My fellow Americans,

Last August, I was informed by my domestic intelligence team during a high-security briefing that well over 9% of our people were unemployed. I must say, I was shocked. Never in my darkest nightmares had I dared entertain the hypothesis that our economic predicament was so dire. But the numbers were clear; they were undeniable; and they were compelling. And the data presented to me at that time did not even include the substantial number of Americans who, I was told, are so unemployed that they don’t even look for work anymore, and don’t show up in the statistics.

Unemployment rates among African-Americans, I learned, were substantially worse. They were ghastly, in fact. This was disturbing to me personally, because even though 99% of African-American voters will vote for me next year no matter what I do, I do know several African-Americans personally. Indeed, my father was himself African; and I am American as my recently-released long form birth certificate documents.

Due to the highly sensitive nature of these unemployment numbers, I decided to refrain from discussing them publicly. My team and I were deeply concerned about the effect on national morale and economic performance should the numbers get out. The potential existed for profound social shock and disorientation. So I said nothing. Nevertheless, at that time I launched a secret, clandestine plan to do something about unemployment. I called it, “Operation Do Something about Unemployment.”

As this plan was carried out by our Special Economic Forces, with technical assistance from Darpa, I pretended to do absolutely nothing of real significance about unemployment. I gave a State of The Union speech in which I pretended to believe that the Great Recession was over, and suggested that prosperity was just around the corner. I pretended that the most important economic problem facing our country was the government’s deficit. I pretended that demand-supporting government deficit spending posed a much graver risk to our country than mountains of demand-suppressing private debt, and more risk than an economically unutilized army of millions of idle Americans lacking gainful and productive employment. I pretended to believe that businesses would soon begin to spend massive amounts of money on hiring and investment merely in response to the low interest rates engineered by Ben Bernanke, even though the customers for these businesses were too strapped and impoverished to buy any new stuff. I pretended to believe that the folks who best understood how to put Americans back to work were people like the US Chamber of Commerce; outsourcing king Jeffrey Immelt; the elite executives of the financial and banking sector who had engineered the meltdown in the first place; Tim Geithner, who is the chief representative of that elite in the United States government; deficit hawk Pete Peterson; the many rich people who I am expecting to contribute to my 2012 campaign; and the noisy laissez faire proponents of various discredited theories about “crowding out” and “Ricardian equivalence.” I pretended to believe that the best approach to a profound crisis of prolonged idle capacity was endless patience and undying faith in the private sector.

Of course, this was all ridiculous. But a cover story was needed. As families fell apart; homes and communities were wrecked; dreams were lost and abandoned; and people even killed themselves from despair, we persisted in the operation. We persisted, and we persevered and we waited. The precise set of tools and techniques employed in this operation can still not yet be revealed. They involve the most innovative and advanced thinking achievable by my economic advisers; and their subtlety and exquisite behavioral calibration are such that even revealing and describing their existence in public might diminish their nearly magical, yet discreetly obscure efficacy.

But tonight I am pleased to announce victory in our long twilight struggle against unemployment. Operation Do Something about Unemployment has finally attained the summit of success toward which it was launched. The official unemployment rate has been reduced a full 1%, down to nearly 8.5%.

This number, it is true, is still extraordinarily high – hideous even – by any reasonable standard based on historical experience and conventional expectations, or on past economic performance. Ordinarily, people would regard the multi-year persistence of unemployment above 8%, coupled with the neglect of this massive unemployment rate in favor of distracting forays into other economic and budgetary issues, as evidence of sheer and grotesque economic incompetence, and grounds for the removal of both the nation's chief executive and its legislative leaders. But these are no ordinary times. Americans have grown to accept that their country and government are now owned and operated by mercenary looters of our national wealth; by the servile but well-funded lobbyists of a small economic elite; by the barons of a new financial feudalism; by a fawning and incompetent media; and by a quasi-academic court of dogmatic crackpots and ideologues of the economic state church. Americans have grown accustomed to ridiculously low expectations and a stance of disaffected political nihilism in a world in which they have no say, and in which their aspirations are considered laughably unrealistic. They now obligingly accept, or at least stoically endure, pretty much whatever they are handed.

So tonight we say, “Well done … under the circumstances!” God bless the brave unemployed families; God bless my do-nothing economic team and my cynical and all-powerful political team; God bless the men and women of the Special Economic Forces, whose invisible machinations must remain ever-shrouded in secrecy and obscurity. And God Bless the United States of America!