Accountable

Greetings good citizen,

Yesterday’s ‘milestone’ for the financial markets appears to be more evidence of the criminal’s favorite pass time, fraud.

IF you think the economy has ‘recovered’ I’ve got some nice ‘drainage challenged’ real estate you’ll be interested in…

In the meantime, to consider stories such as this one anything more than ‘jaw-boning’ is a tragic error.

TOP NEWS
As Worries Ebb, Small Investors Propel Markets
By NATHANIEL POPPER

After millions of people all but abandoned the markets after the 2008 financial crisis, individual investors are pouring money into stock mutual funds for the first time in years.

Left to our imaginations is precisely who this ‘small investor’ is? He certainly isn’t the newly re-employed worker, stoking up for retirement. We already know 90% of ‘new jobs’ aren’t even full time and 80% of those pay minimum wage! So WHO is this ‘small investor’ they are referring to?

Could the answer be as unfortunate as Wall Street, in it’s usual fashion, is merely transferring funds from real estate hedging vehicles back to mutual funds, ‘ringing the cash register’ so to speak?

Because you don’t need me to tell you that this is not cause for rejoicing! This is sticky fingered Wall Street churning (and helping itself) to money that was already there.

So, small investor recovery? Hardly, small investor fleecing is more like it but Wall Street has this ‘truthiness’ problem where honesty only creates hard feelings.

Just because the ‘deterioration’ of the employment situation has slowed doesn’t mean it is ‘improving!’ (But that’s the message the meatheads would have you believe. That ‘less-worse = better!’)

It’s the same idea of when the economy contracts, that return to stability is sold by the pundits as ‘recovery’ when in fact after ‘leveling off’ for a brief period, it falls again and the talking heads pretend it’s a mystery.

But it’s not. There was a headline in the local rag the day before yesterday that one of the city’s largest employers is laying off half of its workforce AND sending the work to its plants in China and Mexico.

Still feeling ‘optimistic’, Bunky?

It seems every time they declare ‘the recovery is at hand’ I feel compelled to jump in and cry foul!

And it looks like they got me again.

The question is did they get you?

For every nineteen people who reject hogwash like this there is one who embraces it. Maybe not as quickly as they used to, they are starting to catch on to the fact people are laughing at them behind their backs…

Understand good citizen, the corporate owned media HAS TO report the economy is on the mend, even if it isn’t in order to quell social unrest and dampen ‘animosity’ towards ‘our betters’.

But as I am tiring of pointing out, no amount of jaw-boning is going to alter the facts on the ground.

Our economy (or that limp dishrag that passes for our economy) is broken and nobody has done a single thing to repair it…nobody!

So ‘recovery’, such as it is, amounts to a lesser rate of descent. We merely aren’t sinking as fast as we once were.

What do you suppose should happen to the employer who cut 70 out of 150 jobs and sent the work off-shore?

One of my other ‘hobby-horses’ has been the need to redefine what constitutes a ‘crime’.

Under our current goofy calculus, the owner can send the work wherever he pleases. He is seen as ‘owning’ the work.

But isn’t he also a citizen and doesn’t that citizenship carry a responsibility to the society he lives in?

He’s quick enough to demand justice (or the protection of society) when disaster strikes…so how come he feels no obligation to keep the society that protects him healthy and vibrant?

Because, until such feckless acts like the global race to the bottom are criminalized, our ‘global’ economy (and all but it best connected participants) is doomed.

Not the kind of world I want to raise my kids in and I’m sure many of you feel the same way.
This ‘competition’ baloney is all fake. Worse, it is the old canard of ‘I can teach a monkey to do your job’ writ large!

Which is to point out that the ‘quality problems’ that served as an excuse to cover early job exports have resurfaced in the cheaper there, indicating the problem didn’t lie with the craftsman but with management.

Which tells you what, good citizen?

It’s time to hold management accountable.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

You or Them?

Greetings good citizen,

In yet another episode of ‘irrational exuberance’ markets enjoyed a rare ‘up’ day because, for the thousandth time, economic activity in the financial sector is being ‘misread’ as a consumer lead recovery.

The sad truth good citizen is not only is nobody hiring (although an amazing number of them are ‘interviewing’, again for reasons most likely political.) when you do talk money, they are all offering less than what I was making in the 1980’s.

But let’s have a look at the headlines:

Signs of Possible Recovery Buoy Chinese Exporters
By KEITH BRADSHER 6:58 PM ET

With few exceptions, exporters at the opening of the Canton Fair, China’s main export show, said demand from emerging markets and the United States was beginning to recover.

Signs of economic improvement are underpinned by investment spending, largely in the form of loans by state-owned banks to government construction projects.

Republicans are pointing to Obama’s ‘stimulus spending’ and belaboring the obvious, old time Keynesian spending doesn’t work in a global economy…

The money all ends up in the oligarchs hands via their Chinese manufacturing arms.

But hey, that didn’t stop the Dow from tacking on 95 points for absolutely NO reason!

Just as the Dow recently tacked on over 200 points on news that Spain was going to receive a bailout.

WTF!

Spain Waits, and Europe Frets
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.

Many economists and analysts are worried that Spain risks push the economy deeper into recession by waiting to take advantage of a bailout fund.

Naturally the Spanish are watching the Greek riot, wondering if they too aren’t making a mistake bailing out corrupt bankers with the taxpayers money.

Some Blame Germany for Spain's Delay 11:28 AM ET

But we shouldn’t be throwing stones, let’s take a look at whats going on in our own banking sector:

DealBook
Citigroup Earnings Plummeted in Quarter on Write-Down
By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG 5:19 PM ET

The nation’s third-largest bank reported a decline in net income because of a $4.7 billion loss related to the joint venture brokerage business Morgan Stanley Smith Barney.

Tough to see a story like this and not be able to click through to find out what’s going on…but we already know what’s going on.

Our banking system along with the global banking network is bankrupt, because it’s customers are bankrupt.

Let’s backtrack a couple of stories to our alleged ‘recovery’. Banks making stupid loans to builders doesn’t mean anything in a world that can’t utilize the capacity it already has!

Don’t look now good citizen but guess who buys an I phone everytime a new one comes out?

The fucking One Percent! They are pretty much the only ones foolish enough to throw away a perfectly good phone just because a new model came out.

This disease/foolishness extends to technophiles who ‘have to have’ the latest, most up to the minute gadget of the moment.

But not all techies are models of frugality…

Under the just who the hell vets these people category we have:

2 From U.S. Win Nobel in Economics
By CATHERINE RAMPELL 5:14 PM ET

Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley were given the award for their work on market design and matching theory, and how to help make markets work better.

Seriously good citizen, with the exception of my humble self, is there any American that knows ANYTHING about ‘real economics’ out there?

I seriously doubt it…and if A Simple Plan is adopted there is going to be a whole boatload of economic degrees getting revoked wholesale! And more than a few Nobel prizes getting clawed back…for a variety of reasons.

And no I don’t want them, I’m gonna give ‘em back to the ‘Wegians!

DealBook
Book by Disgruntled Ex-Salesman Offers His Analysis of the Culture at Goldman
By SUSANNE CRAIG

In the first chapter of his book "Why I Left Goldman Sachs, A Wall Street Story," Greg Smith, a former salesman for the Wall Street firm, writes of interns who had to carry a stool with them.

Um, just a hint of how far gone things really are…in case you thought all of this collapse stuff was hogwash.

Retail Sales Point to Stronger Consumer Spending
By REUTERS

Americans bought more cars and gasoline in September, while a gauge of consumer spending pointed to stronger economic growth than expected in the third quarter.

It’s the price of fuel, stupid! Yet we have this…

Stocks Move Higher on Sales Data 4:07 PM ET
Our final snippet makes us ask, but will pinhead still be the Prime minister by this time next year?

Prime Minister Emphasizes His Belief That Greece Will Stay in European Union
By JACK EWING and LIZ ALDERMAN 2:54 PM ET

Antonis Samaras, Greece’s prime minister, says an agreement will be reached that will end speculation that the country will leave the euro. But business leaders say they have seen little progress.

Unemployment at record levels mostly due to ‘austerity measures’ that are actually hurting the economy.

In fact this whole housing boom and subsequent bust has been so badly bungled that you can’t help but wonder if it isn’t deliberate.

And guess what, the events unfolding over the past four years are precisely what I’d do if I were trying to KILL OFF a large portion of the ‘surplus population’.

But that’s just ‘crazy talk’, right? The One percent don’t Hate us that much, not enough that they want to kill us…although they might look the other way if some of us were starving to death (which is how it’s going to go down.)

After the optimists among us finish paying for shelter and heat they won’t have anything left for food.

Better to throw on an extra blanket and shiver a little than to not allow yourself enough to eat. Without energy you won’t be able to earn more money to pay for shelter and then where would you be?

Consider this as the icy grip of winter approaches…and wonder whether you are valuable enough to your employer to be ‘saved’…

Because in the end it is THEIR decision, not yours.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Rope or Light Poles?

Greetings good citizen,

Sometimes the tune is ‘the beat goes on’ (Sonny & Cher, remember?) and so it is, good citizen, that we are offered an unvarnished look at today’s economy

No. 413: December CPI, PPI, Production, Housing Starts, Real Retail Sales 
January 19th, 2012

Patterns of Slowing Growth Have Re-Emerged
Inflation from High Oil Prices Still Impacting Broad Economy
2011 Average Annual Consumer Inflation: 3.2% (CPI-U), 3.6% (CPI-W), 10.7% (SGS) 2011 Average Annual Wholesale Inflation: 6.1% (PPI)
Perils of Poor-Quality Inflation Data and Bad Assumptions

Followed by an an encore of yesterday’s disturbing ‘what employers want’ debacle

Many employers, though, say they have little choice. Robert Batterman, a labor lawyer who represents employers, said whether it was the N.F.L. or Sotheby’s, which locked out 43 art handlers in Manhattan last July, “the pendulum has swung too far toward the employees, [says the man who makes his living advising employers how to ‘legally’ break their contracts] and the employers are looking in these tight economic times to get givebacks.” [Which is, make no mistake about it, how the rich get richer! None of them ‘need’ these givebacks, it’s just taking advantage of the economy! Every raise they DON‘T give multiplies their, er, ‘personal bonus!’]

