I cover the waterfront, but today I was out at the Teamsters hall in Tukwila giving a speech to a group of retirees. Meanwhile, the Teamsters are supporting an effort by non-union drayage (short-haul) truckers to shut down the Port of Seattle. These drivers haul containers from the port to rail terminals. They make low wages, complain of poor working conditions and are responsible for such things as safety violations in their trucks. They're targeting discretionary cargo that must move on specific days to make rail schedules.

The Seattle Times' Mike Lindblom reported on the issue last week. Today, cargo is barely moving. It's a compelling human story. I listened to a Teamsters organizer talk about the plight of these drivers, many of whom are immigrants, trapped in low-wage jobs. Many walked off the job in protest and the trucking companies allegedly withheld their paychecks. The Teamsters and the port have been at odds over this for years, port officials saying they have limited ability to micromanage the private drayage companies on wages. Of course, the Teamsters would love to organize these drivers.

But it's also a regional competitiveness story. Without the ability to move cargo quickly from dockside to rail container terminals, Seattle is sunk (Tacoma has dockside rail access and is less dependent on drayage truckers.

Clint Eastwood's powerful and moving "Halftime in America" Super Bowl ad for Chrysler has been denounced by some Republican operatives as partisan shilling for President Obama. Eastwood and Chrysler deny it. What's undeniable is that Mr. Obama, despite tremendous political pressure to do nothing, used federal money to keep Chrysler and General Motors out of bankruptcy. (Help for Chrysler began in the waining days of the Bush administration). Challenger Mitt Romney opposed the bailout, an irony coming from this son of the man who rescued American Motors.

Playing counterfactual history is always risky, but what if Washington had done nothing? Ford didn't need federal help. The Japanese transplant factories were also safe. Still, it's unlikely that GM and Chrysler could have gone through Chapter 11 proceedings like an airline and come out fine. Union-haters would have enjoyed seeing the United Auto Workers decertified and pensions eliminated (and this helps the middle class...how?).

But the auto industry is much more than two or three companies. Had GM and Chrysler shut down, an entire economic ecosystem of suppliers would have been destroyed and the damage might well have taken Ford down, too. It would have devastated a Midwest already reeling from bad trade deals and offshoring of jobs. Millions of jobs might have been at risk.

Friday's unemployment report, with 243,000 jobs added in January, shows the economy healing slowly. With growth in gross domestic product more than 2 percent in the last part of 2011, the huge demand hole of the Great Recession is slowly being filled. If this continues for another three or four months, it might indicate a self-sustaining trend of recovery.

The downsides: The percentage of the working-age population that has jobs is only 58.5 percent. That's better than the 58.2 percent six months ago but strikingly low vs. the 63.3 percent before the recession. The broadest measure of unemployment is still an unacceptable 15.1 percent. Local government woes continue to drag on the economy. Pimco's Mohamed A. El-Erian argues that long-term unemployment and joblessness among the young continue to be severe, and under-appreciated, problems.

Most importantly, at this rate of job creation it will take until at least 2019 to regain anything near full employment. Considering how recessions hit every seven to nine years, we might face another economic shock that further sets back job creation. Even without that, hasty "austerity" to fight a perceived deficit crisis will be damaging (ask the U.K.).

Corporate profits are at records and major companies are sitting on enormous piles of cash. Corporate tax rates are at their lowest level since 1972. According to the Wall Street Journal, "total corporate federal taxes paid fell to 12.1 percent of profits earned from activities within the U.S. in fiscal 2011, which ended Sept. 30, according to the Congressional Budget Office." From 1987 to 2008, the average rate was 25.6 percent.

One big reason is the "bonus depreciation" temporary tax break, supported by both parties. Another, less discussed, is the many ways the biggest companies deploy massive resources to use perfectly legal tax dodges. This might not matter so much if the country didn't face a $10 trillion deficit, shrinking funding for education and research, and was stuck with a 1970s infrastructure, and that falling apart. So, today's poll:

Mea Culpa Department: In Sunday's column on manufacturing, I discussed Henry Ford's influence on raising wages, also noting he was a crank and no friend of unions. I neglected to note he was also an anti-semite, especially through his writings in the Dearborn Independent, a newspaper he owned. Later, he tried to do a Ron Paul and claim he didn't know of the vile slanders published in his name. It won't wash and stains his legacy. Anti-semitism is a special evil that culminated in the Holocaust. No wonder Hitler admired Henry Ford. I regret my omission.

