IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser.

Olbermann: GOP introduces ‘screw you’ economics

In a Special Comment, Countdown’s Keith Olbermann talks about the Democrats struggle against the GOP to reestablish the unemployment safety net.

First, another Special Comment tonight on the struggle to reestablish the unemployment safety net.

Sens. Harry Reid and Max Baucus have introduced another bill to rescue those million, two million, four as of Friday, who will have prematurely lost jobless benefits because the Republicans continue to represent corporations and oppose, you know, human beings.

This would be retroactive to the system's collapse at the end of May and would extend to November. It has yet to come to the floor. But to give you an idea of why the Republicans have fought its predecessors, there's a new wrinkle tonight.

The chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management in Minnesota explains it.

"Companies are getting higher-productivity employees for the same or lower wage rate they were paying a marginal employee...You have a more productive and more adaptive labor force." — James Paulsen

To you it's unemployment. To corporations,  it's cheap free-lancers and temps. "Better cost containment," as another analyst put it. No inflation, no leaping interest rates on Treasury Bills so all there is to invest in, is Corporate Stocks. Hell, since March of 2009 the Standard & Poor's 500 Index has risen to 61 percent!

So you thought your unemployed cousin, or friend,  or self merely constituted a small personal crisis. In fact you're part of a global investment opportunity! Every dollar you don't make and every dollar that the government doesn't give you, is another buck for the Republicans' clients — the corporations.

Besides which, there are plenty of jobs out there. Just ask Sharron Angle, Republican candidate for the Senate from Nevada.  From her first mainstream interview last night:

"They keep extending these unemployment benefits to the point where people are afraid to go out and get a job because the job doesn't pay as much as the unemployment benefit does. What has happened is the system of entitlement has caused us to have a spoilage with our ability to go out and get a job. There are jobs that do exist. That's what we're saying, is that there are jobs. But those are entry-level jobs."

See! Don't worry if the latest Reid-Baucus bill gets swatted again by the Political Prostitutes of the Corporations, the Republicans. There are plenty of  entry level jobs available to you. For which no experience, and evidently no intelligence, is required. You know: Like being the Republican Senate nominee from Nevada.

You remember what the first George Bush called Ronald Reagan's financial plan, right? Voo-Doo Economics. Well, welcome to the Republicans' 21st Century version of it: Screw You Economics.