“Employers,” he continued, “are using lockouts because unions are reluctant to do what the employers consider reasonable in terms of compromising. Employers are looking to reset their collective bargaining relations.” [And in many cases they’re doing whatever it takes to ‘bust’ the unions! The assholes cited here have even hired ’replacement workers…something that would have gotten you killed in the old days! Think about that while you enjoy your forty-hour work week!]

After being out of work since Aug. 1, Paul Woinarowicz, a warehouse foreman employed at American Crystal Sugar for 34 years, sees another rationale for lockouts. “It’s just another way of trying to break the union,” said Mr. Woinarowicz, a member of the bakery and confectionery workers union. “People here in the Red River Valley are really mad at American Crystal. It was just like a knife stuck in your heart.”

Because we all KNOW what the next step will be, the plant will close and all of the sugar beets processed here will be shipped to China! And a big ‘fuck you’ to the workers still capable of ‘bargaining’ for a living wage…such as it is these days.

Which brings us to the larger question of ‘are ‘free markets’ really the best way to regulate commerce?

The short answer is no because the free market is ‘incapable’ of justly determining what constitutes a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work. There are simply too many variables.

Under A Simple Plan, pay is determined on a needs basis where everyone is provided with a guaranteed ‘living wage’. Not necessarily enough to live like a Rockefeller but you won’t have to dumpster dive or skip two meals a day either. Nor would you have to sit in the dark, shivering in the freezing cold, contemplating your navel until sunrise either…

But if that’s what you like, it could be arranged.

Just don’t try to martyr yourself afterwards on the cross of ‘lost opportunity’, it’s one of the quickest ways there is to get yourself exiled!

(Assuming our descendants are as ‘vigilant’ as we will become…)

Because the exploiter will always be ready to insist that the ‘old ways’ weren’t as bad as the ‘old folks’ make them out to be.

And it only takes one ‘exception’ to completely reverse the process.

Once they gain the ‘right’ to buy and sell again, it’s all ‘downhill’ from there.

We’re back to ‘stick ‘em up’ and ‘fuck you, pay me!’

We are in this clusterfuck we find ourselves in today BECAUSE we belong/tolerate a justice system that is centered NOT on the well-being of the individual but on the ‘sanctity’ of property rights!

It USED TO include the ‘inviolability’ of a contract (this is where old time union organizers thought they had the capitalist cornered but the fucking weasel capitalists can’t be trusted!)

Which leads us back to the current ‘employer/employee’ contract…can the capitalist be trusted?

I think we all know the answer to that one, the answer is a resounding NO!

Property rights do NOTHING to build or preserve a society, much less a civilization. (Which is to point out we may have been doing this for millennia but that only means we’ve been DOING IT WRONG for millennia!)

Which is to say it takes hundreds of thousands of workers/customers to make a single billionaire, and we have a few thousand of them, world wide.

Well, good citizen, automation cuts out the ’customer’ side of the equation, putting more ‘purchasing power’ in the pockets of the owner…BUT this additional or ‘surplus’ income comes at the cost of lost demand!

Robots don’t get paychecks and neither do the people the robots replace…in fact, there are myriad things that the people replaced by robots don’t/can’t do…like pay taxes. (which is PART OF THE REASON our ‘infrastructure’ is falling apart…but not to worry, the don’t intend to replace it in Hong Kong either, they’ll just build new in Africa!)

Which brings us full circle to the president’s ‘jobs program’. The government has a proverbial ’bottomless well’ of cash…but if you print money with abandon, it makes the existing money (in whatever form) worth-less…in both senses of the term.

Which is to point out that we must throw these ‘short-sighted weasels’ out of power (preferably) before there’s nothing left to salvage!

So, yeah, here we are, 4 years after the collapse of the banking system and we have these shit weasel, one percenters locking down domestic factories to extract ‘give backs’ from beleaguered and besieged workers!

Which brings us full circle to the question of ‘What will we run out of first, rope or light poles?’

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Seriously?

Greetings good citizen,

I marveled at first that this particular article is the second most e-mailed from the NY Times but here I am blogging about it so I expect it is attracting attention for the same reason it attracted mine.

What can Mr. ‘Flat Earth’ possibly have to contribute on the US employment picture?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is nothing useful

Whatever you may be thinking when you apply for a job today, you can be sure the employer is asking this: Can this person add value every hour, every day — more than a worker in India, a robot or a computer? Can he or she help my company adapt by not only doing the job today but also reinventing the job for tomorrow? And can he or she adapt with all the change, so my company can adapt and export more into the fastest-growing global markets? In today’s hyperconnected world, more and more companies cannot and will not hire people who don’t fulfill those criteria.

But you would never know that from listening to the debate in Washington, where some Democrats still tend to talk about job creation as if it’s the 1960s and some Republicans as if it’s the 1980s. But this is not your parents’ job market.

Left to our imagination is how we’re supposed to survive here in the economic desert that globalization (championed by Mr. Flat-Earth hisself!) has created for us?

Perhaps more importantly is how long the oppressed people of a desperately over-crowded continent are going to remain complacent in the face of a decidedly ‘raw deal’?

The ‘race to the bottom’ is over good citizen and the over-populated Asian subcontinent won!

The ONLY way to crank out additional value now is to screw these already oppressed workers into the woodwork.

Because at the end of the day good citizen there is NO SUCH PLACE as the ‘cheaper there’.

Wonder why the global economy is so out of whack?

It’s because the ‘fucking bankers’ invented the cheaper there through currency manipulation!

They too will pay the price for their ‘malfeasance’, likely at the end of a sturdy rope.

This leads us to another troubling topic that has been gnawing at me for the past couple of day…and don’t all of the articles disappear just when I’m ready to address the topic.

And the topic is not ‘new’.

I’m sure you’ve seen all of the headlines in the corporate owned media heralding the ‘end of the NASA era…

And I’m sure most of you have asked yourself just what the fuck they mean by that?

Is our bought and paid for media telling us that our race is run, that it is all over but the shouting, that ‘the world’ has moved to China?

I even saw a political cartoon in the local rag yesterday that pretty much said nobody from the US was going back to the moon for a ‘long time’ (with ‘if ever’ being implied!)

Um, the part that should gall each and every one of you is these dirtbags have used the worst of Western civilization to destroy Western civilization (both here and in Europe) BUT they expect to be protected from prosecution by the laws of Western civilization!

Well, they’ve cooked their own goose when it comes to legal protection. Since it is widely accepted that they ‘own’ the courts, they won’t be given the, er, benefit of a trial!

Nor will one of their bought and paid for judges be allowed to preside over the proceedings.

Moreso because there won’t be any survivors than any other reason.

But I digress into speculation!

Although I will say this much; failure to deal with the perps harshly WILL RESULT IN A REPEAT OF THE WHOLE AFFAIR!

You may not admit it but we stand where our grandparents stood less than a century ago and their ‘mistake’ was in not dealing with these criminals in the brutal manner they deserved!

Let the criminals go free and they’ll repeat the behavior they were given a pass on the first time!

Well, they got away with it last time, I doubt they will be so lucky this time.

Although it IS different this time, we weren’t facing peak oil and the resultant social collapse the end of fossil fuels will bring.

Which brings us back to the ‘useless’ corporate media that has continually failed to alert us to the massive changes that are closer than any of us imagine.

Worse, when the change is upon us it will be too late for many of us to act!

What ‘change’ am I babbling about?

I’ve been warning for years now that energy scarcity will make all non-tropical regions of the planet UNINHABITABLE!

Sure our ancestors survived in the wilderness using wood for heating and cooking…but that was when the nation’s population was a tenth of what it is today.

How long do you think the forests will last for a population of over three HUNDRED MILLION?

Those of us who live East of the Mississippi tend to forget just how ‘treeless’ it is West of the same landmark.

(‘Forget’ probably isn’t the best word here but you know what I mean.)

Not that this is any kind of an excuse for throwing Western civilization under the bus!

It’s definitely one of those times where ‘sorry’ just isn’t gonna cut it.

Worse, the pundits don’t know what to make of the ‘non-response’ coming out of the public.

We have some definite extremely negative indicators flashing here and we got nada coming out of the victim’s corner.

I tend to think this is the ‘calm before the storm’. First blood is coming and I think we’re all waiting to see what that is, then all hell is going to break loose!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Missing the point...

Greetimgs good citizen,

Happy May Day for those of you who celebrate such things! We can start off today’s mental journey with a disturbing headline: today marks the 39th ‘Walk against hunger’ here in Boston.

Does this not bode poorly for any hopes of ending this scourge?

Naturally, there are other fundraising events which are much older and it begs the question of if are they really trying to find a cure or is this just a handout program for fake researchers?

But I both digress and commit a common sin. I am mixing intractable diseases that are genuinely difficult to cure with a wholly man-made phenomenon like hunger.

And, given the economy, ending such efforts wouldn’t help the needy that those in charge of our society neglect, creating the need for such charity programs!

Still, it is both a shame and a condemnation of our society that such efforts have to be undertaken in the first place.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, isn’t it good citizen?

We, as a society, have our issues, don’t we?

So we arrive at shin kicking time, although I leave it up to you to determine which one of us is missing the point here?

When I lived in China in the 1980s and ’90s, there was always an awkward economic imbalance between me and my Chinese friends. I had a car, and they had bicycles. I paid for our meals together because I was so much better off.

Now there’s a new imbalance: Some of those same people ride around in chauffeured limousines while I get around in taxis. They take me to fancy restaurants whose prices give me headaches.

One Chinese friend took me to a home with private indoor basketball court and personal movie theater. It was a tribute to the stunning improvement in the country’s standard of living. But it also speaks to growing income gaps at a time when, by official figures, 320 million rural Chinese do not even have access to safe water.

Moreover, some of the economic boom appears attributable to a bubble, particularly in real estate. And some of the grand fortunes are linked to corruption by government officials. One friend, the son of a Politburo member, once told me that he was being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by a Chinese company just to be on its board. That way, the company could persuade local governments to give it land at reduced prices.

