Based on how unemployment was calculated in the 1980s, economist John Williams reported the true number for December to be 23%. It's a "new (post WW II) high," he said.

---

America's Lackluster December Jobs Report
By Stephen Lendman (about the author)                             Permalink
OpEdNews Op Eds 1/7/2013 at 01:21:16 

opednews.com

America's Lackluster December Jobs Report

Official numbers belie weakness.

by Stephen Lendman

Headlines belied its weakness. Economist John Williams reengineers economic data based on reliable decades earlier modeling.

U-3 unemployment rose 0.1% to 7.8%. U-6 is broader. It's 14.4%. It includes:
(1) Marginally attached workers wanting jobs but not actively looking in the past 30 days. They looked unsuccessfully in the last year. They include "discouraged workers." They gave up in frustration within, but not exceeding, the past 12 months.

(2) People looking for full-time work but forced to take part-time or temp jobs to be employed.
Based on how unemployment was calculated in the 1980s, Williams reported 23%. It's a "new (post WW II) high," he said.

US employment is more phantom than real. The so-called "birth-death model" manipulates calculations. It estimates net non-reported jobs from new businesses minus losses from others no longer operating.

Doing so exaggerates job creation. Thousands of non-existent ones are added to BLS monthly numbers. Doing so distorts reality.

Williams also said yearend fiscal cliff terms resolved nothing. "Fiscal crisis continues unabated." Congress "did nothing to reduce or contain budget deficits." They're out-of-control. They're rising exponentially.

America is in recession. Media scoundrels don't explain. Nor do talking head economists. They put a brave face on lackluster data.

December's report was called another month of stable, solid, moderate job creation. Millions unable to find work have other views.

Headlines said 155,000 jobs were added. The broader Household survey reported 28,000. The private nonfarm sector declined 23,000. It's down two straight months.

Unemployed numbers rose 164,000. The civilian labor force non-institutional population (NIP) rose 176,000 from 244.174 - 244.350 million. The employment-population ratio was virtually unchanged at 58.6%.

The holy grail of low unemployment remains out of reach. Over five years after crisis conditions erupted, recovery for most Americans remains elusive.

Another decade may pass without achieving it. Robust job creation can't happen without responsible economic growth policies. They don't exist. Austerity is prioritized when stimulus is needed.
BLS reports are seasonally adjusted. Doing so distorts reality. Unadjusted Household data showed December employment fell 489,000 from 143.549 - 143.060 million.

Doing so reflects disappearing holiday season employment. More will evaporate in next month's report.

A lost job is a lost job is a lost job. BLS reports don't say so. Seasonal adjustments smooth out monthly data. Doing so doesn't create jobs. They're not smoothed into existence. They don't produce ready cash. They don't cover vital expenses. Venders demand real money.

Harsh reality is concealed. Unemployed millions know more about America's job market than high-paid mainstream economists.
 
Media scoundrels don't explain. Steady as you go, they reported. Data matched expectations. Think small and be satisfied.

Seasonally adjusted numbers are reported as real. They ignore BLS saying:
"The confidence level for the monthly change in total employment is on the order of plus or minus 430,000 jobs." Manipulated data lack credibility.

Nearly 25 million are unemployed. Millions more rely on involuntary temp or part-time work. A 23% unemployment rate reveals Depression level conditions.

Crisis reflects America's economy. Irresponsible policies deprive people of work. Long-term unemployment remains at post-WW II highs. Nearly 40% of people wanting work haven't found it for over six months.

Unadjusted unemployment increased 440,000. Adjusted left it unchanged. Doing so belies reality. What looks solid and reliable to some, reflects hard times for millions. Sweeping people wanting work under the rug doesn't change things.

The National Employment Law Project reports over six million unemployed workers exhausted benefits since fall 2007. Numbers keep rising monthly.

In February 2012, bipartisan complicity cut unemployment benefits. Duration for those receiving it dropped from 99 to 73 weeks.

Doing so applies to states with official jobless rates above 9%. Fake U-3 numbers minimize them. Barriers impose more hurdles. Benefits depend on proving active job seeking. States can mandate job seeker drug tests.

