Newt Gingrich observes the pressure on Chinese leadership to create jobs while discussing his recent trip to China.

The economic pressure the Chinese dictatorship feels to continue creating jobs can be captured by the fact that they need 24 million new jobs this next year just to break even.

Their fear is that without jobs unrest will grow and that historically in China unrest can rapidly become very destabilizing. This focuses their energy on jobs and the economy in a way no American politician can fully appreciate.

So, the Chinese leadership feels intense pressure to create 24 million jobs every single year!  Meanwhile, back in Obama’s USSR, unemployment reached 14.9 million (August – US Bureau of Labor Statistics) and  Obama & Co. appear perfectly content to simply manage expectations for this level of unemployment to persist for years, as indicated last week by Obama’s chief economic advisor, Larry Summers.

More on this later…

In his latest WSJ opinion piece, John Fund documents the damage done to ACORN by the outstanding work of James O’Keefe, Hannah Giles, Andrew Breitbart and Glenn Beck, as well as other less sensational but equally corrupt charges brought against the organization across the country.  In all likelihood, we have only seen the tip of this iceberg.

Newbusters reports that Charlie Gibson declares no knowledge of the ACORN scandal ignited by the investigative reporting and filmmaking of James Okeefe and Hannah Giles.  And this guy is the lead reporter/newscaster for a “major” network?  Duh!  No wonder the “major” networks are either not ranked or at the bottom of the TV news audience rankings.

[Note: This post from Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker so completely captured my state of mind that I felt compelled to re- post it here in its entirety.  I also encourage you to visit his blog for consistently high quality economic analysis and insight.  We do need to jerk these politicians' chains and either force to work for us, or throw them all out and start over.]

From Yahoo News:

On the eve of the August recess, members are reporting meetings that have gone terribly awry, marked by angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior. In at least one case, a congressman has stopped holding town hall events because the situation has spiraled so far out of control.

“I had felt they would be pointless,” Rep. Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.) told POLITICO, referring to his recent decision to suspend the events in his Long Island district. “There is no point in meeting with my constituents and [to] listen to them and have them listen to you if what is basically an unruly mob prevents you from having an intelligent conversation.”

Really?

Well Tim, guess what: you work for your constituents, not the other way around.  (more…)

Thanks to the Ticker Guy – Karl Denninger @ The Market Ticker – for the chart, the data for which comes directly from the US Dept of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Not a lot to cheer about in those numbers, and, the deeper you look in them, the worse the findings.

Goldman, with it’s agent Henry Paulson, operating as Secretary of the Treasury and using the full power of the US government, eliminates competitors (Lehman and Merrill) and gets bailed out indirectly via AIG.  And now they are making “profits”?  This is crony capitalism in extremis.

Even the New York Times scorns these scoundrels, and amazingly, applauds bill O’Reilly at Fox News for doing likewise.

Something closer to the current zeitgeist was captured last week by Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News commentator, who likened Goldman Sachs bankers to pigs during a scathing segment on his TV show. “You’ve got to make an example of the big boy,” he fumed in a rant about the company’s tax-avoidance methods, suggesting Goldman ought to be punished for failing to cough up its fair share of taxes. “And this is the big boy.”

See Windfalls for Bankers, Resentments for the Rest – NYTimes.com for more details on

The associated article can be found here, however, this graph provides far more useful info than the article’s text.