What are we to make of such a country?

That it contains multitudes. And that at this time of rising China-United States tensions, any simplistic black or white view of it may well be right — but also incomplete and misleading.

Mr. Kristof’s point is fairly clear if not somewhat banal. Who gives a flying fuck if a Chinese kid has a longer life expectancy than your average US kid (by a couple of years.)

Given the way things are going I do not think a child born in China today will to see old age period. The social as well as the developmental clocks around the world are both poised to do some serious retrograde action in the not too distant future.

The world eighty years from now will be an alien environment that your great grandfather would be right at home in. Although ‘politically’ it will likely to regress to something that your great, great, great grandfather experienced (and if he wasn’t a ‘noble’ he almost certainly didn’t ‘enjoy’ it.)

But still we digress!

Mr. Kristof’s point is (in essence) the great strides China has taken ‘lifestyle-wise’ in a relatively short period of time.

Make no mistake about it bubba, something’s got to give and we’ve seen the ‘writing on the wall’ already.

As the ‘winner’ of the global race to the bottom, China is (temporarily) enjoying a taste of the ‘western lifestyle’ (a lifestyle that has already bankrupted Japan.)

Why do I say ‘temporarily’?

The western lifestyle was developed and is totally reliant upon ‘cheap and abundant energy’. Once energy is neither, all bets are off.

More chilling, good citizen, is the implications ‘Peak Oil’ has for ‘the world’s breadbasket’. We became the world’s breadbasket thanks to ‘automation’. Much of China’s success is heavily reliant on cheap food imported from…you know where (and they don’t pay anywhere near what we pay!)

Call it a ‘government subsidy’…

Did I mention that Mother Nature DOESN’T HAVE A CASH REGISTER?

How many times do I have to repeat something before it sinks in?

How ironic is it that the thieves say it themselves…’If they knew what we were up to they’d lynch us on the spot!’

But STILL I digress!

The ‘point’ that struck most of you right in the eye (that Mr. Kristof appears to have missed) is how China came to enjoy this sudden change of fortune!

Geez Louise, you don’t suppose this sudden turnaround in lifestyle is due to the fact they are now doing our jobs, do you?

OH, but wait a minute…those actually aren’t ‘our’ jobs, they belong to the capitalist who generously awards them to the ‘lowest bidder’!

It would be ‘semantics’, I’m sure, to point out that the ‘demand’ for the products they make only existed here until just recently. Which is to ask how ‘fortunate’ is it for the capitalist that the Communist Chinese can set the value of their currency wherever they need it to be? (Something we can do here too, IF we wanted to…but, naturally, that would eliminate China’s advantage!)

Do the words ‘captive audience’ mean anything to you?

If you understand what I’m saying then it should be clear just how badly the capitalists are fucking us!

And, PS, by the way…there IS another way!

If you don’t understand what I’m saying then there isn’t much hope.

So, good citizen, who, if anybody ‘missed the point’?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Full Employment

Greetings good citizen,

It must be difficult trying to make sense of the musings of someone whose drummer is so far out of synch with the rest!

Yeah, that’s just acknowledging that I’m more than a little ‘different’.

But what the hell do you learn if you only read the musings of people who agree with you?

In that respect, good citizen, you are ‘enlightened’; if only for your willingness to flirt with ideas that are often outside most people's ‘comfort zone’.

You at least realize that life isn’t meant to be good or bad, life simply is.

The good and the bad parts are BOTH up to you (and therefore, relative.)

(Didn’t see that one coming; did you?)

Speaking of the musings of others, tonight’s offering centers on that most elusive of all ‘social goods’ Full Employment

I (naturally) didn’t read the WHOLE article (but I did ‘scan’ the whole thing using the ‘view as a single page’ option)

And guess what this article ISN’T about?

It’s not about how to achieve the stated goal; that’s for sure!

It does state at the conclusion of the article that the problem, like all things economic, is largely political.

We COULD solve the unemployment crisis TOMORROW but, naturally, that isn’t what those who hold us hostage to our basic needs want.

The ‘solution’ to this, er, ‘conflict of interest’ lies in rope, lots and lots of rope.

Rope dangling from high places. You don’t ‘need’ a formal gibbet to hang a traitor, it is perfectly acceptable to ‘improvise’.

Wake up good citizen! THE PEOPLE ARE THE LAW!

We have become so ‘removed’ from the decision making process that we have forgotten they need our consent!

A consent that they have, for far too long, taken for granted.

No, I chose today’s topic to explore the ‘realities’ hiding behind the HEAVILY MASSAGED unemployment figures.

The article actually points to certain ‘data points’ without providing ‘context’.

Since Barack Obama entered office in January 2009, the official unemployment rate has averaged more than 9.5 percent, representing some fifteen million people in a labor force of about 154 million.

What ‘hits you in the eye’ right off the bat?

Two things, first, the US has NEVER employed 154 million people, I believe 140 is as good as it got back when everybody and their uncle was forging bad paper for the banks!

But that’s just a ‘detail’, the ‘roughly half’ figure they like to use includes the ‘estimated underground economy’.

IF you look at the actual census bureau figures you’d see that the number of ‘working aged US Citizens is actually north of 211 million…so where the fuck do they get this 154 million number?

Oh, and make no mistake about it good citizen, the ‘employed’ numbers include EVERYBODY that works! (Even if they only work a couple of hours a week!) While our minds mistakenly interpret the roughly 130 million people who are counted as ‘employed’ as being employed ‘full time’.

The big, er, ‘error’ here is this number is roughly half of the total. That’s how many ‘part-timers’ this fucked up economic system supports.

Worse, if we start looking at the work week we’d see that the ‘average’ has been hovering around 30 hours for years now.

So MOST workers DO NOT work forty hours a week.

Then there is the ‘full employment’ puzzle, apparently ‘full employment’ DOESN’T mean ‘jobs all around’.

No, Full employment has a 5% ‘structural unemployment’ figure built into it.

If ‘official’ unemployment drops below 5% of the ‘official civilian workforce’ we are said to enjoy ‘full employment’.

This is more ‘fun with numbers’. You are aware, of course, that the nation’s population now exceeds 300 million.

5% of that number is fifteen million people! Relegate 15 million people to the scrap heap of society and write it off as ‘collateral damage’.

THIS IS TOTAL BULLSHIT! (And the fuckers shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it!)

It’s time to say it again…do you already know what I’m going to say?

What’s the ‘magic phrase’?

That’s right! Mismanagement!

How long will we let the fuckers hide behind (badly manipulated) data?

Just because they’ve been ‘getting away with it for years’ doesn’t mean we have to put up with it!

I don’t know about you good citizen, but I’m getting mighty sick of this nonsense.

No irony should be lost that it has been precisely this sort of ‘creative accounting’ that put us here in the first place!

If we don’t put a stop to it our entire civilization will collapse!

But, naturally, that’s just ‘crazy talk’.

The official figures tell us things are getting better with each passing day. Why just look at the Stock Market, it’s recovered so much! (What does the stock market measure again? Oh yeah, how rich the already rich are!)

Which is truly disturbing when you consider that all things financial are ‘funny’ (as in counterfeit, not ‘humorous’)

Constant reader knows that A Simple Plan solves the crisis created by automation and provides true full employment (at living wages no less!)

In a more ‘sensibly arranged’ world we won’t run out of resources as rapidly as the rapacious capitalists would.

Contrary to, er, popular belief (of the political leadership of this country) the ‘well’ is not limitless. We MUST take steps to ‘manage’ what remains, not for the profitability of the false owners but for the future of ALL of our children!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Time to get busy!

Greetings good citizen,

Stock markets are limping along in their usual upward direction (although there is no rational explanation for this!) But we’re talking the fortunes of the rich here so it doesn’t have to make sense! (It just has to happen…)

Um, besides the stock markets some people use the Real Estate market as a barometer of economic health.

(Nobody knows, much less understands what measurement the NBER uses, although rumor has it the decision is tied to how big the bribe is!)

Own it or rent it, we all need someplace to get in out of the rain/cold.

Increasingly, fewer of us will be ‘owning’ our place of residence as we are ‘priced out of the market.’

Understand, the first obstacle will be choking up the ‘down payment’, even if prices fall precipitously, rising food and energy costs will make setting aside large sums next to impossible.

Which brings us to the second part of the equation. Let’s suppose you do come into a ‘windfall’ that allows you to put aside the down payment issue. You’ve still got to heat and light the place as well as put food on the table.

Then there’s ‘property taxes’ (never mind the unending maintenance/replacement of rugs, furniture and appliances!)

You need a substantial income to afford even a modest house!

Well, good citizen, where are you going to find a job that pays YOU more than the minimum wage?

Because in case you haven’t noticed, we (the US) have become the new Mexico, where the minimum wage has become the ‘maximum wage’.

Well, there is the public sector but you need to ‘know’ somebody to get one of those jobs! (The inference here is it is possible to ‘bribe your way in’ but considering the ‘tightness’ of the labor markets, the ‘ante’ will soon become prohibitive, returning the public sector to it’s former [family] ‘members only’ status.)

So, given just some of the ‘factors’ involved, just how ‘optimistic’ do you think people who are (constantly) announcing the ‘turn-around’ of the real estate markets are being?

The ‘problem’, of course, is a dearth of ‘qualified buyers’.

Let’s back up a step and ask a few, er, ‘pertinent’ questions:

Does your employer ‘care’ whether or not you own your house?

Is it in your employer’s interest to pay you enough so that you can afford a house?

Relative to the nature of the work on offer, does your employer even care if you are able to afford shelter at all?

The answer to all of the ‘employer’ questions above is the short one, the two-letter answer as opposed to the three-letter one.

You’re employer doesn’t care if you live under a rock and drink your paycheck so long as you do what you’re paid to do and you don’t annoy (gross out) the customers or the rest of the ‘hired help’.

In that order…

So we arrive at another little ‘disconnect’ brought about by the ‘fuck you, pay me!’ monetary distribution system.

