Does everyone realize how well and truly fucked the 99% are?

[MannyGoldstein]

Right now we're generally focused on the unabashed theft of our Social Security savings. And this is reasonable, because it's so black and white: there is no question, based on the numbers and the talk, that it is pure theft.

The bigger but more subtle problem is that we're in a full-blown depression, and this fully-fake crisis is going to make that even more catastrophic. Real unemployment, calculated as it was before Clinton re-jiggered the numbers to remove "discouraged" workers, is now more than 15%. And based on the recent job creation figures, real unemployment is already increasing at a good clip. Despite what the lunatics, pinheads and liars say, government spending is very efficient at creating and maintaining good jobs. Slashing government spending even more, as both parties now say must be done, will accelerate unemployment even more.

So more people in poverty. With unemployment, health care, and Social Security benefits cut. I guess it sucks to not have cash to pay off politicians, so here we are: pretty well fucked.

Good luck to us all.

[villager]

1. And until the 99% bring it to the 1% in "non-traditional" ways, it will remain that way...

Alas.

[roguevalley]

6. + times google

[roguevalley]

7. and it need never be forgotten that a Dem president let it happen

or at least he says he is, the fucking DINO

[villager]

9. as opposed to "Google + ?"

;-)

[roguevalley]

13. heh-heh ... you math wizards, you. .. ;-D

[TexDevilDog]

34. Does "non-traditional" mean like Norway?

Just wondering your meaning?

[Starry Messenger]

2. Yes.

[FreakinDJ]

3. Before or After the Double Dip Hits

CNBC was talking about all the leading economic indicators are pointing towards a second recession.

I know many well take offense at me calling it a second recession since it never felt like we climbed out of the first

[Hydra]

29. It's hard to use terms for it

Because it's framed one way and the reality is quite different.

Framing: Irresponsible poor people borrowed us into a recession. The recession is over, but it may return.

Reality: The housing market was deliberately crashed, and any attempt to fix the problem other than by pouring treasury money on the people who did it is "unthinkable." The crash is an ongoing depression, but it can and will get worse.

Double dip? No...Double theft? Probably closer to the truth.

[mmonk]

4. No or they wouldn't be arguing with us.

[girl gone mad]

5. Maybe we can bounce some ideas around in SMW..

about how to survive in an austerity environment.

We're facing potentially massive contraction in the economy. It's going to hurt.

[MannyGoldstein]

8. SMW? MMT?

Sorry, I'm TLA-challenged! Can you translate?

Thanks!

[girl gone mad]

11. The stock market watch thread.

It's where all the cool kids hang out these days. :)

[MannyGoldstein]

15. And MMT? nt

[girl gone mad]

16. If you have time..

read this:

http://my.firedoglake.com/warrenmosler/2011/07/20/modern-monetary-theory-the-last-progressive-left-standing-2/

[MannyGoldstein]

33. Points to a 117-page treatise!

But it opens very nicely in my Nook Color, so I'll try...

[truedelphi]

10. Like you say - the government is good at creating and maintaining jobs

And those jobs create other jobs.

When you have people out there teaching, or fire fighting, doing socila work, doing project management, all those folks need to eat at the local diner for lunch. They can stop over at the hardware store on Saturday and buy some lumber and hammers and nails. The kids get new shoes and clthing over at the mall.

So their employment perpetuates a decent job environment.

And the hardware store owner and the local cafe owners can all make their house payments. And buy their kids shoes and clothes. And so on.

Austerity on the part of the government only ends up giving you more austerity.

[EFerrari]

12. That's the really startling thing: having lost the mid-terms over unemployment

Obama seems bent on making that situation worse.

[PurityOfEssence]

18. yes, but for good reason: so those who will never stop hating him will start to like him

He has a foolhardy belief in himself as a transcendent leader who can cross the divide. They've punked him so thoroughly when they were on the run that they know they can run roughshod over him now that they're in a momentary position of initiative.

It's beyond idiotic. It's not even badly played tiddly-winks, and certainly not this vaunted chess.

We will have to see him ruin everything and have to listen to the vituperations of his acolytes that we were the ones who screwed up everything.

What the fuck do we owe this man? To his extremist partisans, he's the greatest entity ever, sweeping in on a tsunami of achievements. He's not. He's an appeasing legislator with a simplistic and old-fashioned tactic of getting elected: being on both sides of anything he can't avoid in the first place. He is the ultimate inside straight: somehow we're to believe that every ill-defined "good" will come from him, regardless of the blase record. We're dared and hectored into believing this cult of personality fantasy, and the action of the glad-handing socializing will trample what little there is of the left and drag the country farther to the right.