What's going on is clear. Congress and administration officials want millions in need deprived. Increasingly they're on their own.

Doublespeak fiscal cliff duplicity belies what's going on. What Washington on the one hand gives, much more is taken away or planned.

Popular needs go begging. Cynicism, indifference, and dismissiveness define official policy. Hard times reflect it. Worse ahead is planned.

Reality swept under the rug conceals it. Growing millions find it harder than ever to get by. Fiscal cliff double-dealing toughened things further.

New York TimesSpeak didn't notice. On January 4, it headlined "Tax Code May Be the Most Progressive Since 1979."

Saying so turned truth on its head. About "99.3 percent of households experience(d) no change in their income taxes."

Nearly half US households pay none. All workers have payroll tax deductions. Raising them from 4.2% - 6.2% exacted a 50% tax increase for most Americans.

The Times pretended not to notice. It cited the Tax Policy Center saying the average top 1% household "will pay a federal tax rate of more than 36 percent this year, up from 28 percent in 2008. That is the highest rate since 1979, at least."

Average taxes aren't effective ones. They're not what rich folks pay. They bear lesser burdens. That's what matters most. Media scoundrels don't explain.

"By some measures, the tax code might now be the most progressive in a generation," said The Times. Saying so is a Big Lie.

"Obama made 'tax fairness' a centerpiece of his re-election campaign." He "insiste(d) on tax increases for the top 2 percent of households and a continuation of tax breaks and cuts for a vast number of taxpayers."

False! Bipartisan complicity plans destroying America's social contract. Yearend double-dealing left tough issues for 2013.

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public pensions, and other benefits are on the chopping block for elimination. A decade from now they may be entirely gone.

The Times and other media scoundrels conceal hard truths. Managed news misinformation substitutes. Ordinary people are scammed.

High income earners have clever lawyers and accountants. Loopholes let them manipulate the tax code advantageously. They pay much less than headline numbers. Others pay it fully.

Decades earlier progressive taxes don't exist. Bipartisan complicity changed nothing. America's top 2% got off easy. Ordinary people are hit hardest. So are those most disadvantaged.
Instead of full and accurate disclosure, The Times turned truth on its head. Planned income inequality will be greater than ever. Progressive policies don't exist.

Hotel magnate Leona Helmsley once said: "We don't pay taxes. Only little people pay" them. Ahead they'll pay a greater proportion than ever. It's the American way.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at Email address removed .
His new book is titled "Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity."
http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio

Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

click here

THIS IS MY 959th POST SINCE JANUARY 2007, WHEN I FIRST BEGAN BLOGGING AMERICA'S CONCEALED DESCENT INTO FASCISM AND THUS THE U.S. GOVERMENT'S BECOMING OF, BY, AND FOR THE BANKSTERS, GIANT CORPORATIONS, AND THE KLEPTOCRATS THAT HEAD THEM -- CONCEALED FROM "WE THE PEOPLE" BY THE HEAR-NO-EVIL, SEE-NO-EVIL, SPEAK-NO-EVIL "MAINSTREAM" MEDIA. I BELIEVE THAT MY LONG SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH QUALIFIES ME TO VET AS TRUE THE DISMAL PREDICTION YOU WILL READ BELOW ...UNLESS WE THE PEOPLE TAKE TO THE STREETS IN VERY LARGE NUMBERS.

---

Headlined to H3 12/21/12
Obama/Boehner Two-Step

By Stephen Lendman (about the author)            Permalink
OpEdNews Op Eds 12/21/2012 at 01:26:14 

opednews.com  

Obama/Boehner Two-Step
Both parties on board to destroy America's social contract.

by Stephen Lendman

Previous articles explained fiscal cliff duplicity in detail. At issue is destroying America's social contract. Both parties agreed early in Obama's first term. They plan killing it incrementally by a 1,000 cuts.

Class war rages. Private wealth and power are pitted against essential public needs. Property rights, individualism, and free-market mumbo jumbo hammer ordinary people mercilessly. Neoliberal harshness reflects it.

Warren Buffet once said, "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's winning."

