Obama’s profitable recovery
from David Ruccio
Obama, his economic team, and the Democratic Party have produced an economic recovery—in profits but certainly not for working people.
These are strange times, in which the White House and the Democratic congress are villified in the right-wing and business press for being anti-business. Yet, business profits are the only thing that have recovered since Obama took office.
A chart provided by Ezra Klein puts it all in perspective:
That’s an extraordinary achievement. Record levels of profits, 20 percent unemployment (and the likelihood things will get even worse)—plus two wars, no action on global warming, and cutbacks in education and social services in cities and states across the country—and they’ve managed to create the impression they’re opposed to business and are more incompetent than the GOP. What a country we live in!
Follow-up
And now the White House has decided to deflect attention from its own gang that couldn’t shoot straight by blaming the “professional left.” Ah, it truly is a grand old country we live in!
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Real-World Economics Review Blog 
What a grand illusion. The recovery that wasnt.
This is an excellent point. This is a “profits, but no jobs” economy. I just made this same comment on my own blog only to find you had made this entry already!
One of the most disturbing characteristics of the last decade has been the ability of businesses to induce productivity gains, and protect profits versus the comparative inability of workers to share in those gains or profits. I find it remarkable that so few firms went out of business during the crisis, yet the workforce has been hammered. This asymmetry is astonishing, yet attracts little attention in the media. Proper functioning markets, as described in orthodox textbooks, surely would not produce such odd outcomes. Then again, such markets don’t exist.
Which implies that the room for alternative explanations is huge, and that we need a more expansive definition of what a market is.
More to the point: our political discourse needs to to be re-focused on the concept of full employment and the problems surrounding its achievement. Meanwhile I fear that the lives of ordinary people seem to be uninteresting to theorists intent upon formalizing, simplifying, and abstracting away humanity from the study of economics.
Finally, the capitalism system has discovered the formula to raise profits in low growth times. Poor american works who have to pay for that new science advance!