It's interesting to read the news on today's unemployment numbers with a first line of WORST OVER? It then goes on to explain how the numbers were "better than expected" even though the economy continues to bleed jobs.
Sure, not everything in the report was bad news...just most of it. The media was quick to report that temporary jobs were increasing, but failed to mention that the U-6 was also increasing, that the number of people on permanent layoff was increasing, and that people not in the labor force but still want a job was increasing.
Nonfarm payroll employment was little changed (-36,000) in February, and the unemployment rate held at 9.7 percent.
The number of persons working part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) increased from 8.3 to 8.8 million in February, partially offsetting a large decrease in the prior month. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.
There was a little more bad news on the BLS summary table of unemployment, which showed an increase of 139,000 in the number of "discouraged workers" who have given up looking for work, between January 2010 and February 2010.
Along with the increase of 500,000 "involuntarily part-time" workers from 8.3 to 8.8 million, there was plenty of bad news, although most of the corporate media described it as "not as bad as expected," and so on.
In order for severe weather conditions to reduce the estimate of payroll employment, employees have to be off work for an entire pay period and not be paid for the time missed. About half of all workers in the payroll survey have a 2-week, semi-monthly, or monthly pay period.
So unless you were a day laborer, or snowed in for at least a week, your employment status didn't change, and snow won't explain away the bad news.
Even according to Obama's advisors, his economic "stimulus" has already contributed most of what they expect it to contribute to reducing unemployment.
The stimulus will continue to trickle into the economy for the next couple of years, but as a concentrated force, it's largely spent. Christina Romer, the chair of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, said last fall, "By mid-2010, fiscal stimulus will likely be contributing little to further growth," adding that she didn't expect unemployment to fall significantly until 2011.
And in the same excellent article from the Atlantic which I linked above, Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson describes some bleak consequences of long-term unemployment for black communities...
"One problem that has plagued the black community over the years is resignation," Wilson said--a self-defeating "set of beliefs about what to expect from life and how to respond," passed from parent to child. "And I think there was sort of a feeling that norms of resignation would weaken somewhat with the Obama election. But these hard economic times could reinforce some of these norms."
Wilson, age 74, is a careful scholar, who chooses his words precisely and does not seem given to overstatement. But he sounded forlorn when describing the "very bleak" future he sees for the neighborhoods that he's spent a lifetime studying. There is "no way," he told me, "that the extremely high jobless rates we're seeing won't have profound consequences for the social organization of inner-city neighborhoods."
Although 83% of Democrats (meaning "TV-intoxicated monkeys") still approve of Obama's "job performance," which isn't much different from approving of the "job performance" of a hockey puck that Republicans have been slapping around for 13 months...
Although millions of TV-intoxicated monkeys still approve of Obama's "performance" as President, which isn't much different from approving of Donald Duck's "performance" as King Lear...
While the economy continues to shed jobs, the war in Afghanistan gets bigger, Obama's generals talk about "delaying" withdrawal from Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of workers give up even looking for work every month...
Democratic monkey-economists are constantly paraded around the networks to explain how Obama's idiotic "stimulus" succeeded, because without Obama's idiotic "stimulus" everything would be even worse...
And the Democratic monkey-economists know that everything would be even worse without Obama's idiotic "stimulus" because none of them can predict or explain fuck-all, and the economic melt-down hit us like a run-away bus without so much as one millisecond of warning from Democratic monkey-economists or the Democratic monkey-politicians who rolled and rolled and rolled over for Bush for eight long years.
But instead of believing all those ridiculous monkeys and their catastrophically discredited theories, maybe we should ask ourselves how many jobs the same amount of money as Obama's idiotic "stimulus" could have created if Obama had simply hired workers for public works.
If we spread out the "stimulus" of $780 billion over five years, and hired workers at $30,000 per annum, which would give a working mom and dad, for example, a respectable middle-class income of $60,000, then 1,000,000 jobs cost $30 billion per year, and $150 billion over five years, so...
The same amount of money as Obama's idiotic "stimulus" could have created and maintained more than 5,000,000 jobs for five years.
5,000,000 jobs for five years!
But instead the monkey-Democrats and President "Hockey-Puck" Obama...