Obama, Boehner and complicit congressional leaders agree. Plans are to give corporations and America's privileged class more. Unprecedented wealth extremes will widen. 

Public needs will grow. Shared sacrifice is one-way. Both parties concur. Obama and Boehner publicly dance around what both leaders agreed on months or years ago. Media scoundrels pretend otherwise.

On September 19, 2011, economist Richard Wolff headlined his Guardian op-ed "The truth about 'class war' in America," saying:

"Republicans claim (Obama's) millionaire tax is 'class war.' The reality is that the super-rich won the war" long ago.

Tax hike fear-mongering claims:

(1) raising them "amount(s) to un-American 'class warfare,' pitting" ordinary Americans against corporations and super-rich elites; and

(2) tax hikes negatively affect productive investment and job creation.

Evidence proves otherwise. Post-WW II, every personal income dollar raised was matched by $1.50 on business profits. Now it's 25 cents.

Ordinary households bear today's burden. Social justice are four-letter words. Corporations pay increasingly less. Nominally from 1989 - 2007, they paid 24.7% of profits. Since 2010, they averaged 12.4%. In reality, many pay much less.

Obama/Boehner's grand bargain assures new cuts. Obama's on record favoring lower corporate taxes. Expect nominal reductions from today top 35% rate to 28%. What's paid, of course, is much less.

Sometime next year, major tax code revisions will be quietly announced. Discussions about them are concealed. Otherwise, major social benefit cuts would look like double-dealing duplicity to fund corporate largese. More on what's coming below.

Wolff said US taxes over the last half century saw "a massive double (burden) shift from the richest individuals to everyone else."

Corporations and super-rich elites won America's class war. Everyone else lost out.

On December 13, Wolff revisited the topic. His Guardian op-ed headlined "Class war redux: how the American right embraced Marxist struggle," saying:

Republicans and conservatives used to say little about "classes and class warfare." America is a "classless" society, they claimed.

Most Americans are "wondrously comfortable and secure consumers," they say. Harsher views now prevail. Unguarded moments reveal them.

Prime targets are called "moochers." Romney called them "the 47%" always voting Democrat.
"Moochers" depend on government handouts, they claim. They include contractual federal obligations. They're for qualified eligible recipients. 

Social Security and Medicare aren't entitlements. They're not welfare. They're insurance policies. They're funded by worker/employer payroll tax deductions. 

Social Security provides retirement, disability, survivorship, and death benefits. It's America's most effective poverty reduction program.

It's worked remarkably well since inception. It once provided secure inflation-adjusted retirement or disability income. Manipulated CPI numbers erode annual amounts received. 
It protects personal savings. It avoids risky private investments. 

It's not going broke. When properly administered, it's sound and secure. Over time, it needs only modest adjustments. Doing so properly keeps it viable in perpetuity.

Medicare is America's largest health insurance program. Tens of millions are covered. Everyone over 65 and some younger disabled people qualify. So do others of all ages with end-stage renal disease.

Obama/Boehner/complicit congressional leaders/and corporate America want both programs privatized and eroded en route to ending them in their present form. They want Medicaid and public pensions treated the same way.

Death by a 1,000 cuts is policy. Expect it to play out over the next decade.

Both parties support class warfare. They want people most in need denied help. They want government reduced to militarism, national defense, homeland security, and defending corporate and super-rich privileges.

They want everyone else spurned, on their own, sink or swim. At issue is destroying America's social contract by neoliberal austerity.

Democrats feign resistance. It's cover for what they agreed on years ago. Obama's fully on board. He's corporate America's point man. 

His people-friendly persona masks his diabolical dark side. No pun intended. He's contemptuous of popular needs. He heads the fight to destroy them.

Battle lines are drawn. Ordinary people are in the crosshairs. Political theater conceals what's coming. 

Both sides agreed on $4 trillion in largely domestic cuts over the next decade. It's for starters. Quietly they're on board for much more.

Deficit cutting urgency is a ruse. Whatever amounts are cut, annual deficits will rise exponentially. Cutting them depends on sound policies both parties spurn.

