One of Mitt Romney’s favorite lies these days is to label Barrack Obama as the enemy of small business. Obama’s response is to point to a long list of small business friendly executive orders. In fact he’s the first President since FDR to show them any real sympathy, but none of the things he’s been able to do really makes much of a difference at this point.

Traditionally, small businessmen have always voted Republican since they tended to either believe the nonsense Republicans told them, or they foolishly believed that someday they’d be the kind of big business that Republicans actually favor. It’s not like they’re a big voting block anymore,- the last 30 years of Republican policies have gotten rid of almost all of them.

It’s 4-20 and if you can’t remember reading Les Miserables in high school because you were smoking in the boy’s room, there is just one aspect of the story relevant to this rant. It’s that Jean Valjean got five years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread. He then got another 16 years for several attempted escapes. In the past this was considered shocking, but in the corporate owned prison system of America this would a light sentence.

The Corporate prison system routinely engineers ever longer sentences for prisoners in their custody for simple infractions of the rules. A serious crime like stealing bread on three occasions can get you life without parole in a private prison.

We’ve had an increase in the Initial Unemployment Claims number for the second straight week, and this may or maybe not bad news. It’s too early to get really worried about it, we’re still way below the 400,000 number that seems to indicate a failing economy these days. The numbers are seasonally adjusted and thanks to global warming we had no winter to speak of, causing the normal spring spike in activity to start in January. Low winter heating bills put an average of $400 per family into the economy with twice that in the northeast. Unfortunately,  high gasoline prices are taking it back again.

The far right is screaming about hyper-inflation again because of gas prices, and this totally wrong headed thinking is common among Federal Reserve Board members. This is what is spooking the stock market, that the Fed might start “fighting inflation”.

The US stock market fell hard at the opening bell and the corporate pundits were out immediately blaming it on the lower number of jobs created last month. With “only” 200,000 new jobs created they implied that the Obama economic recovery is falling flat. The first problem with this “news” was that the real numbers don’t come out until Friday, this was just an estimate from a private payroll service company that has become notorious for being wrong.

The real reason the US markets were down, and they were following the world markets from overnight (US time), is that the fall was based on the Minutes from the last Federal Reserve meeting. A large majority of the board has decided that there will be no more quantitative easing purchases of paper assets, or what is effectively the wholesale printing of money for rich people and their big banks.