Instead the monkey-Democrats and President "Donald Duck" Obama gave us...
An idiotic "stimulus" stuffed with tax cuts, and 4,000,000 jobs disappeared since January 20, 2009, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as President of the United States.
Because of the Republicans new found concern for budget deficits, 1.2 million American families will be cut adrift today.
Nearly 1.2 million unemployed Americans - including 27,000 in Wisconsin - face an imminent cutoff of government unemployment checks if Congress cannot pass emergency legislation to extend federal benefits before funding expires Sunday.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) pushed this week for Senate passage of a stopgap 30-day extension of jobless benefits, which also includes a 30-day extension of a federal COBRA health insurance subsidy for the jobless. But as of late Thursday, Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) objected to each attempt to bring the issue to a Senate floor vote, balking that the measure would further inflate the nation's debt.
Remember, this is the same Congress that took less than a week to bail out Wall Street banks for $700 Billion. There were no questions at that time about where to get the money for their criminal friends in banking.
The Unemployment extension bill is $10 Billion.
CBO: Stimulus bill created up to 2.1 million jobs By ANDREW TAYLOR, The Associated Press - Feb 23, 2010
WASHINGTON -- The economic stimulus law added between 1 million to 2.1 million workers to employment rolls by the end of last year, a new report released Tuesday by congressional economists said.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office study also said the $862 billion stimulus added between 1.5 to 3.5 percentage points to the growth of the economy in 2009.
[...]
CBO projects that the stimulus measure to have a greater impact this year, boosting gross domestic product [GDP] by 1.4 to 4 percentage points and lowering the unemployment rate by 0.7 to 1.8 percentage points.
Crossposted at Daily Kos. If you choose to recommend it there, the Rec Button may have been pushed to the bottom after the last diary comment made.
THE WEEK IN EDITORIAL CARTOONS
This weekly diary takes a look at the past week's important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.
When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:
1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?
2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?
3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?
The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist's message.
:: ::
Chris Britt, see reader comments in the State Journal-Register (Springfield, IL)
I attended a job fair last weekend, and I can scarcely recall a more depressing and desperate scene. It was extraordinary really, a thousand unemployed educators, young and old, queued up, sixty at a time, for a chance to speak with someone, a chance to place a piece of paper in someone's hand, and to look a prospective employer in the eye. The faces I saw looked desperate and more than a little scared.
I'm growing more tired and discouraged and depressed by the job hunt with each passing day. Each day that is exactly like the last: wake up, read the news, drink my coffee, scan the classifieds, go to the gym, eat a little something, stay up late watching Star Trek and the X-Files, go to bed and give my woman a kiss on the cheek. Rinse and repeat.
The sad thing (or, more properly, the tragi-comic thing) is, I'm unemployed by design. I left a pair of jobs that I had held for two years to move to Atlanta, to be close to my lover, my woman, who is an assistant professor at a local university. She's someone I've known for almost a decade, and we've seen each other off and on for much of that time, though we have rarely lived in the same city, or even the same part of the country. It was time for one of us to make a sacrifice, and I offerred myself up. I knew at the time that leaving two steady jobs during the worst job market since the 1940s was folly.
But the heart has its own reasons.
It is emasculating, however, to rely upon her income, I feel like so much less of a man, it's a withering, wilting little worm of a thought. So I stay at it, day after day, decrypting scams, feeling a lift when I apply for something that is appealing, and an absence when it doesn't pan out.
I hold the lazy in high personal regard. But I'm not like that myself, not really. The Protestant Ethic is in my marrow, despite my protestations. My parents were upper-middle class and educated, but every one of my ancestors prior to that worked with their hands, in the fields, behind the wheel of a truck, for generation upon generation, as far back as I can know. My Dad was born in a tar-paper shack, the son of a sharecropper. My mom rode a horse to the corner store. Her parents hunkered down every winter, when construction work dried up, with food carefully stowed away from the garden the previous summer.
And I'm not afraid of hard work. I've picked strawberries, and worked in a sawmill. I've installed cabinets and built a pole barn. I've tried (unsuccessfully) to raise chickens and break horses. My first real job was working a hydraulic press in a small factory, at 15. For the past couple of years, in addition to my teaching duties, I worked for an environmental company, and we did all sorts or very dirty and dangerous jobs.
