There are Structural problems like a growing wall of debt that try as you might cannot all be blamed on The Democrats if you are of the other persuasion or on the Repugs if you stand with the Donkeys. It’s a system thing, a cancer that is eating away at the economy. The Financial Times reported Wednesday night, “US President Barrack Obama warned that the US economy could head into a "double-dip recession" unless urgent steps were taken to rein in mounting public debt. Obama told Fox News—I guess they are talking again-- “That's when the economy begins to recover briefly from a recession only to be dragged back under. Obama told Fox News in an interview Wednesday that his administration is weighing tax breaks that could encourage businesses to begin hiring again. But he added that it's important to recognize that if the nation keeps adding to deficit spending through tax cuts or more stimulus spending, at some point people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy and that could "lead to a double-dip recession." What are the chances that can happen? Quiet as its kept, the odds are pretty good.

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke has given Americans a glimpse of the ugly truth about their future job prospects. Simply put, companies have found that they can shed workers and rely on technological advances and overseas factories to operate with a lot fewer U.S. employees.

The U.S. is losing $725 Billion per year to foreign countries through trade losses. This money does not come back to buy our goods and services.

Unemployed Americans Should Hunker Down for More Job Losses. .... Think the worst is over? Wrong. Conditions in the U.S. labor markets are awful and worsening. While the official unemployment rate is already 10.2% and another 200,000 jobs were lost in October, when you include discouraged workers and partially employed workers the figure is a whopping 17.5%.

"President Barack Obama plans to announce in next year’s State of the Union address that he wants to focus extensively on cutting the federal deficit in 2010 – and will downplay other new domestic spending beyond jobs programs, according to top aides involved in the planning. The president’s plan, which the officials said was under discussion before this month’s Democratic election setbacks, represents both a practical and a political calculation by this White House." Er, now who exactly is telling Obama that raising taxes or cutting spending in the middle of a severe economic contraction is a good idea? This clip from Politico tells us more about the people surrounding Obama, than it tells us about Obama himself. Clearly, his chief lieutenants are just as committed to savaging Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security as their GOP counterparts. This is obvious by the way the fiscal stimulus was handled. Where are the jobs programs, the boost to Green Technology, the massive infrastructure rebuild? Nowhere. Because the industry-reps and bank-vermin who fill out the Obama roster are no different than those on Team Bush. They accept the same pro-business credo--that all public assets and resources should be strip-mined from their rightful owners and delivered to brandy-drooling oligarchs and robber barons at the top of the economic food-chain.

The United States is in open competition with the same countries from which we buy our goods and finance our government. These countries supply our consumption while simultaneously competing fiercely against our companies in international markets. Nations like India, Japan and China, along with trade blocs like the European Union, rail against “protectionism” in the U.S. because they do not want to have their unfettered access to our market tampered with.

Left to fester much longer, the trade deficit could cause an economic Armageddon reminiscent of the Great Depression.

"Mr. Obama announced this week that he would convene a jobs summit at the White House next month to explore ways of putting Americans back to work. It remains to be seen whether the summit will yield anything substantial. But it’s fair to wonder why the president and his party have not been focused like fanatics on job creation from the first day he took office."

A total of 332,292 properties received a default or auction notice or were seized by banks in October, up 19 percent from a year earlier, Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac said today. One in every 385 households received a filing. The tally fell 3 percent from September, the third consecutive monthly decline. “The foreclosure problem is still with us and will keep prices down,” Stephen Miller, chairman of the economics department at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, said in an interview. “The real issue is we don’t know what inventory banks are holding that they have yet to put on the market.”

Other countries like China, India, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Germany, and France treat their export industries as national treasures, unlike the U.S.

According to the CPA, foreign consumption taxes, or value-added taxes, and currency manipulation are the two most important trade barriers affecting U.S. exports

The recession is over! The economy is growing! The Dow Jones is above 10,000! Bankers are pocketing profits and fat bonuses! Happy days are here again! Unless, of course, you're just a regular working stiff struggling with falling income and rising unemployment -- and sensing that your family's grip on middle-class life is steadily slipping away. Welcome to America's tinkle-down economy. The latest job numbers mock the smiley-faced claims of economists and polticos that the Great Recession is over: -- 10.2 percent of America's workforce is officially unemployed -- nearly 16 million people. -- Another 15 million people are either so discouraged by their fruitless job search that they've quit looking, or they've had to settle for part-time jobs when they want and need full-time employment. Add the discouraged and underemployed to the number of the officially unemployed, and the percentage of our people who can't find the work they need rises to 17.5 percent -- one out of every six workers. -- More than a third of the officially unemployed have been jobless for more than half a year -- a new record for long-term joblessness.---

The Alliance for American Manufacturing and the Institute for America's Future held a conference on Thursday, October 29, 2009 entitled "Making It in America: Building the New Economy." Policy makes, labor leaders, economists and concerned citizens came together to discuss the building blocks of America's future.

Most of the millions of manufacturing jobs lost during the recession will never return as companies find ways to continue increasing production with a scaled-down workforce.

Sen. Ernest F. "Fritz" Hollings - American economy decimated in phantom trade war, we lost it because we didn’t even know we were in it so we planned no defenses.

A year ago it was revealed to the American people that our banking system was a legalized Ponzi scheme in which bank and insurance CEOs paid themselves billions of dollars in personal compensation to lend and insure assets with money they didn’t have to customers who couldn’t pay back the loans.

Today most Americans remain blissfully unaware of how emaciated our economy has become.

Pouring money into the private banking system has only fixed the economy for bankers and the wealthy; it has not done much to address either the fundamental problem of unemployment or the debt trap so many Americans find themselves in. President Obama's $787 billion stimulus plan has so far failed to halt the growth of unemployment: 2.7 million jobs have been lost since the stimulus plan began. California has lost 336,400 jobs. Arizona has lost 77,300. Michigan has lost 137,300. A total of 49 states and the District of Columbia have all reported net job losses. In this dark firmament, however, one bright star shines. The sole state to actually gain jobs is an unlikely candidate for the distinction: North Dakota. North Dakota is also one of only two states expected to meet their budgets in 2010. (The other is Montana.) North Dakota is a sparsely populated state of less than 700,000 people, largely located in cold and isolated farming communities. Yet, since 2000, the state's GNP has grown 56 percent, personal income has grown 43 percent and wages have grown 34 percent. The state not only has no funding problems, but this year it has a budget surplus of $1.3 billion, the largest it has ever had.

with video by Craig Harrington .... The government, like households, should hunker down, stop spending where it can, and plug the hole of offshoring jobs in the ship of state.

Public policy has had a strong hand in getting the economy back from the brink of disaster and moving the economy into positive territory. Additional public policy attention is needed, however, to get the labor market unclogged, jobs growing, and the unemployment rate falling in the near future, after large-scale policy efforts did the same for financial markets and economic production.