If you thought the unemployment report back in June was nasty, just wait until Christmas time later this year. By then, we’ll be lucky if anyone in the United States has a job.

In case you haven’t been listening, it seems as if everybody in every industry is losing their jobs. Companies are restructuring, downsizing, laying off, and straight up firing people in order to save themselves from the latest economic downturn.

AirTran just announced that they have laid off 5% of their workers. The LA Times already wrote its own obituary about the 250 jobs they were eating in order to save a buck. Even Starbucks…you know that company with literally a store on every single square inch of Manhattan? Yeah, even they are going to shut down hundreds of stores (about 600 to be more specific)  and they are planning to slow down their unearthly growth rate over the next few years.

I’m no economist, but I can smell trouble a mile away, and I’m here to tell you…there is no end in sight!

Why would I believe that the market might get any better anytime soon? The very leaders of this country have been reluctant to admit that we are in a recession, and with that kind of misguided thinking, can we really consider ourselves headed in the right direction?

Did FDR go around telling the people sleeping in Central Park, fighting for freelance jobs every morning, and separating themselves from their families in order to survive, that they were not in a depression?

Yet somehow, Bush has the ability to be both the facilitator of the recession and the only one who can’t see what he has caused.

Look, people, if you thought that last Christmas was bad, with its retreating sales figures and all, just wait until X-mas ’08. It’s not going to be pretty. Sure, every company is going to try their best to give stuff away, but it won’t work.

With gas prices likely to be above $5/gallon by then, how will anyone get to the mall?

With who knows how many people lacking a job, who’s going to have a Christmas Bonus check to spend?

And with our country still at war, spending the few capital resources we have left given the weakness of the mighty U.S. dollar, how can we expect inflation to slow down before 50% off tomorrow turns into a 25% increase from today?

But none of that really matters anyway. Given the complete commercialization of holidays that has made Christmas a materialistic phenomenon, we might not even know its Christmas once it rolls around. Afterall, there’s a good chance all of the TV stations and newspapers will be out of business before we even reach Thanksgiving.

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