It’s a Depression

It’s not a recession, it’s a depression. Possibly the Greatest Depression.

All the unemployment numbers are cooked. I live in Iowa, where the published unemployment rate is 6.7% — it says so, right on the State’s unemployment Web site.

However, if you’ve been unemployed since March as I have, you know that’s much higher than that.

I pegged it at about 25%.

This was based on the staggering number of men picking up their kids from school where it used to only be myself and one or two others. We all have the same look on our faces: happy to be able to spend time with the kids, but ashamed that we aren’t out there making money to feed them.

The last time I stepped into one of those discount haircut places in a strip-mall was on a Friday in mid-afternoon. There were five men present getting haircuts. I asked the room point-blank: “Does anybody here but the stylists have a job?”

The unanimous answer was “no.”

Also, because I get unemployment, I’m required to occasionally show up at their office for crap-tastic seminars. These are usually about idiotic things: how to do things like show up for job interviews speaking professional English; wearing a suit; and not tripping yourself up by talking about how you hate Crackers or Spics or Towel-Heads or Niggers — particularly not using that kind of language.

Since March, the unemployment staff as at least tripled, their parking lots are completely full every time I’m there, and they had to hire people just to stand at the door and point the unemployed to the right office. It’s like being greeted at Wal-Mart.

A couple of weeks ago, I had to show up for a crap-tastic seminar on writing resumes. I told the unemployment employee running the seminar point-blank that I thought unemployment was around 25%.

She disagreed — she thought it was over 30%.

A woman working for an agency whose Web site says the unemployment rate is 6.7% knows the numbers are cooked by a factor of four.

Thirty frakking percent.

Note this, if you’re unaware of it:

During it’s peak, unemployment during the Great Depression was only 25%.

This isn’t a recession, it’s a depression.

It’s not going to get any better, either.  The cause is century of socialist and fascist policies that have essentially bankrupted the United States.  Don’t blame it on Obama or Bush — blame it on Obama, Bush, every President since at least FDR, and every single Congressman, Senator, or Federal Judge for at least a hundred years.

It’s a depression, it’s getting worse, and it’s about to get nasty.