Dateline Capital City: Word has reached us of the passing of the state’s rural icon Samuel Drucker at age 96. Sam, as he was known so fondly by the people of many small communities here abouts, was a civic leader and proprietor of the Hooterville General Store for many decades until its closing in 2001. He is reported to have died at his post greeting patrons at the Super Walmart in Pixley, which opened shortly before his own store closed.

Hooterville hasn’t fared well since Sam left along with most of its original residents. The houses that are still occupied provide shelter for the undocumented immigrant labor force that work at the sprawling hog confinement operation that occupies the former Ziffel and Douglas farms.

In an interview with PBS News Hour, Bill Clinton completely walked back his comments about Obama criticizing Bain being inappropriate. He said today, [about making Bain an issue being wrong] "Not necessarily. It depends on the facts of the case. That's what I tried to say in the CNN interview. The equity business can be good if you - I've got a friend who buys failing companies, and he tries to turn them around. And he's turned a bunch of them around, but not all of them. So sometimes he tried and failed. The effort was honorable. That's a good thing.”

Yeah right, he said that guy was “Romney” in the CNN interview, but now you are to think he means some other (private equity pirate), but you notice that Slick Willy didn‘t actually say that.

The Dow fell like a rock today, the reported reason for this was the Wall Street banks' exposure to Spanish bonds. But it was industrials like Alcoa and Caterpillar that were the big losers followed by the oil companies, and only then the banks. Oil company profits are expected to decline with the falling price of gasoline as if they didn’t still have a monopoly.

Companies like Caterpillar are locked in major labor disputes where they are attempting to strip the benefits from so-called second tier union employees. These are people hired since Reagan broke the unions. They typically receive in the neighborhood of $11/hr plus benefits. In Romney land, these benefits have to go. The hourly wages these workers receive are the same, or less than the minimum wage of 25 cents/hour (adjusted for inflation) that workers got under the New Deal in 1938. Union wages were several times that then, but not in our brave new world of unregulated capitalism.

Initial jobless claims were unchanged for the week, suggesting that jobs continue to be produced albeit at a slow pace. We have recovered more jobs than were lost in private sector from the Bush crash, even in “slow“ months. Obama can take credit for half again what was Bush‘s average month before the crash. If you include the jobs Bush lost at the end (including the early months of Obama‘s term), Bush’s average month was zero new jobs created.

The problem is that Red States have laid off 700,000 teachers, social workers, cops, firefighters and bridge inspectors. This probably killed another two million more private sector jobs that would have produced supplies used by these government workers, or would have benefited from the workers’ spending. Trickle down from the top doesn’t work, but you can drain the economy from the bottom.