Relying on someone else for a paycheck puts you at a decided disadvantage when it comes to controlling the circumstances that you will live out the rest of your life under.

Less for you is more for them.

And we’ve been over the ‘capitalist utopia’ thing a thousand times! That shit don’t float, specially in ‘tight’ economic times like now!

So, what are you going to do? Sit there and mumble ‘fuck my life’ while the capitalists reply, ‘I’ve got mine, fuck you’?

That’s where you’re sitting, my friend.

Snapping back to the present, it matters little how ‘unjust’ the current system is because it is on the brink of collapsing…and you know the ‘chaos’ that comes afterwards will only make matters worse.

It could conceivably be decades before anything resembling ‘order’ is restored and perhaps centuries before anything resembling ‘freedom’ returns.

All because we couldn’t control the fucking ‘greed heads’…

Hell of a thing to try to explain to your starving children as they watch you die…

WE are the authors of THEIR future, don’t condemn them to misery…or worse, don’t hope/pray that ‘someone else’ will save them. THAT’S YOUR JOB!

Time to ‘get busy’!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

What's wrong with this picture?

Greetings good citizen,

It’s Thanksgiving Day here in the corrupt land of the dazed and home of the Mesmerized.

Tradition dictates we roast up a turkey and share it with our relatives, the ones we like anyway…or at least the ones who continue to tolerate our presence.

No irony should be lost on how little the modern celebration resembles the ‘original’ Thanksgiving Day feast, presumably one shared by the colonists and the original inhabitants of this, their former land.

Now may not be the time to go into the hearsay and rumors surrounding how modern native Americans ‘celebrate’ this particular holiday but from what I’ve heard, it is ‘appropriate’.

Left to our imaginations is whether or not the natives are having a good laugh for themselves at our expense considering ‘Pale Face’ turned out to be an ‘equal opportunity exploiter’…

Not satisfied with screwing the natives out of their homes, they have proceeded to screw everyone who came after with equal, er ‘deceit’.

Not that most people find such personality traits, er, ‘endearing’, but I guess that’s one of the ‘primary tenants’ of capitalism, it’s got nothing to do with love, its all about the money!

When asked, most managers said they preferred to be ‘feared’ than loved or even admired. How sad is it that ruthlessness is often its own reward?

Anyway, I navigated away from the source of tonight’s offering before I could copy the link and now I can’t find the damn thing…

So you’re gonna have to take this one with a BIG grain of salt.

Corporations Have Most Profitable Quarter in US History as Unemployment Soars

[As the original article asked, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’]

According to a new report (PDF) from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. corporate profits are at an all-time high, despite the turbulent economy. At the same time, the real unemployment rate remains astronomically high, affecting some 1 in 5 Americans.


Reports Raw Story:

America's poor and middle classes are under siege, with a mostly stagnant job market that has shown only marginal signs of improvement.

Yet for seven fiscal quarters running -- since President Obama's election -- American corporate profits have shown strong growth.

[Now scratch your head and try to figure out how the ‘survivors’ of ‘the great recession’ are reporting higher earnings in a time when overall payrolls have shrunk by almost 20 percent? The key word is ‘survivors’. Think ‘market share’ and the whole situation comes into focus. The survivors are sucking up more market share, driving their profits. What the assholes AREN’T TELLING YOU is that overall sales volume is down significantly from previous years!]

According to a New York Times analysis, Q3 2010 saw the largest corporate profits in recorded US history, at $1.66 trillion. [This is still ‘smoke an mirrors’, there’s more ‘creative accounting’ going on here than actual product being moved!]

The government releases a few different unemployment rates. The official rate stands at about 9%, while the so-called "real" unemployment rate, which includes underemployed Americans, is an astounding 17.5%. Even worse, experts have found that as many as 22% of the nation's households have at least one member looking for full-time employment.

So basically, it's the same old story: the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer. Indeed, a July Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report (PDF) found that the income disparity between rich and poor in America is at its widest in over 80 years. [Which would be alarming if it weren’t a foregone conclusion that we are rapidly becoming a ‘Banana Republic’…]

The top 1 percent of households in the US have seen a 281 percent rise in after-tax income since 1979, the center found. Meanwhile, the bottom fifth of American earners have seen only a 16 percent increase since 1979: a percentage which doesn't account for value lost due to inflation.

According to inflation calculations by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it would take $75,313.71 of today's money to match the buying power of just $25,000 in 1979.

That’s about right good citizen, I started making a LOT more money in 1979 and I got to spend a lot more too.

The fuckers ‘doubled’ our pay but by the time the dust settled they had quadrupled prices!

Then they ‘altered’ how inflation was calculated (because all union contracts had strong COLA provisions.) Don’t want to pay massive pay hikes, simply change how inflation is, er, ‘calculated’.

Which brings us full circle with the opening argument…Pale Face is an equal opportunity exploiter.

The question facing you good citizen is whether or not you want to go on living like this…always holding the shitty end of the stick.

Most of us would prefer to die on our feet rather than live on our knees. The problem is there isn’t a ‘clear target’.

If we could point a finger at someone and say unequivocally, ‘He did it, it’s his fault.’ I know that whoever had the finger pointed in them wouldn’t live long enough to draw another breathe…but it’s not that easy.

The fucker who pretends ‘give you a job’ is one of the many ‘responsible parties’.

It should come as no shock to anyone that there is no such thing as a job created ‘by’ an employer. The need to do a particular thing exists naturally whether there’s an ‘employer’ or not. This is why there is ‘unemployment’. There is only so much that needs doing and over time we have built up such a legendary amount of ‘overcapacity’ that it doesn’t take very many of us to do it.

If you’ve read ‘A Simple Plan’ than you know the solution to the ‘employment problem’ rests in worksharing. It is impossible to be a ‘member’ of society if you aren’t provided with the opportunity to participate!

Who’s ‘responsibility’ is this? Society’s!

Why isn’t it done now?

Too many STUPID greed heads in charge.

How do we fix this?

‘Fire’ the greed heads!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sign of the Times

Greetings good citizen,

Back in the Spring of this year there was a prediction made that we (humanity as a species) would encounter an, er, ‘event’ that would ‘de-stabilize’ the ordinary circumstances of our lives.

Admittedly, this prediction was made based on ‘Astrology’ AND it had a rather large ‘window’, three months either side of August…so we’re not ‘out of the woods’ yet.

A question that keeps running through the back of my more than a little disturbed mind is whether or not the ‘powers that be’ would let news of any, er, disruption in the flow of goods and services? What do you suppose they’d tell us if we had just off-loaded the last tanker full of oil we were ever going to get?

How the hell do you ‘candy coat’ that sort of calamity?

Um, I suspect things will have, er, ‘fallen apart’ long before anyone has to make that kind of ‘announcement’. A vast majority of us will no longer be able to afford the ‘luxury’ of motor transport in the not too distant future.

Tick-Tock good citizen, how much longer do you think we have?

Is the giant ball of pocket lint that is the ‘American Dream’ coming unraveled as we sit here contemplating the, er, ‘inevitable’?

What happens to said ‘dream’ when you no longer have the means to achieve it?

While many (hell, psychopaths aside) ALL of us have ‘dreamt’ of retiring by the time we were 50, most of us didn’t expect things to turn out like this.

For the Unemployed Over 50, Fears of Never Working Again

We were ‘supposed to’ make our heap and retire ‘comfortable’. As matters stand, the vast majority of us had the proverbial ‘rug’ pulled out from underneath us.

So the answer to today’s trivia question is: If you’re suffering from ‘over 50 disease’ and you’ve been, er, ‘downsized’ you will NEVER return to ‘well compensated’ employment again.

You can find work but it will be work that doesn’t pay spit. You’ll make money all right but you won’t be able to live on it.

Which, as I have stated repeatedly, is not their problem, it’s YOURS!

Not to put too fine a point on it but ‘The State’ won’t burn their fucking plant down for screwing you over, it up to you to do that!

Or you can just twiddle your thumbs while you cry in your…you can’t afford beer so you’ll probably have to cry into your own lap! And wail (at the top of your lungs) OH POOR ME!

Which will make anyone within earshot holler, ‘Quit yer whining and get a job, you bum!’

Funny how unemployment automatically makes you a ‘bum’…like you had a choice!

Which brings us full circle to the original thought here…if the shit were hitting the fan, would you know it?

You know damn well the MSM won’t report it, hell the whole damn country could be on fire and those assholes wouldn’t admit nuthin’! They might mumble something about ‘arson’ and how the cops were ‘all over it’ despite being clueless…you know the drill.

They’ll arrest their favorite ‘agitator of the moment’ and pin it on him, complete with ‘eyewitness reports’ that put the guy ‘on the scene’ at a dozen separate events at precisely the same moment!

The only question is whether or not they’ll ‘water board’ a confession out of him.

Geez, it’s hard to go down some of these broad ‘avenues to hell’ without coming across like a kook, but it is what it is…

And this brings us to the soft-white underbelly of ‘perception management’, where the ‘truthiness’ of what you’re told is flavored/sweetened to ‘deflect’ likely ‘blow back’.

So, just what does the, er, ‘abrupt termination’ of the careers of people over fifty mean for the future of our, er, civilization?

Nothing to see here, things will be ‘fine’ when YOU turn fifty?

More disturbingly, a lot of people in their early fifties are the parents’ of teenagers. Hell some, er, ‘unwary individuals’ are on their ‘second families’!

What kind of message do you suppose something like this sends to these kids?

Will it make them ‘stellar employees’ or will they rebel at the idea of working for anyone other than themselves? (And we all know how ‘capitalist utopia’ would royally fuck up the markets of the already wealthy!)

When ‘cooperation’ can no longer be relied upon, it will be abandoned.

From there it is one short step to killing each other on sight.

For one brief moment we would see ‘Libertarian Utopia’ blossom and die. (Because in Libertarian Utopia, you have NO RIGHTS.)

This ‘me, me, me…’ thing is a disease that needs to be eradicated! I doubt we need to ‘loose the hounds’ to find the ‘greed heads’ among us.

