The terrible jobs report should be matched with another set of data to point out that this is the economy that corporate executives have wanted for a long time. Because they are not suffering in a time of weak demand. They're actually thriving. Corporate profits are soaring. The chart above shows corporate profits as a percentage of GDP, and you can see that they are now back above pre-recession levels, well over 10%. Felix Salmon notes that this has never happened before.

The decoupling of productivity and wage growth around 1980 was the most significant moment for corporate America. They recognized that they didn't have to pass the benefits of productivity and profits onto their workers anymore. The workers weren't organized to a sufficient degree to demand that. The high corporate earnings, therefore, have not been channeled back into investment in the economy.

[snip]

This is an institutional failure, Brad DeLong says. Government has the capacity to borrow at microscopic interest rates, real negative interest rates if you factor in inflation. They should do so and bring the kind of investment the economy needs. You could transform our crippling infrastructure, you could engage in direct hiring of hundreds of thousands of people, you could parcel out free money for all it matters. You can, in sum, fill the demand gap and put the rest of the country on the same relative footing as those corporate executives sitting on massive profits. But nobody has any expectation that government will do that. The President is afraid to say anything that even sounds like a stimulative economic measure; he's too busy trying to prove that he's a paragon of austerity. The Federal Reserve has completely failed in its mission to maximize employment, and they are too frightened by the possibility of non-existent inflation to change course.

I did see a few irises around here though and I always loved irises, so a pathetic pot of them on the sale rack for $5.00 last year seemed like a gamble with some possibilities.  I talked my husband into putting them in an area near the driveway that has some erosion problems because iris roots can put a stop to that.  He was pretty grumbly about it because of having to dig in the clay and my 50/50 kill record.  I didn't really even care if the thing bloomed, it could stay greens and nothing more.  But it came right to life after hitting the big dirt and took over the whole nasty area and bloomed and bloomed and bloomed.  It bloomed last fall and it bloomed this spring.

Desperate to win election.

Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran

From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran's main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America's first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks -- begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games -- even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran's Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm's "escape," Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America's most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran's nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.

"Should we shut this thing down?" Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president's national security team who were in the room.

Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and offered evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. Obama decided that the cyberattacks should proceed. In the following weeks, the Natanz plant was hit by a newer version of the computer worm, and then another after that. The last of that series of attacks, a few weeks after Stuxnet was detected around the world, temporarily took out nearly 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify uranium.

Republicans in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania [population 320,000] have elected Steve Smith, a white supremacist, with close ties to neo-Nazi groups, to the county's GOP Committee.

The elections took place in late April and were certified by the GOP committee two weeks ago. Smith notified supporters of his victory last week by posting a message to the online forum WhiteNewsNow.com.