A weak, jobless recovery?

Jobs are at the heart of economic recovery if it's going to be meaningful in repairing the damage that's been done across the social spectrum by deep, lingering recession. So what is the outlook for the long-term unemployed?  Not good, according to Nancy Folbre, economics professor at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, writing at New York TImes "Economix":

Once upon a time, economic recovery led to expanded employment of the United States population. Not anymore. The percentage of adults employed has declined sharply during the last two recessions and failed to increase much in their aftermath.

(T)he employment-to-population rate remains at about 58 percent, about the same as in December 2009 and far lower than the peak of 65 percent achieved before the 2001 recession...

(M)ore than 45 percent of those unemployed in January reported they had been looking for jobs for 27 or more weeks. Many other workers in this situation simply give up and stop looking for paid employment – and thus are not counted as unemployed...

(M)ajor multinational corporations cut their employment in the United States by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million.

This is a big change from the 1990s, when those corporations added 4.4 million jobs in the United States and 2.7 million abroad...

Globalization weakens the link between economic recovery, increased profits and job creation in the United States...

Foreign-owned businesses may locate in the United States, helping compensate for declining investment by American multinationals. But as all businesses become more footloose, they have less incentive to support public spending on education, health, human services or social safety nets, including unemployment insurance.

Unneeded as workers, the unemployed also become superfluous as consumers and burdensome as citizens.

Cutting unemployment benefits (as was just accomplished in Michigan and is well under way in Florida) becomes just another means of cutting losses...

Terrible news, made even bleaker in the absence of effective government policy. Just what is being done on the policy side to deal with the implications of a weak "recovery" that's bypassing the jobless?  In the view of Dean Baker of Center for Economic Policy and Research, commenting at UK Guardian, the Washington agenda for stimulating job creation ranges from "not much at all" to "nothing":

Those boasting of the strong recovery have touted the fact that the unemployment rate has fallen by 1.3 percentage points since its peak in October of 2009. However, this decline is almost entirely attributable to people dropping out of the labour force, rather than people finding jobs...

If economic policy was driven by economic reality, then there would be a serious debate in Washington right now about possible routes for boosting demand. This would include calls for more fiscal stimulus, more aggressive monetary policy and a reduction in the value of the dollar in order to boost net exports.

Unfortunately, none of these items are on the table. The debate in Congress is over the best way to reduce the deficit – in other words, how much and how quickly we want to slow growth further. At his press conference last week, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke essentially swore off any further monetary stimulus and expressed his willingness to fight inflation that is not there. And no one in Washington seem seems to understand that the amount we import is affected by the price of imports, so lowering the value of the dollar never enters the discussion.

This is a great recipe for continued slow growth and high unemployment. And few in Congress or the media seem to give a damn.