This is a crisis that nobody is paying attention to. When the system doesn’t work for everyone, it doesn’t work for anyone…and civilization falls apart.

Too bad Jared Diamond didn’t include this in his book…maybe it will find its way into the next one. (Actually he did, it’s just not ‘in context’ to our current situation.)

Warning! Danger good citizen! (I’d be inclined to write ‘danger Will Robinson’ but some of you might not be old enough to appreciate what is now an obscure reference to the robot on ‘Lost in Space’!)

Yes, this particular article speaks quite clearly regarding what the future holds for, I once again can’t bring myself to call it ‘our’ civilization.

It only takes a few self-centered shitheads to ruin it for all of us.

I keep providing you with, er, unwelcome visions of the future and I wouldn’t blame one of you for not giving what I share here another thought…but that doesn’t alter things a single iota.

It is what it is…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

PS. Thank heavens for CK Michaelson…he had the ‘intestinal fortitude’ to read the whole ‘Hubbard’ article [posted here yesterday] where he notes in today’s ‘Some Assembly Required’ a wrinkle I missed (because I didn’t read the whole thing):

From: ‘The Party of Ideas’

To: The Unwashed Rabble

Subject: Bright Idea!

Re-fi your underwater note with a new, super-low interest rate (there will be a little ‘kicker’ in there to make this hit on the head ‘palatable’ for the lender.) You’ll enjoy lower payments…BUT your ‘non-recourse’ loan will be converted to a ‘full-recourse’ loan that you can’t ‘walk away’ from!

So once again the ‘Party of Ideas’ demonstrates just whose side they are on.

And these asshats actually believe you’re going to vote for them!

WTF!

Not now, not ever...

Greetings good citizen,

We were warned more than six months ago that 1.5 million people were in danger of exhausting their unemployment benefits by January.

Well guess what? January is here and what do you suppose the headline says? “Labor Market Shows Signs of Reawakening in New Data.”

How can they call this ‘new data’ if the information is more than six months old? Naturally, it is not the information that is ‘new’, it is the ‘spin’ that has changed…now dire news is being used to inspire more unfounded, baseless ‘happy talk’.

What you want to look at (because the figure is immune from the ‘selective banishment’ they use to dress up the unemployment numbers) is the labor force participation rate (see the graph at the bottom of the linked article.)

What does this tell us? Well two-thirds is 66%, and the participation rate is 64.6% so one out of three working aged citizens doesn’t…work that is. To make matters worse, 40% of those who do have jobs only work part time.

Is this any way to run a society? It is if you’re a selfish pig!

But what can we expect from the kind of people that brought us this headline?

Labor Market Shows Signs of Reawakening in New Data

By PETER S. GOODMAN and JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ
Published: February 5, 2010

The American unemployment rate dipped from 10 percent to 9.7 percent in January, the Labor Department reported Friday, buoying hopes that the worst job market in at least a quarter-century is finally improving. [Why would any sane person think that? The evidence doesn’t agree!]

The economy shed another 20,000 net jobs during the course of the month, underscoring the considerable strains remaining in millions of American households. Yet that marked a continued decline in the pace of deterioration. Economists focused on a host of encouraging signs that suggested recovery following the worst recession since the Great Depression. [How about one specific example? Just one…]

Manufacturing added 11,000 jobs in January, the first monthly increase since November 2007, while factories saw a modest increased in the length of the workweek. Temporary workers grew by 52,000, and the overall American workweek lengthened, reinforcing the view that commercial activity is awakening after more than two years of veritable hibernation. [Uh, is it too much to ask for one specific example? All we have here are jobs created by BLS software! Jobs that so far have proven to be totally imaginary!]

“It does signal that the economy is continuing to improve,” said John E. Silvia, chief economist at Wells Fargo in Charlotte, N.C. “You don’t have a boom, but you have an economic recovery. It’s a positive sign.” [What’s a ‘positive sign’? The ambiguous ‘lengthening’ of the workweek, they don’t even tell us how much it supposedly increased or where we could find proof of such a claim! I don’t know about you good citizen but this ‘trust me’ crap coming from this pack of liars doesn’t hold any water with me…]

Yet despite the hopeful indications, the government’s monthly snapshot of the labor market came wrapped in an unusual degree of statistical uncertainty, economists said, intensifying the debate about the staying power and vigor of the apparent economic recovery. [The so-called ‘recovery’ is piece of convenient fiction that even our politicians don’t believe!]

The Labor Department revised past data to show that the economy comprised 1.36 million fewer jobs in December than previously thought. The revisions showed the economy lost 150,000 jobs in December — far more than the 85,000 initially reported. [Yeah, the economy is ‘turning around’ all right, doing damn 360’s while it sails off a cliff is what it’s doing!]

The report also featured a new way in which the government estimates the population, which is used to calculate the unemployment rate. That prompted some economists to dismiss the drop in joblessness as a statistical quirk.

“The message is, you can’t believe what they tell you,” said Joshua Shapiro, chief United States economist at MFR Inc. in New York. “Everyone goes crazy over today’s number, but history has been rewritten. Things are not comparable from month to month.” [Odd that they would include what’s on everyone’s mind even though they are doing this solely to discredit the nay-sayers.]

Mr. Shapiro focused on the caution that still grips many households amid a time of economic anxiety, suggesting this will continue to dampen consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of the economy. That should keep employers reluctant to hire, limiting the wages that workers have to spend at other businesses. [Short answer good citizen is there will be no recovery, not now, not ever!]

“The question is, what is the rate of improvement going to be?” he asked. “Very slow. We don’t see companies going crazy on the hiring.”

Some forecasts envision the jobless rate reaching nearly 11 percent by the end of the year, which would raise the prospect of new shocks to the system: a retreat in consumer spending, and fresh fears in the banking system as jobless people lose the wherewithal to pay their mortgages, amplifying an already disturbing wave of foreclosures. [Again the ‘assumption’ is society will somehow be able to function with a terminally wounded taxbase.]

Such gloomy visions are at the center of concerns that the ending of the Great Recession could merely mark the beginning of a long period of disappointingly slow growth, or perhaps a pause before another downturn—one that could be difficult to escape. [Oooo, ‘Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy!’ is it just me or is there an inordinate amount of gloom hiding in this unabashed pronouncement of economic victory?]

“Businesses are still very cautious,” said Nigel Gault, an economist for IHS Global Insight.

Construction continued to suffer in January, shedding 75,000 net jobs. Transportation and warehousing lost 19,000 net jobs.

Small companies complain that loans remain exceedingly difficult to secure, limiting their ability to expand and hire. Businesses with fewer than 500 employees hold more than half of the nation’s private-sector jobs, according to the Small Business Administration.

In Cleveland, Kirk K. Meurer, the owner of store that sells office furniture, has frozen the pay of his 30 employees and stopped buying new cars in an effort to trim costs. He has a $250,000 loan, but complains that it has been difficult to persuade his bank to lend any more, limiting his contribution to spending in the local economy. [Bank is no fool. Who the hell is buying office furniture never mind leasing office space? That damn ‘For Lease’ corporation is taking over everything!]

“I’m being very frugal with my decisions,” Mr. Meurer said. “For us to hire, we need to see a turn in the economy.”

But many economists took the January jobs report as evidence that such a turn is indeed at hand. [Um isn’t the qualifier here ‘academic economists’? You know, the kind with no ‘real world’ experience? And if you’re talking about economists who work for investment firms, they are nothing better than ‘paid liars’ all they do is ‘talk their book’.]

For months, American business has been defined by what economists refer to as productivity growth: companies have expanded their output of goods and services without increasing their labor. [Which is total horseshit!] January’s data — particularly the [unspecified] increase in manufacturing and the hours worked — appeared to signal that employers finally feel enough confidence in the expanding business opportunities to add to payrolls. [Ahem, I say again, we have zero idea how ‘large’ this one time increase is…or isn’t. There isn’t a fucking single thing you can point to and say ‘this is driving the increase’…not a thing.]

Health care, long a bright spot in a largely dismal economy, added 17,000 net jobs in January. Retail jobs swelled by 42,000, though some economists suggested this could be reflective of the way the Labor Department adjusts for seasonal factors. Professional and business services added 44,000 jobs. [Um, didn’t Wal-Mart just announce 12,000 lay-offs? So what the fuck makes these assholes say ‘retail’ is adding workers when we have proof of the exact opposite?]

“We’ve seen a surge in demand for graphic designers and people who create display advertising for the Web,” said Fabio Rosati, chief executive of Elance, an online job market for freelance computer programmers and other tech-related workers. “There’s been an increase in confidence among employers over the last few months.” [What The Fuck! How does an uptick in hiring INDEPENDENT CONTRACTORS spell ‘increased confidence’? These aren’t even permanent jobs!]

Adding to the sense that employers are finally inclined to add labor as they expand production, the number of so-called involuntary part-time workers — people who cannot find full-time jobs, or whose hours have been cut — fell from 9.2 million to 8.3 million in January. [Left unsaid is how many of these workers were axed completely as opposed to being returned to full time employment?]

But even amid the welcome evidence of improvement, the report offered up another batch of evidence that times remain bitterly hard for millions of Americans, with a long slog through lean times likely ahead.

The so-called underemployment rate — which counts the involuntary part-timers along with people who have given up looking for work — sat at 16.5 percent in January. That amounted to an improvement from the 17.3 percent seen a month earlier, yet it was nearly double the level of three years ago. [I’m going to guess these buttheads (correctly) figure most people don’t read down this far, they read the headline and maybe the first couple of paragraphs and then they move on…]

Those who have been out of work for six months or longer swelled from 6.1 million in December to 6.3 million in January, the highest level since the government began tracking such data in 1948.

“Things are getting bad less rapidly,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. “We’re sort of hitting bottom, but there is no evidence of a robust turnaround.”

How about that last line good citizen? Actually the last couple of statements negate the whole damn article…this piece is nothing more than pabulum for the feeble-minded!

Recently the discussion turned around here turned to ‘Why bother’? My own posts have devolved into ‘same shit, different day’. This is probably the umpteenth post dissecting the fake recovery.

