Thursday, December 29, 2011

There and back again...

Greetings good citizen,

Apparently the thinking is you have to be unemployed to even go looking for the ‘help wanted’ listings…and believe me when I tell you, you have to really ‘hunt’ for them in the only place they don’t ‘back up’ (in your local newspaper. Online job postings are eternal in our capitalist fuck you, pay me ethic.)

So a lower level of new claims tells us what?

Only that they are done throwing people out the nearest window…for now.

And, traditionally, it is considered ‘poor taste’ to jettison the baggage during the holiday season.

The only useful thing to come out of ‘A Christmas Carol’ is a palpable fear that the three ghosts wait to this day to ‘treat’ their next victim…

And at least some of these would be ‘Scrooges’ might be reluctant to relive the tyrannies of Christmas past…nor would they be eager to preview what the Spirit of Christmas yet to come may reveal!

So the answer is ‘no’, a reduction in lay-offs during the ‘Holiday Season’ is actually fairly ‘typical’.

Making it difficult to classify this offering. One thing is certain, it is definitely ‘Happy Talk’…

US unemployment claims rise after steady declines

December 29, 2011 — WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits rose last week after three weeks of declines to a level consistent with modest gains in hiring.

But broader trend over the past month suggests job growth could pick up in the new year. Weekly applications increased by 15,000 to a seasonally adjusted 381,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. Still, the four-week average, a less volatile measure, dropped for the fourth straight week to 375,000. That's the lowest level since June 2008.

Applications generally must fall below 375,000 — consistently — to signal that hiring is strong enough to reduce the unemployment rate. While layoffs have fallen sharply since the recession officially ended two and a half years ago, many companies have been slow to add jobs.

Still, hiring has improved in recent months. Employers have added an average of 143,000 net jobs a month from September through November. That's almost double the average for the previous three months.

There is NO CORRELATION between falling new claims and ‘rising’ anything!

Worse, they have the workforce figures so distorted that is masks 50% of the unemployed!

Why do they do this?

If the public were aware of how badly capitalism is failing they would DEMAND a replacement!

But the working public is, er, ‘unaware’ of their good fortune (and nobody dares to point it out.)

Sure, they hear how lucky they are to have a job all the time…what they don’t know is there are more than six workers for every job in global marketplace!

Only a handful of these jobs require prior experience in the given field. A couple of weeks of ‘hands on’ in most jobs is enough to fill 99% of ALL job requirements…kinda adding mightily to the ‘lucky’ factor. (In many cases you COULD be replaced by a chimp! The only thing saving your sorry ass is chimps can‘t talk.)

Naturally, there is another factor that doesn’t garner much attention in the press and oddly they aren’t trying to keep it secret and that’s the constant consolidation of market share around the globe.

That is how they keep their figures rising when every thing else is falling.

There’s a slightly larger overall market (driven solely by population growth) while there is a steady decline in the number of ‘competitors’ for what markets remain.

This is yet another way to disguise the corrosive effects of globalization and its perverted cousin, the global race to the bottom.

Sadly, if people were paying attention, they might have noticed that the one percent has stolen their children’s future (and left an economic wasteland in its place.)

Ironically, as we are soon to relearn, ‘redundancy is GOOD!’

In an energy scarce future 6,000 mile long supply chains will be unthinkable and sole sourcing will become a defacto crime!

Nobody can live in an ‘economic desert’ nor should anyone be forced to try…(IF they’re not a criminals!)

In a ‘sustainable’ future all supply lines will be as short as possible. If quality considerations dictate that only a certain type of resource is suitable, then those products will be produced as close as practical to that source.

Shipping stuff half way around the planet and back was never a ‘practical’ idea. The bastards who deliberately destroyed our economy (s) knew that (although China is notoriously ‘resource poor’…)

I’m guessing the plan is to secure sources closer to China as the pressure to shorten supply lines builds.

And that may well be the trigger we continue to squeeze, good citizen.

As the cost of shipping goods half-way around the planet and back again becomes prohibitive, the ‘problem’ of being unable to make it ourselves will truly become ‘our problem’…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

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