The health insurance companies are coming out strong against Obama now. This can only me one thing.

He’s doing something right.

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The idea that things are getting better seems to be based on the fact that things are getting miserable more slowly now, or that the increase in misery has turned from a downpour to a drizzle, but it’s still coming down.

For instance, according to this article in the New York Times, Joblessness increased last month by “263,000 jobs in September, and the unemployment rate edged up to 9.8 percent from 9.7 percent in August, according to the Labor Department’s monthly snapshot of the employment picture.”

So the actual unemployment rate is still going up, people are still losing their jobs, and in no real way is the recession over as far as how actual people are experiencing it.

Can anyone call this good news?

Though the job market worsened, the pace of deterioration remained markedly slower than during the early months of the year, when roughly 700,000 jobs a month were disappearing. That improvement seems consistent with the widespread belief that the recession has given way to economic growth. Yet the report also buttressed fears that economic expansion would be weak and hesitant, with scarce paychecks and economic anxiety remaining prominent features of American life well into next year.

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Unemployment in Michigan is 15.2 percent. Unemployment in Detroit is 17.3 percent.

Nevada – 13.2. Rhode Island – 12.8.

And at 12.2 percent, California has its highest unemployment rate in 70 years.

Unemployment is still rising.

Here’s Detroit for you. Wasteland.

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The tub of lard known as Albert Haynesworth began his $100 million dollar career with the Redskins inauspiciously on Sunday, but I’m sure he’ll prove himself well worth the hundred million when all is said and done. And besides only $41 million is guaranteed.

Dan Snyder’s no dummy. Although he has found it probably harder than he expected to buy the Superbowl, he’ll keep shelling out the bucks and eventually he’ll bring home the trophy, and then it will all be worth it.

Anyway, for those of us who aren’t Washington Redskins, or Dan Snyder, things aren’t all that great. Here’s a summary of the devastation.  It’s hard to know where to begin quoting, so here’s a big hunk by Bob Herbert in the New York Times.

Consider this: Some 9.4 million new jobs would have to be created to get us back to the level of employment at the time that the recession began in December 2007. But last month, we lost 216,000 jobs. If the recession technically ends soon and we get to a point where some modest number of jobs are created — say, 100,000 or 150,000 a month — the politicians and the business commentators will celebrate like it’s New Year’s.

And:

But think about how puny that level of job creation really is in an environment that needs nearly 10 million jobs just to get us back to the lean years of the George W. Bush administration.

A national survey of jobless workers by a pair of professors at Rutgers University shows just how traumatized the work force has become in this downturn. Two-thirds of respondents said that they had become depressed. More than half said it was the first time they had ever lost a job, and 80 percent said there was little or no chance that they would be able to get their jobs back when the economy improves.

The 1,200 respondents were jobless at some point over the past year, and most — 894 — are still unemployed. More than half said that they had been forced to borrow money from friends or relatives, and a quarter have missed their mortgage or rent payments.

The survey found that affluent, well-educated workers, who had traditionally been able to withstand a downturn in reasonably good shape, were being hit hard this time around.

The professors, Carl Van Horn and Cliff Zukin, described that phenomenon as “a metric of the recession’s seismic impact.” Of the workers who found themselves unemployed for the first time, more than one in four had been earning $75,000 or more annually.

“This is not your ordinary dip in the business cycle,” said Mr. Van Horn. “Americans believe that this is the Katrina of recessions. Folks are on their rooftops without a boat.”

Stunned by the financial and psychological toll of the recession, and seeing little in the way of hopeful signs on the employment landscape, many of the surveyed workers showed signs of discouragement. Three-fifths said that they had experienced feelings of helplessness.

Said one respondent: “I’ve always worked, so this is very depressing. At age 60, I never believed I would be unemployed unless I chose to be.”

Said another: “I fear for my family and my future. We are about to be evicted, and bills are piling. We have sold everything we possibly can to maintain, and are going under with little hope of anything.”

At some point the unemployment crisis in America will have to be confronted head-on. Poverty rates are increasing. Tax revenues are plunging. State and local governments are in a terrible fiscal bind. Unemployment benefits for many are running out. Families are doubling up, and the number of homeless children is rising.