While much is the same, some parts are different. Tonight’s post displays the ‘desperation’ of the powers that be.

Failure is not an option. Things won’t stay glued together if they admit saving our scuttled economy is an exercise in futility.

It’s ‘even worse than it appears’. Once it becomes apparent that we have been toiling away on a ‘fool’s errand’, the collapse of ‘life as we have come to know it’ will be very rapid indeed.

And make no mistake about it, these lies they are spreading now WILL come back to bite them on the ass! Either the liars are ‘expendable’ or the probability that there will be enough survivors of the aftermath of whatever’s coming to worry about is considered to be negligible.

Either way good citizen, there is more to tonight’s offering than SSDD.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Fizzle...

Greetings good citizen,

No ‘break-outs’ or ‘runaway’s’ in today’s markets either, in fact the whole week seems to have been spent waiting for September. Wait until the kids go back to school, then break their parent’s kneecaps!

Yes good citizen, the ‘bear market rally’ is over and as we reported at the beginning of summer, the markets are going to ‘retest’ their springtime lows. It’s been stated repeatedly across all sectors of the marketplace, there isn’t any genuine evidence of a recovery anywhere, none, nothing, zip.

It’s somewhat remarkable that they can ‘jawbone’ the markets up some three thousand point without the faintest shred of evidence, not even the most whimsical bit of proof.

So let me ask you good citizen, how confident are you that this is the only place you can put your retirement savings? You’d be better off with a mason jar buried in the backyard if it weren’t for inflation, which, despite claims to the contrary, hasn’t slowed down even a little.

Yet another remarkable situation I’ve recently encountered is the stiff upsurge in, er, ‘top calling’ (sort of the same thing as ‘bottom calling’ only from the other end of the spectrum.) Mind you this is on the heels of the declaration of a ‘global’ economic recovery (again, with no real evidence) just this past Tuesday.

I mean gee, that was one ‘short-lived’ global rally if you ask me.

So we are left to ponder the nearly 4 month long market rally, where nothing got materially ‘better’ only to watch the markets sink once again. Will the Feds have to ‘bail them out’? It shouldn’t be necessary but technically, it wasn’t ‘necessary’ the first time either.

Nope, what’s really disturbing about this whole ‘recovery’ is the persistently rising unemployment figures like those shown in tonight’s offering

[Hat tip: Jesse’s crossroads café ]

26 August 2009 Fed Official: Real US Unemployment Rate is 16%


Dennis Lockhart may be expressing his own views, but the figure of 16% he quotes is nothing more than the Bureau of Labor Statistics "U-6" measure of unemployment.

U-6 Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers.

[T]Here is a chart showing the 'official' U3 measure of unemployment and the U6 alternate measure. The chart also includes the unofficial unemployment rate projection done by John Williams of Shadowstats.com.

It appears that Dennis wanted to take this occasion to say that things were SO bad that there is little use in applying any sort of stimulus to the public, although there is plenty of stimulus required for the banks.

Breitbart
Real US unemployment rate at 16 pct: Fed official
Aug 26 02:25 PM US/Eastern

The real US unemployment rate is 16 percent if persons who have dropped out of the labor pool and those working less than they would like are counted, a Federal Reserve official said Wednesday.

"If one considers the people who would like a job but have stopped looking -- so-called discouraged workers -- and those who are working fewer hours than they want, the unemployment rate would move from the official 9.4 percent to 16 percent, said Atlanta Fed chief Dennis Lockhart.

He underscored that he was expressing his own views, which did "do not necessarily reflect those of my colleagues on the Federal Open Market Committee," the policy-setting body of the central bank.

Lockhart pointed out in a speech to a chamber of commerce in Chattanooga, Tennessee that those two categories of people are not taken into account in the Labor Department's monthly report on the unemployment rate. The official July jobless rate was 9.4 percent.

Lockhart, who heads the Atlanta, Georgia, division of the Fed, is the first central bank official to acknowledge the depth of unemployment amid the worst US recession since the Great Depression.

Lockhart said the US economy was improving but "still fragile," and the beginning stages of a sluggish recovery were underway.

"My forecast for a slow recovery implies a protracted period of high unemployment," he said, adding that it would be difficult to stimulate jobs through additional public spending. (How about Bank bailouts and bonsues? Plenty of room to add more, right? - Jesse)

"Further fiscal stimulus has been mentioned, but the full effects of the first stimulus package are not yet clear, and the concern over adding to the federal deficit and the resulting national debt is warranted," he said.

President Barack Obama's administration has resisted calls for more public spending, arguing that the 787-billion-dollar stimulus passed in February needs time to work its way through the economy.

Lockhart noted that construction and manufacturing had been particularly hard hit in the recession that began in December 2007 and predicted some jobs were gone for good.

Prior to the recession, he said, construction and manufacturing combined accounted for slightly more than 15 percent of employment. But during the recession, their job losses made up more than 40 percent of all US job losses.

"In my view, it is unlikely that we will see a return of jobs lost in certain sectors, such as manufacturing," he said. (Yep that's it. Manufacturing is dead, forever. Never to return. - Jesse)

"In a similar vein, the recession has been so deep in construction that a reallocation of workers is likely to happen -- even if not permanent."

Payroll employment has fallen by 6.7 million since the recession began.

Perhaps more disturbing is the fact that job creation under the eight years of the Bush administration only totaled 5 million jobs…so the 6.7 million jobs lost represents a lost decade. Ten years of zero job growth.

Think about that the next time the ‘party of ideas’ urges you to give them your vote.

You may have noticed my posts have been brief since my return from being hospitalized, I’m awaiting another medical procedure and I’m not quite right…but since when did that matter?

Hopefully, once they do what they’ve got to do to me, I’ll be more ‘cogent’ than I have been recently.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Him, with the noose around his neck...

Greetings good citizen…

Tonight I was sorely tempted to use a different ‘salutation’. I was going to open tonight’s piece with ‘Hey you! Yeah…you with the noose around your neck!’

Sadly, the ‘literal’ among you would fail to grasp the allusion to the ‘figurative’ noose we all wear as members of a debt driven society.

The millions currently experiencing job losses and foreclosure have quite literally had their nooses ‘stretched tight’. Perversely, this ‘figurative’ form of hanging is no less ‘fatal’ than the literal variety. Worse, of the two varieties, the literal form is more ‘humane’ as it is devised to ‘snap your neck’ (killing you instantly) rather than slowly starving you to death, the end result of being ‘pruned’ from the workforce.

I’ll once again point to the multiple reports that insist ‘recovery’ is on the way, if not underway as of right now…which would be mighty damn remarkable because absolutely nothing has been done to ‘fix’ anything.

Sure, they’re re-paving the Interstate highway system (whether it needs it or not) but that only helps the (few hundred) people (in each state) that work for public works departments or paving companies.

What do you suppose is going to happen once these infrastructure projects are completed (or, more likely, are halted because the funds have dried up?)

The ‘consensus’ is the jobs lost during the past six months aren’t coming back, not now, not ever. This isn’t a matter of waiting for the market to recover, this is ‘it’s time to learn a new skill because my old one isn’t needed anymore.

Although, truth be told, there are still too many applicants for the few jobs the market does generate. It’s not like any sector is set to expand anytime soon.

If you have a ‘situation’ hunker down and hold on. If you don’t have a situation, seek out your family. If you’re not close, seek out your (true) friends. If you haven’t got anybody, good luck.

Everybody try to keep your nooses out of the way as we launch into tonight’s offering from Shadow Stats (we’re a little overdue for a visit with Mr. Williams.) for a somewhat sobering dose of ‘fresh air’.

Latest Commentaries
Depression Special Report, Subscription required
August 1st, 2009
• Current Economic Downturn Is Worst Since Great Depression
• Recession Started a Year Earlier Than Official Reckoning
• Business Contraction Triggered Systemic Solvency Crisis, Not the Other Way Around
• Still Heavily Gimmicked, Post-Revision GDP Shows More Realistic Numbers
• Economic Crisis Is Far from Over.
• The U.S. economy is in a multiple-dip depression. The grand benchmark revision of the national income accounts on July 31, 2009 confirmed that the U.S. economy is in its worst economic contraction since the first downleg of the Great Depression, which was a double-dip depression. The current economic downturn increasingly will be is referred to as a depression, and it is far from over. There will be intermittent blips of new activity, such as the current cash-for-clunkers automobile giveaway program that appears to be generating a one-time spike in auto sales. Yet, this downturn will continue to deteriorate, proving to be extremely protracted, extremely deep and particularly non-responsive to traditional stimuli.

It is the last line of the above statement that is the most disturbing or it would be if you agree with what Mr. Williams is saying, as I do.

What has been the ‘response’ to the recession over the past couple of years? As sales have dropped off, companies have slashed their workforces to compensate for the, er, permanently reduced customer base.

There has been talk, but only talk, of restoring ‘some’ of our former manufacturing capacity. Reader Solo has reported that Intel plans on expanding production at ‘some’ of its US plants…but that is only one chipmaker out of a cast of thousands…just as Haas is the only remaining US machine tool manufacturer. Once upon a time, the US dominated both markets.

Where will the new jobs come from? What will you study to prepare yourself for a new job in the new economy?

Sadly, nobody knows.

Flash Update, Subscription required
July 31st, 2009
• GDP Shows Most Severe Recession Since Great Depression
• Second-Quarter GDP Annual Contraction Was Worst Ever
• Recession Is Not Ending • Annual Durable Goods Plunge Continued In Great Depression Territory
• Broad Money Growth Still Slowing
• Unemployment Skew Next Week?