It will all be our fault. We just didn't believe. We just didn't hope enough. We dared to differ.

[sad sally]

22. What is obvious in this line from the President's speech tonight?

"They work all day long, many of them scraping by, just to put food on the table. And when these Americans come home at night, bone-tired, and turn on the news, all they see is the same partisan three-ring circus here in Washington."

Dammit, does he realize he's the LEADER of this so-called circus??

[FiveGoodMen]

27. I think he's just in on it.

[nashville_brook]

14. Truly.

[TheKentuckian]

17. Controls set for the heart of the sun, the debate is speed not heading

[Stinky The Clown]

19. I agree, Manny

[fivepennies]

20. Most of us probably don't realize it.

I hate when people say that things can't get any worse because they can and often do in ways hardly anyone would ever predict. We're still in the early stages of our wasting disease without any idea of how to treat it ourselves. Even worse, most people seem to still be hoping that the ones who infected us will offer the cure.

[tnlefty]

21. K & R!

I've been thinking about the 99'ers and how nothing much was/is being done for them for about a year now. I can't imagine how that feels.

Unemployment increased here http://timesfreepress.com/news/2011/jul/22/jobless-rate-rises-in-tennessee-georgia/ and these are new numbers, not the 99'ers.

It's been getting harder and harder for us to save, so we haven't made contributions to local politicians or anything else for a few years. Fucked, yes.

[Octafish]

23. Thought about it since meeting President Aristide of Haiti, the first time he was deposed.

I met Jean Bertrand-Aristide after he was deposed by the generals in the early 90s. He came to metro Detroit and spoke before the Cranbrook Peace Foundation.

The newspaper I then worked for didn’t see any reason for sending me to cover Aristide’s speech. The editors weren’t BFEE, but the events on a Caribbean island just weren’t “local” enough for their budget. So, I went on my own time.

The Cranbrook people were happy to see me. They wanted, of course, as much coverage as possible. So, they invited me and the other interested reporter types to have at him for an hour before his address.

I’m ashamed to report, at an important event in two nation’s larger media market, only a couple of CBC radio reporters out of Windsor and one local Detroit TV crew bothered to show. I was the lone print guy. Anyway…

Aristide answered every question asked in English or French. He also told us about life in Haiti, where there were four doctors to care for 4 million people. Another interesting stat: One percent of the population own 99-percent of the property.

I asked Aristide what the United States could do to help him restore democracy to Haiti? Aristide said all Poppy Doc Bush had to do was pick up the phone, call the generals and say, “Get out,” and they would quit their coup and the first democratically elected leader of Haiti in 75 years would be returned to power. Bush didn't and Aristide wasn't until Clinton sent the US Marines, many years and many Haitian lives later.

The reason for Bush Senior's inaction? Aristide said he didn’t know the answer, but he suspected Bush’s politics favored the landowners over the masses. (“Sounds familiar,” I then thought and still think today.)

Aristide said that the generals were deep into the wholesale cocaine importation business. Now who would be their partner in all that? Besides the wealthy landowners, for whom the Generals worked, I mean.

Apart from link, mostly from an old post: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=1257891&mesg_id=1259743

[pinqy]

24. Discouraged haven't been included since 1967

Clinton didn't remove them, they weren't part of the definition of Unemployed. And even before 1967 their inclusion was sporadic and up to interviewer discretion.

Plus, adding in the discouraged raises the rate to 9.8%. Adding in all Marginally Attached (not a category before Clinton) raises it to 10.7% To get over 15% you have to add in "part time for economic reasons" which has NEVER been part of any official definition of unemployed (because they're employed).

[MannyGoldstein]

25. They were tracked before Clinton, but I believe that Clinton discounted them for the first time

from the "prime" unemployment number.

http://www.shadowstats.com/article/employment
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts

[pinqy]

26. You believe wrongly

Read carefully what Williams is saying, versus what he implies. Until 1967, Unemployed was

Unemployed persons comprise all persons who did not work at all during the survey week and were looking for work, regardless of whether or not they were eligible for unemployment insurance. Also included as unemployed are those who did not work at all and (a) were waiting to be called back to a job from which they had been laid off; or (b) were waiting to report to a new wage or salary job within 30 days (and were not in school during the survey week); or (c) would have been looking for work except that they were temporarily ill or believed no work was available in their line of work or in the community.