It’s eerie to me how little attention this crisis is receiving. The poor seem to be completely out of the picture.

Yep, but Albert Haynesworth is doing well, and to be fair, he’s no greedier than any other star professional athlete. They and their sleazy agents live in an alternate reality of pure, pathetic, and shameless greed. And we love them anyway.

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Someone was telling me the other day that we brought all this on ourselves. We became fat people driving giant cars into giant houses, encouraged by our leaders to consume and spend and waste like we truly owned the world and owed nothing to no one because we were the chosen people.

We became the living embodiment of the things people in other countries liked to think about us when they wanted to hate us. We grew into the nasty stereotype of the spoiled and ugly American, and now we’re getting what we deserve.

But I didn’t actually do what my friend was accusing us all of doing. I know my kids didn’t. I know most of my friends didn’t. My parents sure didn’t. We all lived relatively modest lives.

I’ll agree that a lot of people became selfish and careless and unthinking, but it wasn’t malicious. I suppose we should all accept some of the blame, but I also believe there are villains, you know, truly evil people who actually deserve to be held responsible.

Oh sure, we ran up our credit cards, but we weren’t concocting dirty financial schemes to get rich at any cost. No. There are real villains out there, and I would like a list of names, so we could all know who to beat up.

I think older people in particular have a right to know who to beat up. Then I think the government should assign special military personnel to beat these people up for us, or to deliver them to us and hold them down while we do the beating up ourselves.

Here’s a particularly annoying article sure to rouse your beat-up-a-banker spirits. It’s in the AARP Bulletin. Let me quote from it at length.

In February, the stock market was down nearly 45 percent from its October 2007 high point, a $7 trillion loss in value—$5 trillion of that loss absorbed by those over 50. Housing values are down 20 percent, with most losses again borne by those over 50. In the past 16 months, the economy has trimmed more than 5 million jobs, and the unemployment rate among workers over 55 has more than doubled to 6.2 percent.

Then there’s the secondary impact—the “rebound effect.” It has three components: Older Americans have less time to recover their lost savings; they’re having to delay retirement; and they’re finding it harder to get rehired if they’ve lost a job, in part because of the difficulty of persuading businesses to hire older workers.

No wonder we’re angry, especially after the huge bonuses paid to creative speculators whose handiwork undermined the global economy, and the trillion-dollar bailouts given to a financial industry whose greed has ravaged retirement savings.

You could say these people stole money from us, but what they really stole was life. Working five more years of your last 20 because some banker needed to make a hundred million a year instead of 50 million is a terrible thing.

Let’s find them. Let’s squeeze it out of them. I want names.

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You’ll be happy to know things could be worse. For instance, unemployment is only 9.7%, but in September of ’82, it was actually 10.1%.

I can hardly remember that, and it didn’t matter because I had just implemented brilliant recession survival plan B. In other words, I was in the army and just about to arrive in Germany for 3 years of wine, beer, and travel. Munich, London, Paris, Vienna, Amsterdam, Venice, Rome, and countless small towns all over Germany, England and France.

Oh, yeah, plus I had to fix electronics for the army and salute idiots, and the Soviets had nuclear missiles pointed at the building where I worked, but it was a small price to pay. It was fun, actually, knowing that when all hell broke loose you’d be dead twenty minutes before everyone else.

I was in my twenties, the cold war was fascinating, the enemy was complex, ruthless, and infuriating, but no one blew anyone else up, the future seemed somehow vast and inviting, as long as the nukes stayed put, and yes, the world did recover, the wall came down, dictators fell, economies boomed, and life got good for awhile.

It could happen again, right, sorta?

Granted, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Great Recession don’t have much romance in them, but if they’d take me at this age and send me with my family to Europe for three years, I do believe I’d sign up again.

Sergeant White, 55-years-old. Driving the autobahns again, only this time with my daughters. “See this wall, Anna, it was built by the Romans a couple thousand years ago.” If only.

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Tired of video of morons shouting at congressman about health care? Maybe this will cheer you up. And you just can’t beat the advice. I mean, it’s not really advice, it’s more of a what not to do sort of thing. I’d hire these people before I’d hire the people in the town hall video.

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