They include ending permanent US wars, cutting defense spending sharply, shutting down overseas bases, reinstating progressive taxes, and making corporations and large investors pay their fair share.

Most important is putting money power back in public hands where it belongs. Doing so ensures long-term, inflation-free prosperity. It's possible with minimal taxes on ordinary people.

Good policy isn't rocket science. It's time-tested effective. What worked in other countries and colonial America can be replicated now. Both parties reject it. They have other fish to fry. 

Their plans involve thirdworldizing America. Political theater will unveil it step by step. Obama agreed to $1.2 trillion in largely domestic yearend cuts.

Boehner raised his initial $800 billion to $1 trillion. Expect agreement on around $1.1 trillion. Simpson-Bowles recommended it two years ago for starters. All parties have much more in mind.

Boehner's on board for modest tax increases on incomes of $1 million or more. Obama suggests $400 million. Expect compromise around $600 million. On average it's what America's 1% earns.

Word awaits on expected tax revenues raised v. bracket manipulation and specific spending cuts. Expect Medicare and Medicaid to be hit hard. 

Final deal terms may mandate around $500 million cut from Medicare alone. Expect it mostly in higher Part B and Part D deductibles and copays.

Defense increases, not cuts, are planned. War profiteers rest easy. Reductions will come from weapons systems Pentagon officials don't want, overseas troop drawdowns, and veterans benefits most of all.

Retirees will pay higher healthcare premiums and co-pays. Overall benefits will be cut. Promises made were broken. Neoliberal harshness targets them like other Americans. Even wounded and disabled vets increasingly are on their own.

"Broadening the tax base" is code language for major code revisions coming. Ordinary people will be hit hardest. 

Expect mortgage deduction caps, state and local tax deduction limits, less allowed for charitable and medical insurance deductions, lower education credits, raising the Social Security retirement age to 67 or higher, and other ways to squeeze America's middle class and least advantaged.

Obama and Boehner feign negotiations. They're on board in principle. Public two-stepping is deceptive. Deal parameters and terms were agreed on long ago.

Corporate bosses are on board. Obama's been meeting with them multiple times weekly. Tax relief, greater handouts, and other incentives bought their support. What they back becomes policy.

Key bosses matter most. They're lobbying Congress for Obama. Heavy lifting is done. Final details await announcement. Most planned cuts are backloaded. They'll begin in 2014 or 2015. Others will kick in later.

December 31/January 1 are fictitious deadlines. Cuts can come any time. They can be made retroactive to yearend.

March 27, 2013 is a real deadline. America runs out of money when its debt ceiling is reached. US law requires Congress  authorize borrowing limits to fund federal programs. 

Doing it means raising the ceiling by late March or sooner. Expect agreement in principle by year end. Details come later. Two-stepping continues. 

Media scoundrels provide background music. Corporate approval sealed a done deal. Neither side of the isle dares disagree. 

Campaign contributions depend on going along. Money talks. In Washington it buys influence. It demands consigning America's social contract to history's trash bin. 

Middle class and disadvantaged households are increasingly on their own. Harder than ever hard times await them.

A Final Comment

In 2009, the Nobel Committee continued its long/inglorious tradition. Another war criminal got its peace prize. 

Obama followed Henry Kissinger, Shimon Peres, Yitkak Rabin, Menachem Begin, Al Gore, Kofi Annan, three other US warrior presidents, and other candidates deserving harsh condemnation.

On December 19, Time magazine added another award. Obama became its person of the year for the second time. It called him "both the symbol and in some ways the architect of this new America."

It omitted saying he helped make it unsafe and unfit to live in. 

It ignored his war on humanity, his police state governance, his kill list, his self-appointment as judge, jury and executioner, and his self-designating himself power to have any US citizen arrested and imprisoned uncharged indefinitely for life. 

It forgot about numerous other violations of international, US statute and constitutional laws. So many exist, it's hard remembering them all. Instead of denouncing his rogue governance, it praised what causes so much harm to so many.

It shouldn't surprise. In 1938, Time named Hitler person of the year. In 1939, Stalin followed. Future Nazi collaborator Pierre Laval won in 1931. So did Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh in 1927. 

