Ford has relocated St. Paul manufacturing jobs to Thailand and Brazil.

​Weeks after the last Ford vehicle build in Minnesota rolled off the Highland Park assembly line, the World Socialist Website writes that the plant's closure is symptomatic of the decline of American manufacturing.

The fact that one of the world's leading sources for left-wing news and analysis picked up the St. Paul plant closure story speaks to the significance of Ford ending its century-long manufacturing operation here in the Twin Cities.

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The state lost nearly 14,000 jobs in November, yet the unemployment rate fell. WTF?

​Yesterday, the state Department of Employment and Economic Development announced it has awarded more than $2.2 million in grants to provide services for 585 workers who were recently laid off at eight Minnesota businesses.

The grants represent a significant public expense meant to help out-of-work adults develop the skills they need to compete in today's brutal job market, including career counseling and training.

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​A Minnesota company with a worldwide profile had a great 2011, and it isn't Target, Best Buy, Ameriprise or any of the usual suspects.

Winona-based Fastenal was one of this year's ten "hot stocks" according to a Slate analysis.

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Work like this went away last year, but still pays a lot.

​Americans cannot get enough technology, from wall-sized televisions that play movies to handheld gadgets that play very small movies. But even the technology field can't avoid getting caught up and tossed around in the tide of the recession.

Minnesota lost 2,900 technology jobs in 2010, with the majority of the losses coming on the manufacturing side, according to a new report from the TechAmerica Foundation.

The same report found that tech jobs disappeared across the country, and that Minnesota's ranking, No. 17  in America with 120,800 tech jobs, is unchanged from last year.

Tech jobs come with pros and cons, it seems. For example, con: You have to figure out how to use those skinny little screwdrivers. Pro: You get paid by the truckload.
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Mark Dayton and Majority Leader Kurt Zellers: We're screwed, let's shake on it.

​Standard & Poor's is the third of the big three credit ratings agencies to knock down Minnesota's score.

In the last three month, the "big three" have been taking big chunks out of Minnesota's financial reputation one at a time. First it was Fitch, which knocked Minnesota down from Triple-A to Double A-plus in July. Then Moody's took the same step, only with harsher wording, ticking the state down from "stable" to "negative."

Now S & P has joined the pile-on: Like Fitch, it dropped Minnesota from Triple-A to Double A-plus.

At this rate, Minnesota will never be able to get that mortgage we've all been talking about.
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Mark Dayton, Barack Obama: Minnesota's greatest bosses.

​We have officially entered phase three of the plan to turn America into a socialist country: Everyone in Minnesota works for Mark Dayton or Barack Obama.

Well, not everyone. But the top two employers in the state of Minnesota are the state government and the federal government, in that order. In fact, the state government is way out in front, even of the federal government, according to a new report from the Business Journal.

And, according to the state employment website, they're not done vacuuming up all the employable adults: As of this morning, they're hiring!

Of the top seven employers in the state, only two private companies added jobs in the last two years: Target Corp., and Wal-Mart. According to this report, in the America of the near future, everyone works for the state, shops at a big-box store, and spends a lot of time in the hospital.
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This, for those of you who have forgotten, is what money looks like.

​Hey, Forbes -- maybe it was a "banner year" for the richest people in the United States, but how 'bout a little something for the rest of us?

Minnesota's income dropped about $1,000 per household in 2010, according to a new data dump from the U.S. Census Bureau. That thousand bucks isn't a significant amount, but it becomes a bit worse when you consider that statewide income still hasn't recovered from where it was in 2007.

There are other, even worse indicators from the census. More Minnesotans, and more children, were living in poverty in 2010 than the year before, with the child poverty rate hitting 15.6 percent.

Okay, so, everyone's making a bit less, and a lot of our kids are poor. Now for the good news: The rest of America is just as screwed as we are.

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Tim and Mary Pawlenty, happily signing away all your jobs.

​First we learned Minnesota is taking all the jobs in America. Now we know that China is taking all of Minnesota's jobs. So, A minus B, minus China, times infinity... soon China will have every single job in America.

Well, maybe it's not that simple. But China's labor practices, and the United States' trade deficit with that country, is blamed for the loss of 70,000 Minnesota manufacturing jobs during the last decade in a new paper from the Economic Policy Institute.

These "displaced" jobs put Minnesota in the top 10 "hardest-hit" states on trade with China, and account for 2.6 percent of total employment in Minnesota. Actually, Minnesota was on the receiving end of around 11,700 jobs thanks to trade with China -- but it gave up 82,400 the other way.
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This is what jobs see as they come to our fine state.

​No one in America found a job last month. Not one person. But in Minnesota, the job vacancies listings have shot up in recent months.

This leads to some pretty interesting possibilities. Could it be that Minnesota is not part of the United States? Or, perhaps more likely, it confirms our long-held belief that we are special, and as the nation goes, so does Minnesota not necessarily go.

The nationwide numbers, released this morning by the U.S. Department of Labor, indicate an absolutely even month for American unemployment in August, with 9.1 percent of employable persons out of a job.

Our local good news comes via the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, which found that second-quarter job vacancies in the state rose 32 percent compared to the 2010 numbers. In total, there were 54,700 vacancies listed in the state last quarter. Admittedly, some of those job openings are better than others: For example, the Timberwolves still can't find a head coach since they fired Kurt Rambis.
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Where have all the millionaires gone?

​Our embarrassingly long budget standoff turned up an interesting fact: being a millionaire is apparently a high risk factor for leaving Minnesota.

In the heat of the budget debate, DFL-ers often threw around the fact that of the 7,700 Minnesotans millionaires--defined as people making at least a cool $1,000,000 each year--half don't live here. MPR fact-checked the claim, and it turns out it's true.

What's up with all those rich people leaving?

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