Have you noticed that the regime is now using women to shill and cheer for them on the Money shows?  Must be they think women are more believable than men, but it's not going to change anything.

The economy either creates jobs, or it doesn't. You can screw around with the number of unemployment claims all you want. Unemployment claims can be down for any number of reasons, one of which is the jobless have just run out of their benefits.

The only really meaningful number is how many are on the payrolls, and that number comes out only once a month. In between reports on job numbers, you get cheerleading and hoopla about productivity increases, decreases in unemployment claims and growth in the economy.

For the record, factory jobs in the last report were down for the 38^th straight month. Cheering on Wall Street because they were down "only" 29,000 jobs gives you an idea of just how one-sided the reporting is on the failure of this economy to create jobs.

Coupled with the fact that 33,000 of those jobs created last month were temporary jobs makes the 57,000 increase in jobs look really bad, but you would never know it to listen to the shills on the Money shows.

In my last report, I used the figure 100,000 as the estimated number of new jobs needed each month just to keep the number of unemployed where it is now--that's nine million.

A WSJ article this week tells me that my estimate is wrong--it's 125,000 new jobs needed each month just to stay even! Further, a recent survey of CEOs shows they expect gains in their sales

Next year, they are looking for slight increases in employment, but get this– they don't anticipate hiring in their own firms!

In that kind of business climate, I don't believe the job outlook is encouraging. Unless and until economic growth exceeds productivity increases, there will be no increasse in jobs.

In fact, as long as productivity is greater than economic growth, the economy grows by reducing the cost of labor. This may be good for usiness profits and the stock market in the short run, but it can't last much longer.

Either the economy starts to produce jobs in the 100,000 per month range, or the cheerleading on Wall Street is going to end abruptly and very soon.

New bumper sticker--- Recall Bush OR Lose Your Job

Richard Walrath, a resident of Columbus, Ohio and is Axis of Logic's answer to the corporate media spins on the U.S. economy.