Now I'm trying to get a job, though I remain wary of scams that seem all too common among the listings. Any company that would have you pay your own expenses, or provide your own capital equipment, likely isn't much of a company at all. I read a job listing yesterday that required the applicant to have a credit card with at least $1000 limit in order to cover travel expenses. You get to pay for the privilege of having a job. Imagine that.
So that's all I have to say, I don't really expect or want any sympathy, by reading this you've counseled me already. What I want is a job, something to do when I wake up in the morning. At this point, almost anything would do.
(2/10/2010, cross-posted at Daily Kos, first diary at Docudharma!)
The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has posted a very illustrative discussion of the current recession on their website, and for readers confused by the simultaneous decline in jobs and the official measure of unemployment, 20,000 fewer jobs while "unemployment" declined from 10% to 9.7%, one picture may be more informative than so many curiously defined statistics.
The shaded area in the graph shows the upper and lower bounds of all recessions after World War II. The purple line is the current recession.
Obama: Small Business Key for Recovery Kent Bernhard, Jr. -- Jan 27, 2010
The president proposed eliminating all capital-gains taxes on small-business investment, creating tax incentives for small businesses to hire new workers and raise the wages of those they already employ, and steering $30 billion in money from the Wall Street bailout to community banks to lend to small businesses.
"Now, the true engine of job creation in this country will always be America's businesses. But government can create the conditions necessary for businesses to expand and hire more workers," Obama said. "We should start where most new jobs do--in small businesses, companies that begin when an entrepreneur takes a chance on a dream, or a worker decides its time she became her own boss."
Putting People back to work, takes more than rhetoric -- it takes Action.
It takes Dollars. It takes investing in Main Street -- for real.
It takes turning those Unemployment Checks into Paychecks!
It take compassion and guts. Putting People back to work takes HR 4290.
Rep. Phil Hare (D-Ill.) writes in a 12/03/09 op-ed:
"Second, I intend to introduce the New Deal for a New Economy Act (H.R. 4290), legislation that creates a hybrid of Roosevelt's WPA and an expanded version of the Conservation Corps of the 1970s. This bill will authorize a multiyear grant program administered by the Department of Labor to provide funding for the creation of resource management positions on federal and state lands, public works projects on the state and local level, and public interest work with community-based nonprofit organizations. This legislation would provide a lifeline to the many Americans who find themselves out of work and out of hope... "
A recent change of the guard in the Massachusetts Senate race force the President to reveal he is working. We, the American people, are waiting, just as we have been for months and months. For a full year, countless citizens have felt as though they were patient. Yet, the President did not seem to have their interests at heart. True change has not come. Countless constituents anticipate none is forthcoming. Three hundred and sixty five plus have gone by and the American people are tired of being patient.
The deeper and longer the recession goes on, the more questionable the numbers get.
Today the headline number was a loss of 85,000 jobs in December and a steady unemployment rate of 10%.
The market only expected to lose 3,000 jobs, so this was a negative report. However, like most unemployment reports, the Devil is in the details.
With the news that unemployment remains stagnant at 10% and that employers have cut more jobs than expected is a fresh blow to the American psyche. Based on what I have informally observed, the latest stats are a more-or-less accurate portrayal of what I see on the ground. I might even be compelled to believe that today's grim news is in fact a bit sugarcoated, particularly among those under the age of thirty-five. Friends of mine have undergone the ultimate of indignity and shame of moving back home, temporarily, they always conclude. Returning to the womb does not exactly do wonders for one's self-esteem, particularly when independence in the form of separate living arrangement are one of the metrics we consider essential to attaining that sometimes elusive construct denoted as "adulthood".