In 1937, facist Chinese leader Chaing Kai-shek was Time's choice. Kissinger, Nixon, GHW Bush, Bill Clinton twice, Newt Gingrich, GW Bush twice, and Bernanke were future inglorious choices among others.

Perhaps Netanyahu will win next year. Qualifying depends on colonizing all valued parts of Palestine he doesn't yet control. Perhaps he's pushing overtime to meet Time's deadline.

                                                                  ----*----

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at Email address removed . 
His new book is titled "Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity."
http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.dailycensored.com/obamaboehner-two-step/

HAVE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE OUTLIVED THEIR USEFULNESS TO THE RICH MINORITY?

---

Tuesday, Jul 27, 2010 09:01 ET                                                    PERMALINK

Are the American people obsolete?

The richest few don't need the rest of us as markets, soldiers or police anymore. Maybe we should all emigrate 

BY MICHAEL LIND

Have the American people outlived their usefulness to the rich minority in the United States? A number of trends suggest that the answer may be yes.

In every industrial democracy since the end of World War II, there has been a social contract between the few and the many. In return for receiving a disproportionate amount of the gains from economic growth in a capitalist economy, the rich paid a disproportionate percentage of the taxes needed for public goods and a safety net for the majority.

In North America and Europe, the economic elite agreed to this bargain because they needed ordinary people as consumers and soldiers. Without mass consumption, the factories in which the rich invested would grind to a halt. Without universal conscription in the world wars, and selective conscription during the Cold War, the U.S. and its allies might have failed to defeat totalitarian empires that would have created a world order hostile to a market economy.

Globalization has eliminated the first reason for the rich to continue supporting this bargain at the nation-state level, while the privatization of the military threatens the other rationale.

The offshoring of industrial production means that many American investors and corporate managers no longer need an American workforce in order to prosper. They can enjoy their stream of profits from factories in China while shutting down factories in the U.S. And if Chinese workers have the impertinence to demand higher wages, American corporations can find low-wage labor in other countries.

This marks a historic change in the relationship between capital and labor in the U.S. The robber barons of the late 19th century generally lived near the American working class and could be threatened by strikes and frightened by the prospect of revolution. But rioting Chinese workers are not going to burn down New York City or march on the Hamptons.

What about markets? Many U.S. multinationals that have transferred production to other countries continue to depend on an American mass market. But that, too, may be changing. American consumers are tapped out, and as long as they are paying down their debts from the bubble years, private household demand for goods and services will grow slowly at best in the United States. In the long run, the fastest-growing consumer markets, like the fastest-growing labor markets, may be found in China, India and other developing countries.

This, too, marks a dramatic change. As bad as they were, the robber barons depended on the continental U.S. market for their incomes. The financier J.P. Morgan was not so much an international banker as a kind of industrial capitalist, organizing American industrial corporations that depended on predominantly domestic markets. He didn't make most of his money from investing in other countries.

In contrast, many of the highest-paid individuals on Wall Street have grown rich through activities that have little or no connection with the American economy. They can flourish even if the U.S. declines, as long as they can tap into growth in other regions of the world.

Thanks to deindustrialization, which is caused both by productivity growth and by corporate offshoring, the overwhelming majority of Americans now work in the non-traded domestic service sector. The jobs that have the greatest growth in numbers are concentrated in sectors like medical care and childcare.

Even here, the rich have options other than hiring American citizens. Wealthy liberals and wealthy conservatives agree on one thing: the need for more unskilled immigration to the U.S. This is hardly surprising, as the rich are far more dependent on immigrant servants than middle-class and working-class Americans are.

The late Patricia Buckley, the socialite wife of the late William F. Buckley Jr., once told me, "One simply can't live in Manhattan without at least three servants -- a cook and at least two maids." She had a British cook and Spanish-speaking maids. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently revealed the plutocratic perspective on immigration when he defended illegal immigration by asking, "Who takes care of the greens and the fairways in your golf course?"

