More economic recovery:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12648347

 

The US unemployment rate fell slightly to 8.9% in February, down from 9% the month before.

It is the third month in a row that the jobless rate has fallen, with February's figure marking a near two-year low.

Employers added 192,000 jobs last month, the US Labor Department said, above market expectations.

Paul O'Neill, former US Treasury Secretary, described the data as "very positive".

A Labor Department statement said that most job gains were in manufacturing, construction, business services and transport.

State and local government slashed 30,000 jobs, the most since November as budget cuts continue to bite.

The data showed that the jobless rate for adult men was 8.7%, for adult women 8%, and for teenagers 23.9%.

The unemployment rate has come down from 9.8% in November.

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I'll be the first to admit that this is not what the Obama Administration predicted or really wanted when they wanted unemployment to stay where it was when they were inaugurated. However looking at this, the unemployment figures appear to be showing more, and more effective, growth since the Administration's stimulus package has gone into effect. It makes me curious in fact whether or not a larger stimulus package would have had more effect. What do you guys think?

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The real definition of fascism requires a paramilitary and an ethnocratic concept of society. Arguably that describes the Solid South to a T, but that would offend too many Right-Wingers to point out that Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond were relics of the US experiment with fascism.

[http://users.livejournal.com/-wanderer-/]

Why use a word out of its historical context though? If that is how you want to define fascism, the word will lose all of its meaning, and instead come to be defined as a bunch of mean rulers that think their race / tribe / bingo group is superior to all others (hardly a rarity in the course of human history).

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I use it thus because in the White League and in the segregation society you had direct precursors of fascism, complete with the same type of pre-condition (a war that mobilized the rich, middle classes, and poor together in one big brawl). The key difference is that Victorian societies had none of the experience needed to create a party state (the war economies of the 20th Century) nor the tools needed to maintain them permanently.

[http://users.livejournal.com/-wanderer-/]

The main reason I don't think you can count the Confederacy as a fascist state is for the very reason you mention: it wasn't a party state, and the state didn't intervene in all aspects of civil society in the way that happened in Germany or Japan (or the Soviet Union).

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Re-read that sentence and the comment originally responded to. I'm not talking about the Confederacy, but the South from the 1870s-1960s. Your rationale is accurate in that it was not a party state, though the Confederate state assumed much more sweeping powers than Lincoln dared to. For ultimately bupkiss as far as good results were concerned.

[http://users.livejournal.com/-wanderer-/]

Ah I see. I agree that you can argue that the South during, say, the 1920s might have had some fascist elements to it.