Jobs, jobs, jobs continues to be the story line that trumps all others, an issue unlikely to subside for a long while. Aside from the political repercussions that have been debated extensively for months and will continue to be debated as we get closer to November, I admit I'm more interested in trends often sparsely covered by the major outlets. We've seen the demise of certain industries and businesses that had been hanging on by a thread even in good times. We've noted the strain upon government agencies and the many socialized component pieces that variously make up a bulk of our infrastructure--those which depend heavily on tax revenue. What we have not really come to grips with as a people is how we best ought to respond to a period of reduced harvest over a protracted period of time. I have read many pieces that detail that which is wrong, but few which propose a resolute, firm course of action for the future. These may be unprecedented times, but it would be nice to see someone's grand unifying theory.
Alongside the latest doom-and-gloom headlines, the media tries its best to put a micro human interest aspect in play, but these sorts of character sketches at times resemble caricature sketches more than anything else. While I appreciate a desire to show the personal impact of any massive crisis like the one in which we are still mired, it has always seemed a bit cloying to highlight the The Typical Hispanic Immigrant Family™, The Typical Single Parent African-American Family™, The Typical Asian-American Family™, and The Typical White Working Class Family™. To be sure, the mainstream boys and girls tend to leave in-depth analysis to print magazines and NPR, but in a crisis this pervasive, one can't help but wish they'd incorporate some degree of truly thoughtful analysis. Instead we get two tiresome talking heads from opposite sides, each granted four minutes airtime each to devote to often-meaningless improvisational variations on a theme.
In an illuminating book called People of Plenty, David Potter persuasively advances the thesis that the most distinguishing traits of national character have been fundamentally shaped by the abundance of the American living standard. He marshals evidence of the effect that plenty has had upon such decisive phases of life as the nursing and training of babies, opportunities for education and jobs, ages of marriage and childbearing. He shows how abundance has determined characteristic national attitudes between parents and children, husband and wife, superior and subordinate, between one class and another, and how it has molded our mass culture and consumer oriented society. American national character would indeed appear inconceivable without this unique experience of abundance.
A closely related corollary of the unique American experience of abundance is the equally unique American experience of success. During the Second World War, Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger made an interesting attempt to define the national character, which he brought to a close with the conclusion that the American character "is bottomed upon the profound conviction that nothing in the world is beyond its power to accomplish." In this he gave expression to one of the great American legends, the legend of success and invincibility.
Woodward continues,
If the history of the United States is lacking in some of the elements of variety and contrast demanded of any good story, it is in part because of the very monotonous repetition of success. Almost every major collective effort, even those thwarted temporarily, succeeded in the end. American history is a success story. They have, until very recently, solved every major problem they have confronted--or had it solved for them by a smiling fortune.
While on the stump, Barack Obama skillfully appealed to this particular strain of American mythology as a means of direct emotional appeal. I do not believe that it was a tactic employed disingenuously, but at any rate it sought to advance the idea that our unique character was so high-minded and noble that, despite the struggle getting there, eventually we embrace social progress. With this assertion came a very American, very unflinching belief in our perceived superiority and our own perceived invincibility. But, following this line of logic, if we as a country can elect an African-American and seriously consider electing a woman as President, it would then stand to reason that the solution to revive a sick economy would be easily within our capabilities. One would believe that with abundance would come a corresponding abundance of proposals, each novel and credible in its own way. However, it should also be noted that casting a ballot and breaking a sweat are two entirely different matters, a notion not lost on Woodward. One would hope that when this country elects a female President that we don't inundate ourselves with self-congratulatory talk that the glass ceiling has finally been shattered forever. It has proven to be quite resilient to even the largest of cracks.
When the formerly Grand Old Party states its own interpretation of American success, it clothes its own mythology in terms of resolute military triumphs, battles won, enemies vanquished in heroic terms by complete unknowns and by generals who never lost a fight. America is a magical place where everything is possible, but only to those who embrace a struggle between God and Satan, Good and Evil, dark and light, impurity and purity. When the system fails, it writes apology after apology for the failures and corruption of capitalism, pointing to the inevitability of its eventual rebirth. It is as sure of its own infallibility and superiority just as surely as Marx was in thunderously concluding that the bourgeoisie would someday prove to be its own grave-diggers. If either were any help now, I'm sure we might be seriously considering them.