The point is that, just as much of America's elite is willing to shut down every factory in the country if it is possible to open cheaper factories in countries like China, so much of the American ruling class would prefer not to hire their fellow Americans, even for jobs done on American soil, if less expensive and more deferential foreign nationals with fewer legal rights can be imported. Small wonder that proposals for "guest worker" programs are so popular in the U.S. establishment. Foreign "guest workers" laboring on American soil like H1Bs and H2Bs -- those with non-immigrant visas allowing technical or non-agriculture seasonal workers to be employed in the U.S. -- are latter-day coolies who do not have the right to vote.

If much of America's investor class no longer needs Americans either as workers or consumers, elite Americans might still depend on ordinary Americans to protect them, by serving in the military or police forces. Increasingly, however, America's professional army is being supplemented by contractors -- that is, mercenaries. And the elite press periodically publishes proposals to sell citizenship to foreigners who serve as soldiers in an American Foreign Legion. It is probably only a matter of time before some earnest pundit proposes to replace American police officers with foreign guest-worker mercenaries as well.

Offshoring and immigration, then, are severing the link between the fate of most Americans and the fate of the American rich. A member of the elite can make money from factories in China that sell to consumers in India, while relying entirely or almost entirely on immigrant servants at one of several homes around the country. With a foreign workforce for the corporations policed by brutal autocracies and non-voting immigrant servants in the U.S., the only thing missing is a non-voting immigrant mercenary army, whose legions can be deployed in foreign wars without creating grieving parents, widows and children who vote in American elections.

If the American rich increasingly do not depend for their wealth on American workers and American consumers or for their safety on American soldiers or police officers, then it is hardly surprising that so many of them should be so hostile to paying taxes to support the infrastructure and the social programs that help the majority of the American people. The rich don't need the rest anymore.

To be sure, wealthy humanitarians might take pity on their economically obsolescent fellow citizens. But they no longer have any personal economic incentive to do so. Besides, philanthropists may be inclined to devote most of their charity to the desperate and destitute of other countries rather than to their fellow Americans.

If most Americans are no longer needed by the American rich, then perhaps the United States should consider a policy adopted by the aristocracies and oligarchies of many countries with surplus populations in the past: the promotion of emigration. The rich might consent to a one-time tax to bribe middle-class and working-class Americans into departing the U.S. for other lands, and bribing foreign countries to accept them, in order to be alleviated from a high tax burden in the long run.

Where would a few hundred million ex-Americans go? The answer is obvious: to the emerging markets where the work and investment are found. That will show all those American union members who complain that their jobs have been outsourced to China. Let them move to China themselves and compete, instead of complaining!

Needless to say, the Chinese and Indians might resist the idea of an influx of vast numbers of downwardly mobile North American workers. But like American capitalists, Chinese and Indian capitalists might learn that ethnic diversity impedes unionization, while the mass immigration of North Americans to East and South Asia would keep wages in those regions competitively low for another few decades at least.

Once emptied of superfluous citizens, the U.S. could become a kind of giant Aspen for the small population of the super-rich and their non-voting immigrant retainers. Many environmentalists might approve of the depopulation of North America, because sprawling suburbs would soon be reclaimed by the wilderness. And deficit hawks would be pleased as well. The middle-class masses dependent on Social Security and Medicare would have departed the country, leaving only the self-sufficient rich and foreign guest workers without any benefits, other than the charity of their employers.

Of course there are alternative options, which would not require the departure of most Americans from America for new lives on distant shores. One would be a new social contract, in which the American people, through representatives whom they actually control, would ordain that American corporations are chartered to create jobs in the U.S. for American workers, and if that does not interest their shareholders and managers then they can do without legal privileges granted by the sovereign people, like limited liability.

The American people also could put a stop to any thought of an American Foreign Legion and declare, through their representatives, that a nation of citizen-workers will be protected by citizen-soldiers, whether professionals or, in emergencies, conscripts. The American people, in other words, could insist that the United States will be a democratic republican nation-state, not a post-national rentier oligarchy.

But restoring democratic nationalism in the U.S. would inconvenience America's affluent minority. So instead of making trouble, maybe most Americans should just find a new continent to call home.

• Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution." More: Michael Lind