Jobs.

Although the official time frame for “The Great Recession” was December 2007 through June 2009, for the millions of long term un and underemployed, the daily reality is that not only has the recession never ended, it is more applicable to The Great Depression than it is to any of the various acknowledged recessions since the end of WWII. One of the articles of faith from the always surprised Economists is that job creation lags other indicators, yet here we are, over two years since the “end” of the last recession and the official unemployment rate is still at 9.1% with the underemployed figure at 16.2% for August 2011.

So apparently, the phrase of the week from Republicans is “Class Warfare!” as a response to President Obama’s proposal for a new Millionaire’s Minimum Tax. Paul Ryan and Lindsey Graham both used the phrase yesterday on the Bobble head shows.

It is an article of faith among Republicans (and far too many Democrats) that all those pesky “regulations” are to blame for the lack of jobs today and the ongoing economic slowdown. Just the first of this month, McClatchy had an article where they had surveyed small business owners across the country and the consensus was that in fact regulations are not the problem for small business but lack of demand is.

“Business Friendly Climate” is one of the buzz phrases we see and hear a bit more frequently these days. I guess it is a phrase that may have always been around to some extent but is not just limited to the business press. But what exactly does “Business Friendly Climate” actually mean?

Unemployment is officially at 9.1% (roughly 14M people) and underemployment is nearly double that. Social Security has been one of if not the most effective government program of all time, yet all we hear out of Washington is how there must be “shared sacrifices” (from all but the very richest of us of course) so Social Security must be “on the table” for budget discussions, even though Social Security has not contributed one dime to the “problems” with the budget.

Sounds like times are tough for the banksters after all, right? Well maybe not so much. Fortune had this post which called the Bank of America $8.5B settlement a “win,” apparently because it allows BoA to “look forward” and all that. According to this from Reuters, BoA will take write-offs of a bit over $20B in total in the 2nd quarter of the year, giving them a loss for the quarter. It is figures like that that show just how skewed things are. One bank takes a write-off/loss of over $20B in a fiscal quarter and will still most likely be profitable for the year!

So apparently, while sitting on record amounts of cash, industry is willing to invest in technology but not people.

Ho hum. Here we are once again. The weekly report of Initial Unemployment Claims is out, jobless claims for last week are up “more than expected,” the figures from last week’s report have been revised upwards again, economists are surprised and water is wet.

The FBI is planning to revise its manual for agents in some rather frightening ways, officially codify the erosion of some of our privacy rights that have been taking place for years.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke gave a speech yesterday to the International Monetary Conference in Atlanta, GA. Only one speech. Yet looking around the Toobz at the various headlines at news sites on this speech, it must have been an all things to all people speech as I’ve found at least four different perspectives presented, some of them directly contradictory.