What we need, then, is to truly act as though we really are what our mythology triumphantly proclaims. Setting aside irony and cynicism for a moment, we have the power within our grasp to put into place a new American mythology, one that is comprised of more than just jingoistic platitudes or narcissistic back-patting. But what it will entail is effort and a willful desire to scrape off the rust, even when doing so is uncomfortable and puts us out of our comfort zones. Now more than ever, we ought to be the country the rest of the world thinks we are. Now more than ever we ought to live the notion that we really meant it when it was written that all are created equal, that we were a welcome respite and land of promise to our tired, our poor, our huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and that our exceptionalism is not a club quick to bludgeon or a license for arrogance, but instead the source of healing and solution of a sort that is profoundly lacking today.
In these times of record unemployment, there are some sectors that CAN"T hire em fast enough! There are hearts and minds to be won -- and YOU just may have the skills to "get er done!"
Just be ready to check your squeamish morality at the door -- afterall DC doesn't run on good intentions. It's more a city of players. Players who know how to twist arms, take names.
Apparently many workers in China would -- for how much longer though is not entirely clear. You see the Chinese, want to make more, improve the Standard of Living for their families -- just like Americans and Europeans do.
8-12% Raises in Minimum Wages across China, in 2005!?
Apparently, Workers around the World, AREN'T Working just for the Fun of it!
This new trend toward leveling the the Global playing field, doesn't bode well for the Wal-Marts of the world, who rely on such "captured cheap labor markets" --
to remain quiet, dutiful, and
happy with a pittance.
Afterall Billions of Dollars (and Euros) are at stake -- those Foreign Workers must not upset that Apple cart.
Just two days after announcing the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, President Obama held a jobs summit:
With unemployment levels above 10 percent, Obama said "We cannot hang back and hope for the best."
But, mindful of growing anxiety about federal deficits, Obama also tempered his upbeat talk with an acknowledgment that government resources could only go so far and that it is primarily up to the private sector to create large numbers of new jobs.
He said while he's "open to every demonstrably good idea ... we also though have to face the fact that our resources are limited."
Beyond the question of why a Democratic president is giving lip service to deficit hawks at a moment that screams for more Keynesian stimulus, the real question is this: why is it that we have to endure nearly a year of grueling political games just to get a weak, watered down health care bill that we have been told, all along, has to be deficit-neutral, yet no one bats an eye at throwing tens of billions more each year into wars?
The Great Green Hope for lifting America's economy is not looking so robust. [...]
Growth in clean energy industries and in green jobs has been considerably slower and bumpier than anticipated, industry experts say.
[...]
Last week, the Gamesa wind turbine plant in western Pennsylvania announced it was laying off nearly half its 280 workers. Last month, General Electric said it would close a solar panel factory in Delaware
[...]
There are myriad reasons why green jobs have grown more slowly than hoped. The clean energy component of the $787 billion stimulus package has only recently started to kick in. Energy experts say that banks, which have been reluctant to lend generally, have been especially loath to lend for alternative energy projects.
And renewable-energy companies are hesitating to invest in new plants and equipment before Congress enacts new environmental mandates, like cap and trade, to limit carbon emissions.
[...]
The rate unexpectedly fell to 10 percent, from 10.2 percent in October, as employers cut the fewest number of jobs since the recession began. The government also said 159,000 fewer jobs were lost in September and October than first reported.
If part-time workers who want full time jobs and laid-off workers who have given up looking for jobs are included, the so-called underemployment rate also fell, to 17.2 percent from 17.5 percent in October.
Understand that I'm suspicious of any government numbers, especially positive economic numbers, because politicians have a long tradition of lying with them. So when these numbers came out so much better than everyone expected, I decided to look at the raw numbers.
As my gift to this country that I love so much, I personally fixed that whole unemployment problem there by lowerin' the unemployment rate from 10.2% to 10.0% last month. It was obvious that rampant socialism wasn't gettin' the job done, and that someone had to goose the free markets to get things rollin' again. And I am that goose.
How, you may ask, did I save the country? With my book, of course! The publishing company had to hire millions (-ish) of new workers to print additional copies, plus all those pilots, stewardesses, and associated airport employees needed for my bus tour, and also all those additional mall employess for the crush of humanity linin' up to get there books signed. The waves of free market activity are like a giant tiramisu rollin' across the ocean!
March on Washington