Flash Update, Subscription required
July 28th, 2009
Chart of existing home sales
• Depression Data Distortions Fuel Recovery Mania
• Statistically Insignificant Monthly Changes amidst Severe Bottom Bouncing
• Foreclosures Warp New and Existing Home Sales
• Shy of a Political Fix, Second-Quarter GDP Consensus Is Too Optimistic

Newsletter (Issue No. 51) Subscription required
July 20th, 2009
• Current Recession Now Longest Since Great Depression
• June U-6 Unemployment Rate Topped 20% (25% SGS) in Michigan, Oregon, Nevada, California, South Carolina and Rhode Island
• Pressures Will Mount for New Stimulus and Bailouts
• Spreading Depression Creates Its Own Statistical Distortions
• Inflation Signs Begin to Surface
• U.S. Dollar Remains the Key to the Markets and Inflation
• The U.S. economic and systemic solvency crises show no signs of abating, despite the happy hype out of Washington and Wall Street. While the pending second-quarter GDP estimate likely will show a narrowing quarterly contraction, such will be against a deepening annual downturn and revisions that should show the recession to have been not only longer and deeper than previously reported, but also the most severe recession since the shutdown of war production after World War II. Irrespective of media excitement around the fluttering of often statistically-insignificant or seasonally-warped monthly numbers, annual growth rates in key series have been holding at or pushing to new historic or post-war lows.

Remember good citizen, this time last year? This time last year they were all predicting we’d see economic recovery in the first quarter of this year. But things didn’t do so well in the fall of last year so they nudged their predictions to where we are now, the beginning of the second half.

Well here we are…and nobody can point to a single actual positive development. The banks are doing better but that’s because they can borrow cheap and lend dear, not all banks mind you, only those banks who are part of the Federal Reserve system.

Stocks have returned to their pre-March levels (but they’re still off 40% from their October 2008 highs) but nobody knows why. Sales are off 30% year over year, while many corporations have ‘beat expectations’, they have done so by slashing both payrolls and head count, leaving them in a poor competitive position should demand return.

Naturally, all this ‘downsizing’ hasn’t encouraged any new investment in plants and facilities. In fact, companies are consolidating operations wherever possible.

Worse, some companies are still off-shoring as much as they can.

So, you with the noose around your neck, can only sit and wonder how long it will be before you feel that sudden jerk and you find yourself dangling with your feet a foot off the ground.

Don’t be alarmed, this part isn’t ‘fatal’…it will be the failure to replace the income you’ve lost that will do you in. Some of you will escape through personal bankruptcy but most of you will foolishly wait too long to pull the trigger, costing you the benefit of competent counsel.

Let’s, for the sake of argument, assume that you don’t wait too long and you do find an affordable, competent bankruptcy attorney. Bankruptcy gets your creditors off your back but it doesn’t provide an income stream. You may have plugged the hole in your money bag but you are still faced with the challenge of finding work that pays enough for you to live on.

Any company that has slashed the wages of existing employees has already reduced what they’re willing to pay a new hire double. From what I’ve been hearing, most firms have slashed existing payroll by 20%. Even if they need to fill a critical position, they still won’t be inclined to offer you starting pay anywhere near the level they have pushed existing employees down to.

Remember; you’re the desperate one, not them. They already have someone keeping their finger in the dike…and they’ll keep it there if they don’t want to find themselves on the outside looking in too.

During ‘good times’ it is possible to ‘negotiate’ with HR so you don’t lose ‘everything’ when you transition to a new company…but these aren’t ‘good times’.

You may have had three weeks vacation and more than just the normal amount of sick days coming to you…but that was then and this is now.

Chances are good you’re going to get the ‘El Kabong’ when it comes to negotiating over ‘fringe’ benefits. You’ll know how well you impressed the hiring manager when HR patiently explains these are the benefits THEY offer, end of discussion.

Understand that you thought your former job was fairly secure, but your former employer decided they could do without your services. The question without answer is how long will the new guys keep you? If their business is hurting, it may not be as long as you think.

As I have stated before, the economic desert continues to grow and is already vast. You may reduce your debt to a manageable level and still not find employment that allows you to live indoors and eat regularly.

Naturally, this is not your employer’s problem; it is yours and yours alone. If you are currently over 40 and have been reasonably well compensated, chances are excellent you will be unable to find full time employment anywhere at any wage.

This is why in good times many older workers strike out on their own…but once again I am compelled to remind you that these are not ‘good times’.

Worse, only under exceptional circumstances do ‘shoestring start-ups’ succeed beyond their first year. Oh, and as I mentioned earlier, the banks are doing well by borrowing cheap and lending dear…

It’s bad enough being the new kid on the block, it’s even worse to be the new kid that has to crack a sky-high interest payment.

I’m wasting a lot of space here and I’m not sure I’m getting my point across because the real issue here is deeper than simply cracking your nut.

The question you need seriously consider is just how far the people who sunk our current economy are willing to go to retain their power?

Global warming isn’t a ‘real’ problem…yet, but it will be, just as ‘peak oil’ isn’t a reality, yet, but it definitely will be in the not too distant future.

Our current unsustainable system of commerce is plagued by what, good citizen?

Simply put, we currently have too big a ‘surplus population’ that is chewing through resources at a horrendous rate.

Logic tells us that most of the ‘surplus population’ is located in China and India but they work for nothing and relatively speaking, have nothing…so the capitalists have targeted the markets that are already ‘saturated’ with their products for, er, ‘destruction’.

This is why the economic desert continues to expand here in the US. Worse, it expands with the aid of what passes for our government and often at the taxpayer’s expense.

Globalization was never intended to make anything ‘better’ for you, it has been done ‘to you’.

Lower prices are fairly meaningless if they cost you your job in the process…but our government doesn’t seem to recognize/care about that.

Which should provide you with a pretty clear picture of what has to go and why.

Remember, the same dirtbags that threw you out the door are the same ones that invaded a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, most of the hijackers were Saudis…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Liberty

Greetings good citizen,

There are a few topics that piqued my interest this weekend, such as the kerfuffle over the Iranian election results…where US pundits pointed out if they had only cut the margin down to a slim few percent, it would have been enough to keep the ‘losers’ quiet.

Interesting observation to make, no?

Which brings us to a couple of other ‘observations’, such as how the Conservatives have only 20% of registered voters while Liberals regularly poll in the 50% range…yet our elections, of late, have all been ‘squeakers’.

Here’s a rhetorical question for you: Do you suppose Mr. Obama would have won if he had competed for the job using the Republican agenda he has so firmly embraced on the economy?

How would either candidate have faired if they had been compelled to present a blueprint for solving the economic crisis before ‘earning’ the Presidency?

Obviously, after eight years of tax cuts, Mr. McCain ‘failed’ to prove he had a viable, workable economic recovery plan…but he didn’t lose by a particularly large margin either.

Sadly, Mr. Obama ‘talked a better game’ but the actual results of his administration’s actions have yet to produce a positive outcome.

Back to the subject at hand, The president of Iran is a figurehead position with no real power (all real decision-making power rests in the hands of the Ayatollah and the ‘Islamic Council’.) So allowing the public to vote for this puppet serves what purpose again?

Oh yeah…it’s the same ‘exercise in futility’ that we partake of over here. It’s known as the ‘illusion of participation’.

We elect the guy (or someday, gal) that presents themself as the one to do the job…but then they don’t do it…and there isn’t a thing we can do about it.

Our ‘say’ is done so we have to wait another four years before we get another chance…which has so far produced unsurprisingly identical results.

The Guy/Gal knows what to say but they never do any of it once they are elected.

More disturbing is how every time we fall for this ‘sucker’s bet’, we end up worse off than we were.

This is not the type of game any rational, free society should be subjecting itself to.

The economy has lost millions of jobs, many of them well compensated positions and we all know the truth, NONE of them are coming back.

If you shrink the amount of money circulating within a society, there will be less for everyone.

Which brings us to the severely ‘twisted’ Stock Markets that no longer tell us anything about the economy or economic performance.

Since hitting their ‘March lows’ the stock market has gained some 35% and is finally ‘positive for the year’…but what does that really mean?

The losses suffered by your 401k ‘started’ at the 14,000 level. The fact that the markets are back up in the 8,700 range means you retirement account has revived a little over the past three months.

Like I said, jobs will not return nor will the prices that boosted stocks up to the 14,000 level EVER return in your lifetime.

Businesses will not ‘expand’ because their customer base is broke, there’s no one to sell to, so there’s no reason to hire more employees.

Worse, the, um, ‘inventory’ of highly qualified people will remain at a very high level for a real long time, reducing the ‘incentive’ to pay the qualified any more than absolutely necessary.

And in case you haven’t noticed, ‘prevailing wages’ are dropping like a rock as current employees are trading today’s income for tomorrow’s job security.

So where are those ‘green shoots’ they keep blabbing about? It’s a Chimera good citizen, so far all of the ‘green shoots are numbers that have been ‘less bad’ than ‘expected’.

Which leads us right back to the ‘tight-rope’, good citizen. If we wait long enough, eventually the ‘year over year’ numbers will ‘improve’, if only due to population growth.

Can you see the future? We need only look at Japan to see what our economy is doomed to become.

Most of us that are ‘lucky’ enough to find work will find it as ‘contractors’, where the employer pays us a salary and nothing else. Job security will be considered a luxury of the past and employers will ‘replace’ you periodically with people willing to work cheaper/longer than you…and there will be nothing illegal about this.

As Joe is fond of pointing out, this will be a return to the McKinley era, a time when the boss was king and did whatever seemed good to him. (including beating the hired help.)

If that’s not bad enough for you, we will also see the return of child labor as beleaguered and besieged communities either seriously curtail or do away with public education programs entirely.

If they can repeal Glass-Stegal then they can repeal the education act.

Which will be a bit bizarre as one in every three jobs will be ‘police/security related’ and they will ‘somehow’ find the funds to pay for that.

For all of their squawking about the Constitution, protecting your ‘liberty’ is the last thing these vultures are concerned with. Liberty is for them, not the ‘unwashed riff-raff’.

Do you think I’m being overly pessimistic?

All of these conditions existed right here in the US a little more than a hundred years ago.

The fact that it was ‘worse’ elsewhere is somehow not particularly comforting.

‘Liberty’ the ‘freedom from oppression’ is a precious thing, a thing to be guarded zealously.

History shows that only those found ‘worthy’ of liberty enjoy the freedom it provides. Both the Greeks and the Romans could not ‘conceive’ of a civilization without slavery…an idea that has ‘persisted’ to this very day among our ‘elite’.