That's very subjective. Note too, that unemployed was just "looking for work" with no time limit. In 1967, it was changed to "made specific efforts to find employment some time during the prior 4 weeks" and the part of "no work available" was dropped as it's just to subjective and is a belief that may or may not reflect actual market conditions.

In 1976 the discouraged were counted again in the U-7 measurement "Total persons seeking full time jobs, plus one half of persons seeking part time jobs, plus one half of persons working part time for economic reasons, plus discouraged workers as a percent of the civilian labor force plus discouraged workers less one half of the part time labor force."

In 1994, new alternative measures U-1 to U-6 were introduced to replace the old U-1 to U-7 http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1995/10/art3full.pdf">Monthly Labor Review Article

These changes, not to the Unemployment definiton but to the alternative measures, added a 12 month period for discouraged. Basically, someone who looked for work sometime in the last year but stopped because they believed no job was available tells us a lot more than someone who last looked for work 5 years ago or who had never looked for work.

But a new category was also added: Marginally Attached. These include the discouraged and are those who looked in the last year but not the last month and are no longer looking for any reason at all.

Williams claims he's adding in just the discouraged who haven't looked in longer than a year (though he doesn't say how he derives that number), but he adds it on to the U-6 (Unemployed plus Marginally attached plus part time for economic reasons as a percent of the labor force plus marginally attached). This is not remotely comparable to any previous measurement.

You can go to http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/publications/employment/">the St. Louis Fed for back issues of Employment and Earnings and read for yourself the prior definitions of Unemployed (near the end of every issue).

[MannyGoldstein]

30. So, a question: bottom line - what would today's unemployment rate be if

calculated the way it was calculated in previous epochs?

I'm truly curious and you seem to be very knowledgeable.

Thanks.

[TBF]

28. Yes - and those are the things I think about when I watch this theatre called

"debt limit ceiling" play out. This has only become an issue because the leaders of both parties are on board with cutting the very programs that actually help poor people in this country. Mark my words, there will be a "deal" and it will include cuts and there is not a damned thing we can do about it. Except resist.

[socialist_n_TN]

31. Well Manny, ready to check out Marxist solutions yet?

:)

[MannyGoldstein]

32. Still not evolved enough yet

Things went pretty well under FDR, no?

[socialist_n_TN]

35. Because the Marxists were pushing for a system

overthrow and scared the SHIT out of the PTBs of the time. They caved because they feared they would lose it ALL.

Also, think about this. We're having to TRY to do it again in a little over 50 years (FDR to Reagan). Do you want to saddle your grandchildren or great grandchildren with having to fight this battle all over again. And that's of course, IF we win.

[socialist_n_TN]

36. And one other thing. Marxist solutions don't have to be

Stalinist ones. I would be willing to bet that some of your older relatives know something about the SWP. A NON Stalinist Marxist group.

[MannyGoldstein]

37. I get your drift, but

I don't know of any Marxist/SWP experiments that have worked out on a large scale - unless you consider European Socialism to fall under this categories. Kibbutzes were successful to a degree, but on a smaller scale and I'm not sure how Marxist those are these days.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, thanks.

[indurancevile]

38. not until the war. if you call that "pretty well," well, ok...

[MannyGoldstein]

39. FDR's first term was awesome; unemployment halved, and

GDP grew 8% per year.

Second term was a big problem when he turned into a deficit hawk; thank God no president will repeat that mistake!

[indurancevile]

40. i think "halved" is an exaggeration.

[MannyGoldstein]

41. I believe that those numbers are quite different than

The BLS statistics; I'll check in the AM.

[indurancevile]

42. i already did. in 1933 ue was 24.9%. in 1937 it was 14.3%. in 1938 it was 19%.

"halved" would be 12.45%.

ue stayed over 14% from 1931 to 1941.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/cwc/cm20030124ar03p1.htm

(halfway down the page)

[MannyGoldstein]

43. So unemployment dropped 43% in FDR's first term

Closer to half, than to one-third. That's still amazing, no?

Do you have a graph using the BLS numbers? Where do the numbers come from on the other graph that you show?

My understanding is that current unemployment, as measured the same way it was under FDR, is north of 15%.

Thanks!

[sweetapogee]

44. No Silver

No silver lining in these dark storm clouds

[piratefish08]

45. watch The Shock Doctrine. then watch Collapse.

you'll realize why all the "call your congressman RIGHT FUCKING NOW" buzz is just more noise.


the trajectory is set, everything is going according to plan.