Continue reading to see the week's links and the haiku:

The initial public offering for Facebook, scheduled for May, says much about the American economy. It's the most anticipated business event of the year. Yet amid the largest unemployment crisis since the Great Depression, Facebook will create few if any new jobs. The social networking company employs 3,200 mostly highly skilled workers, largely in Silicon Valley. By comparison, Microsoft employs 40,000 in the Seattle area alone. General Motors has more than 200,000 employees across a range of skills. These are companies that actually make productive things. Facebook provides an online forum in which we amuse ourselves and check on former girlfriends and boyfriends. Once it must dance to Wall Street's tune, Facebook will be under relentless pressure to hold down or even cut the number of employees.

In a nation with retrograde socio-economic mobility in America, the IPO will result in the usual group of winners. A lucky 1,000 Facebook employees who own shares will become millionaires. Depending on the deal's valuation, the investment banks on Wall Street will pocket $500 million in fees, nearly half of Amtrak's annual subsidy. As usual, average shareholders will be virtually shut out of whatever quick profits come from the early days of the offering.

(Here's Wired's annotated version of Mark Zuckerberg's "open letter").

At 7 p.m. tonight at Town Hall Seattle the presidents of Washington's six public universities will be on stage to discuss the effect of cutting state funding for higher education by nearly 50 percent. But it's not just an education issue, but one that also endangers Washington's competitiveness. That's why the event will also feature a panel of business leaders: Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith; REI Chief Executive Sally Jewell, who is also a University of Washington regent and Laura Peterson, Boeing's vice president for state & local government operations in the Northwest.

This will be no ivory tower discussion. Even with the headwinds of the economy and globalization, the connection between a college education and better earnings remains. College graduates are less likely to be unemployed.

I can't think of a high-wage, high-tech economy that's not anchored by great universities: Silicon Valley, Boston, North Carolina's Research Triangle Park. The Puget Sound region was lucky that Bill Boeing and Bill Gates put their companies here, but it also made much of its luck by building the UW into a top institution.

A new study by the Manhattan Institute finds that all-white enclaves are "effectively extinct." The New York Times found a bevy of experts to second the motion, albeit with some caveats. Yet this is highly misleading.

Consider Columbia, S.C. The city is 52 percent white and 42 percent black, with a median household income of $38,272. Yet the city is highly segregated, with whites living in older gentrified neighborhoods of grand old houses and some new subdivisions, and blacks living in poor areas. Meanwhile, once-rural Lexington County next door has seen a huge influx of affluent whites. It's 79 percent white and 14 percent black with a median household income of $52,205.

Dayton, Ohio, once named one of America's most segregated cities, is another example. The west side remains nearly all black. White flight has shrunk the city while once-rural counties nearby have ballooned with mostly white, better-off populations. Phoenix's once all-white, middle-class automobile suburb of Maryvale is now mostly poor and Hispanic. New suburban Gilbert is pretty close to an all-white enclave. Sprawl has been a great enabler of the new segregation, which is not only heavily determined by race but especially by economic means. Poverty has spread to older suburbia, engulfing all ethnic groups caught in its trap.

Those draconian Obama defense cuts are actually not. As Fred Kaplan reports in Slate, the real spending reduction proposed for fiscal 2013 is a mere 1 percent less than the actual spending in FY 2012. More details have yet to emerge, but the obvious winners are technology and special operations; the losers the ground forces.

And none of this accounts for the many hidden places for defense spending, such as the State Department, which is spending heavily on its own drone fleet and security contractors. According to the New York Times, 5,000 private security contractors, along with drones, are protecting 11,000 embassy employees in Iraq alone. Mission accomplished.

Mr. Obama's line about using money spent on wars for nation-building at home was also a bit disingenuous. The $1.3 trillion-and-rising cost was mostly borrowed, including from China. Conservatively, the United States spends more on its military than the next 14 biggest military powers in the world. This is Ike's Military Industrial Complex in full flower. It distorts the economy and until its really addressed, America can't recover and compete.