If you weren’t born into the tyrannical system of ‘income streams’ that make the elite who they are, you are on the outside looking in.

Simply put, if you weren’t born with a trust fund, you can forget about even becoming one of them unless you were gifted with an intellect so enormous that you can create something only you understand…so it can’t be stolen from you.

Consider tonight’s post as a ‘warning’, the ‘experiment’ of social equality is drawing to a close. Battle lines are being drawn and this time there will be no offers of ‘appeasement’, this time it will be a battle to the death.

Understand that the ‘new deal’ was indeed ‘appeasement’. Starting with the Reagan Revolution, the New Deal has been systematically dismantled.

And now it’s time to see who’s going to return to bondage peacefully and who, if any, will fight for their freedom.

Let me assure you of one thing good citizen, there is no way in hell we can ‘vote’ our way out of this…we stand no more chance of that than the Iranians do.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

What happened to the three million jobs the stimulus package was supposed to create?

Greetings good citizen,

Since December 2007, the economy has shed more than seven million jobs, more than the total number created during the eight years of the Bush presidency.

Naturally, if we look underneath the numbers we’d find that the Bush administration created 5 million jobs, most of them in banking, real estate and construction, while shedding 15 million manufacturing jobs!

Bad news good citizen, we’re still shedding manufacturing jobs faster than any other category.

Understand good citizen that manufacturing is THE process where raw materials are converted into ‘wealth’. These are not only the physical items we ‘trade’ for other items we need but these items ‘back’ the strength of our currency!

The more we produce and sell, the more valuable our currency is.

But you may have noticed that mainstream economists are curiously quiet on this ‘econ 101’ fact.

What you need to understand is what the difference is between an economically ‘strong nation and a Banana Republic. The ‘strong nation’ has the capacity to produce what it needs for itself, leaving what comprises a Banana Republic somewhat ‘self-explanatory’…

Over the past thirty years we have lost tens of millions of manufacturing jobs and are very hard pressed indeed to find anything on our retailer’s shelves that is in fact US made…which makes us, well, what do you think?

But that’s only half the problem, good citizen. Over the years automation has become so efficient that, like farming, it no longer requires very many people to produce what the world consumes.

This is a ‘double bum-blast’ not only do we have too much capacity to produce what we consume but we also don’t have enough funds to buy it!

This is ‘capitalism’ turned on its head…goods should be so cheap producers would be giving them away...but that's not what’s happening.

While we tend to be a bit myopic when it comes to economic reporting, there are currently tens of millions of people unemployed world-wide.

Ironically, if we were to define ‘unemployed’ as an individual that doesn’t collect a paycheck, then there are literally billions who are in fact ‘unemployed’.

Keep that figure in mind as we consider tonight’s offering where we compare six hundred thousand to six billion.

Obama Promises Job Creation in Plan

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: June 8, 2009

WASHINGTON — The rising unemployment rate is giving President Obama’s critics an opportunity to raise questions about the effectiveness of his recovery plan and his economic leadership. The huge budget deficit is focusing fresh concern on the national debt.

So Mr. Obama began a new effort on Monday to show that his stimulus plan was yielding concrete benefits, saying that his administration expects to save or create 600,000 more jobs this summer, as the federal government spends billions to expand care at health centers, spruce up national parks, hire teachers and improve military facilities. [Will he ‘spruce up’ National parks while they’re closed to the public because the states they’re located in can’t afford to pay park employees? While updating military facilities is all fine and well, what are his plans for the tent cities springing up around the nation…what does he expect these people to do once cold weather returns?]

At a meeting with Mr. Obama and the cabinet, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. outlined 10 major initiatives that he said would “build momentum and accelerate job growth” over the next 100 days. After Mr. Biden ticked off a list of programs — including water and waste projects in rural America and rehabilitation of 98 airports and 1,500 highways — the president took aim at his critics.

“Now I know that there are some who, despite all evidence to the contrary, still don’t believe in the necessity and promise of the recovery act,” Mr. Obama said, “and I would suggest to them that they talk to the companies who, because of this plan, scrapped the idea of laying off employees and in fact decided to hire employees. [For a complete list see…nowhere] Tell that to the Americans who receive that unexpected call saying, ‘Come back to work.’ “ [This would be far more convincing if he could point to a website where such information was posted so the public could verify these claims…but he’s too busy to bother with such things, like ‘the good lord, you gotta have ‘faith’.]

A little less than four months after he signed the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law, Mr. Obama is now in the position of trying to convince Americans that the stimulus measure — his signature legislative achievement thus far — is working,even as the job losses mount.

On Friday, the Department of Labor reported that unemployment was now 9.4 percent, the highest in 25 years, although the rate of monthly job losses dropped off in May. The president’s top aides spent the weekend trying to tamp down expectations that the unemployment rate would turn around anytime soon. One adviser, Austan Goolsbee, told Fox News the nation was in for “a rough patch,” a phrase often invoked by Mr. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush

With Mr. Obama talking up the stimulus bill, Republicans went on the offensive.

“The Obama administration is continuing to fabricate job creation numbers related to the stimulus,” Tony Fratto, a deputy press secretary in the Bush administration, said in an e-mail message to reporters. He added, “Their so-called models would not stand the light of day.”

The administration maintains that 150,000 jobs were either created or saved in the first 100 days after Mr. Obama signed the stimulus bill on Feb. 17. The 600,000 figure the president discussed Monday is not new; it was made public by Mr. Biden on May 13. It includes 125,000 part-time summer jobs for teenagers, which the administration counts as 62,500 full-time job equivalents. [Memory recall time…wasn’t the ‘stimulus package’ supposed to provide 3 million new jobs? So what’s this 600,000 BS!]

Independent experts say those figures — estimates based on macroeconomic models and projections — are plausible, although they say it is very difficult to measure the number of jobs created. But Republicans say the teenage jobs estimate proves that there is less than meets the eye to the stimulus package.

“The administration looks dramatically out of touch as they highlight the creation of temporary summer employment in the face of job losses unseen in decades, record unemployment and massive deficits,” said Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House Republican whip. [At the time when the president elect announced a rather disappointing creation figure of ‘2-3 million jobs’, the economy had already shed 5 million jobs…]

In preparing his report to the president, Mr. Biden said he had asked cabinet secretaries to give him a list of projects “that they were absolutely certain of they could get up and running in the second hundred days.”

The Department of Health and Human Services, the White House said, will either build or expand 1,129 health centers to provide service to approximately 300,000 additional patients across the country. The Justice Department will hire or keep approximately 5,000 law enforcement officers on the job. The Department of Veterans Affairs will begin improvements at 90 veterans medical centers across 38 states.

By spotlighting specific projects that he expects will get under way this summer, Mr. Obama may be trying to use his presidential platform to prod states into spending the federal dollars at a critical period, when the weather is more conducive to construction projects in the Northeast and teenagers are free to work, giving a temporary boost to the job market, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. [Seriously good citizen, construction NEVER STOPS up here in the Greater Boston area, those poor workers are out there in all kinds of weather, usually at night. Hell, they paved the entire Southeast Expressway in the dead of winter last year!]

“The economy is at a very key juncture,” Mr. Zandi said. “We are right at a turning point from recession to recovery. If they can juice things up just even a bit, that may make a big difference.” [He is an economist thus does he ‘have his own version of the truth’, it’s ‘axiomatic’.]

But complicating Mr. Obama’s efforts are the predictions of two of his own economic advisers: Jared Bernstein, the top economist for the vice president, and Christina D. Romer, the chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. In January, 10 days before Mr. Obama was inaugurated, they released a report forecasting that the unemployment rate would remain at 8 percent or below in 2009 if the plan were enacted. [Guess that didn’t work out too well…]

“When they passed this spending plan, Democrats said it would immediately create jobs,” said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, “yet nearly four months later, unemployment has continued to climb and none of their rosy predictions have come true.”

Mr. Bernstein, addressing reporters on Monday at a contentious White House briefing, conceded that his forecast had been “clearly too optimistic.” He said it had not taken into account figures from the fourth quarter of last year, because those numbers were not available at the time. But he said unemployment would be higher were it not for the economic recovery package. [This is doubtlessly true.]

“Job losses would have been deeper,” Mr. Bernstein said. “The unemployment rate would have been — by our estimate, by the end of next year would have been between one and a half and two points higher than it otherwise will be.”

What it looks like is what it is. More ‘weasel words’ and waffling. What the hell happened to the (originally 2 million) and then 3 million jobs the stimulus program was supposed to create? We’re talking nearly 800 billion with a B bucks here!

I’m guessing he wouldn’t have gotten that much if he had said up front the was going to dump most of it into the worthless banks…

In light of the seven million jobs lost to date. 600,000 is just a piss hole in the snow, especially for nearly 800 billion invested.

Worse, most of the jobs provided in the example are ‘saved’, not ‘new’…while the economy gushes billions from our overall payroll.

Understand, the ‘Economic Recovery Act’ is in full swing up here in Boston, there isn’t a single major roadway within thirty miles of town that isn’t being resurfaced, worse, they’re all being done at the same time so traffic is FUBAR.

Oh, PS by the way, all of these projects are being worked on by ‘the usual suspects’ as most of us don’t have the capital (or political pull) to buy a hundred 18 wheel dump trucks, a pavement shredder and a half a dozen steam rollers.

For more ‘business as usual’ There are more state troopers than construction workers at any one of these work sites.

Due to the ‘capital intensive nature’ of these road projects, there wasn’t much of a chance that any ‘new’ jobs would be created. Sure, some of the guys got their kids summer jobs but that would have happened anyway…what will be interesting to see is what happens next year, when neither the states nor the Fed has the funds to ‘do it again’.

The failure to restore job growth will inevitably result in greater tax shortfalls…which could potentially cause the start of a cascading systemic failure.

The States will cut benefits, which cause the needy to resort to using much more expensive ‘emergency services’, defeating the purpose of cutting benefits in the first place.

As I have said before, there is no way out of this crisis, the problem is insoluble using the system as it is currently configured.

The only question remaining is which will be worse, the eventual collapse of society or the poisonous cure the elite will force upon the survivors.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner