Blue vs. red; D vs. R; Goldman Sachs' candidate of 2008 or Goldman Sachs' candidate of 2012; Koch-unfriendly or Koch-friendly; someone that never struggled in a low-level public service or physically dangerous job for crap wages vs. someone that never struggled in a low-level public service job or physically dangerous job for crap wages; and choosing to shoot our democracy in the stomach with a blue bullet or red bullet in the guise of an election. It's pretty tragic that looking at most politicians today merely confirms that those with the most honesty and brains want nothing to do with politics. And those who have no problem stepping on other Americans or getting rich by stepping on other Americans and think greatly of themselves for doing so fund the politicians or choose such phony "public service" as the means to get rich. Serve the public, go teach kids or sweep streets or do something else necessary, getting elected to become a multi-millionaire and to enjoy tens of millions of dollars of public-funded perks now and forever isn't noble and sure as Hell ain't sacrifice. What wonderful and varied choices we have nowadays.
Here's who will win: the people that "donate"/bribe politicians/puppets, the lobbyists that act like bagmen, and the politicians/whores that do their bidding. As for us, come on now, what do average citizens that want a thriving democracy in the USA 2012 have to do with the political process our Founding Fathers envisioned? Every election we must choose who gets to be rich through "public service" at our expense. Even the losers get rich through said service as they can appear endlessly bemoaning their political opponents for 2-4 years in friendly TV studios. USA 2012 - brought to you by [fill in the appropriate foreign or domestic corporate or other big money sponsors].
It's also false, statistically. If anyone was paying attention, GOP wants more guest workers, which clearly from the labor statistics we do not need. We need those jobs to go to U.S. citizens, the people already here.
Even with these disgraceful figures Obama will probably still be elected because so many are dependent on his hand outs and addicted to the mooching lifestyle.
The lower participation rates of the 1950's are due to less women in the workforce. Beyond the social issues here, the reality is today one needs two incomes to make it and that was not the case, even as late as the 1980's. After 1965 we started to get less discrimination which also increased the labor participation rates.
We are not misrepresenting this. I suggest you view our article on the breakdown of labor participation rates by age group, see our overview on when the 2010 Census data was incorporated, here. One cannot say the low labor participation rates are retirees when looking at the ages of 25-54, the prime working years.
The link to the time series for men is here and we see a decline.
For women, LPR, ages 25-54 is also a decline, the time series, NSA is here.
This is why immigration should be drastically reduced. We cannot provide enough jobs, tax breaks, health care, business grants, food stamps, rental assistance, language classes, etc. for all these immigrants. I read there are over 100000 a month coming in! Many commit comes which costs us the cost of jail, court appointed lawyers, police costs, like the Mexican hit and run driver who hit my daughters car, had no license, no insurance, was stoned, did over 2000 in damage and he'll probably never pay for it. It was his 3 rd offense, driving without a license/insurance! Please help lower immigration before its too late!
There is a hard ratio of the CPS to CES survey to get the number of jobs including self-employed. Using the CPS survey we get 110,990, assuming the same terrible conditions as outlined. The Household, or CPS survey does count self-employed, but there isn't a lot of resolution and these days "self-employed" often equates with being paid below minimum wage, denied benefits and retirement. i.e. contractor, freelancer, "day laborer" and so on.
We overview the data in this post, which has some maps on State and metro employment. If you follow the top link, you'll go to the BLS website which has more information, but you have to query their database as well as read their reports.
We always put at the first link the government site where you can find more information or the direct data from our overviews.
You don't seem to be counting the people who are leaving the labor force because they are retiring. Because the baby boomers are now beginning to reach retirement age, this is an important number.
Your graph that shows that labor force participation is at a record low is distorted because it begins at 1980. Labor force participation was lower before 1980, so it is not really at a record low.
Excellent article! Many points are described clearly to open so many blind eyes. However the many blood suckers will continue to rob unscathed.... I believe that people revolt is not too far away. extremist? May be, bu too many are struggling for those corrupted lies loving politicians tha you now till nov, then they do not you ny longer for many years. Poor America,,,, our Founders mus be turning over and over in their graves
Payrolls, employed levels are net, not gross. In other words, people lose jobs every day and every day jobs are gained. The BLS employment report is giving you the net monthly amount: (jobs gained - jobs lost). Jobs disappear, new ones are created that never existed before.
There is churn in employment, in other words, people lose jobs but get new ones so fast they never show up in the monthly numbers. So, while monthly initial claims may add up to 1.5 million, there is a large percentage of those initial claims will get jobs or will be denied unemployment in the first place.
Filings are simply filings, not benefits approval and the requirement to get UI is pretty ridiculous. Filings are people who filed asking for benefits. Employers these days try to deny benefits because they eventually will pay more in UI contributions so they lie and claim people were fired for good cause, which denies people benefits.
Anyway, it's not a simple addition of initial claims to get a correlation to jobs at all. Some of those people will have a new job tomorrow, some will be denied, some will stay on the UI rolls and some will run out of benefits and never get a job.
I wrote up an article earlier, initial claims and correlation to payrolls, where I show there is a correlation to jobs but it's not a direct just "add up" the numbers due to employee churn and hires, addition and subtraction. At best you have a scalar multiplier, this is a constant, like pi or e.
(that's a math joke but getting a jobs these days seems to be the result of the magic of the karmic universe)!
I actually show those as scalars in the above link. i.e.. 400k means blood letting stopped, 365k initial claims implies more job growth than population growth, but those are rough numbers. You have time in here, a time variable as well.
Scalar is constant, so a ratio, such as 1 in 7 or 1/4th, just a math definition in case no one is familiar with it. Means "stuck thumb in air, wet it, and gauged how hard the wind is blowing" and plenty of those types of scalars in economics.
I have an naive question. If I look at the U.S. Department of Labor 4-Week Moving Average of Initial Claims I see the following numbers for July and August (randomly chosen example months):
2012-07-07 377,000
2012-07-14 376,000
2012-07-21 368,250
2012-07-28 366,250 or 1,487,500 total new claims in July
2012-08-04 369,250
2012-08-11 364,500
2012-08-18 368,750
2012-08-25 371,000 or 1,473,500 total new claims in August
There was a net decrease in new claims from July to August of 14,000 fewer claims.
The BLS Employment data showing net changes is jobs per month says that July was up 141,000 (preliminary) jobs over June and August was up 96,000 (preliminary) jobs over July.
How does one reconcile jobless claims versus employment change? I would roughly equate new claims for unemployment with jobs lost. Using that definition, we lost something on the order of 1.5 million jobs in August. If we simultaneously added 96,000 new jobs, is it correct to say that we had a difference of 1,473,500 lost minus 96,000 gained, or a net loss of 1,377,500 jobs overall?
Using this approach since 2008 we had 110,233,250 new unemployment claims/jobs lost versus 4,359,000 jobs added (months of negative growth were ignored, since those losses would likely be reflected in unemployment claims).
The end result is a net loss of jobs 105,874,250 over the last four years. Where does my reasoning break down?
Didn't answer that before, I actually calculate out how many per month, one can do this based on the monthly statistics and will be writing up another article on other parts of the report.
The press quoting "150k" are just aping something else they read one day. I know most do not run the numbers themselves, although a few clearly do. Honestly, so many get these reports wrong, dead ass wrong, and that was the motivation to start writing overviews in the first place. It is just ridiculous as if the press cannot do high school math and the government does make a huge amount of data available to the public, as they should, at least on the Federal level.
Anyway, more is coming and yes, we are becoming a 3rd world nation, we have such income inequality the macro level statistics hide the reality of the median, which is why I do things like graph up actual wages by brackets from gov. data and so on, to show most of America is dead ass broke, in poverty, can barely keep a roof over their heads and many plain can't. Who can afford $800/mon rent when they are making $26k a year, even that's a real stretch. Places like California, New York, DC if you find $800/mon you're living with rats and cockroaches.
If you look at the complete economic destruction that's been going on inside the US, it really does look like we are now approaching Third World status. What modern nation can really have people paying $100,000 so that they can join 22% of their fellow citizens unemployed while their government shows it doesn't care about its own citizens and merely serves wealthy domestic and foreign interests? That's the very definition of a banana republic and oligarchy. And given the complete destruction of the rule of law, we are surely at banana republic status. What democratic nation actually allows people to incorporate and then break laws regarding price fixing commodities and interest rates, commit forgeries 10,000+ times, bribe officials, bankrupt towns and counties, illegally foreclose on veterans, commingle and steal billions of dollars, etc., etc. and then escape any justice because they pay for political campaigns and lobby law enforcement and regulators? Doesn't that sound like a banana republic? Or hack thousands of phones, bribe police internationally, compromise child murder investigations, but never get arrested and actually run a US-based media corporation, lobby law enforcement, and actually dictate America's immigration policy? Or view money launderers and terrorist financiers more highly than US citizens because those with the money dictate policies and enjoy a two-tiered legal system? Surely this is a banana republic.
One need only see how people who apparently don't understand supply and demand and labor economics (or are obviously lying about it to get more $ and political power) argue more free trade and unlimited immigration will create jobs? Bloomberg must've missed Econ. 101 despite his business "acumen." In what world could that happen? Even Alice in Wonderland makes more sense then that "logic." Maybe in a world where gravity means things float up and Newton's laws of physics are nonsense but talking points are gospel?
And for those who think this is madness and people who say these words are idiots who have never traveled the world or are Communists or Fascists or some other trite turn-of-phrase, read our postings, our analysis, on the countless blogs out there in 2012. Here and on other sites, do the people who say these words come off as unintelligent, poorly educated, or not well-traveled? Or do the people who spout the endless left vs. right, Dem vs. Republican, freemarket vs. Communism tripe actually sound more ridiculous in the face of facts, facts, and endless facts from around the world?
My candidate says Americans are lazy, I'm not lazy, but he says I am, so he must be right! People should work for free as interns to show their bosses they should pay them?! Karzai is good, he is rich despite being a "public servant" that oversees a heroin empire, but my candidate says he's good, so more $ to him at my fellow citizens' expense and let's keep defending his life and power! My candidate takes money from Goldman Sachs, and so does the other candidate, but my candidate says he's looking out for me and not bankers, so I trust him!
Anyway, the Founding Fathers are rolling over in their graves, and if there is a zombie apocalypse, I hope to God they rise up and have an all-you-can-eat buffet in corporate boardrooms and political halls of power. Sure, the brains won't be nourishing and are in all likelihood very diseased, but it's a start. Let Jefferson and Paine and Franklin feast and make our world a brighter place. When there's a lobbying group listed as a top donor to either candidate that represents the 99%, the long-term unemployed, the outsourced STEM grads and workers, recent grads that could cure AIDS but are now waiting tables or working as interns so teleprompter readers can call them lazy and uneducated, let us know. The rule of law is dead. Spin is endless. And Burundi's or Pakistan's legal system will soon seem more fair to the 99% than our own. This system was paid for by the corrupt and is perpetuated by them. We are locked out. Bring on the zombie Founding Fathers!
Our real problem is we continually get policies, bills demanded by lobbyists instead of policy, legislation putting the U.S. worker first and foremost in priority.
While the DNC convention had celebrities, awesome performers and soaring rhetorical speeches, the reality is Bill Clinton enacted a host of bills which royally screwed the U.S. worker. NAFTA, China PNTR, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, Commodity Futures Modernization Act to name a few.
Of course the GOP will never point that out because they love all of those bills and like even worse agendas which screw the U.S. worker.
The DNC convention looked like the "illegal alien convention". The reality is the U.S. simply does not need even more workers, there just isn't the demand and we need to employ the millions of Americans already here (and legal) who need a job. Instead of facing labor economic reality, we get B.S. and bogus spin trying to claim immigration increases jobs. It's pure bunk and that's from a historical statistical reality check. The economic fiction spun on immigration is like a blizzard of lie snow.
Just disgusting to see them claim they are for the middle class when they continually promote illegal immigrants, or more immigration instead of the U.S. worker. Immigration is simply not the U.S. middle class. When it comes to the people already citizens of the nation, they might as well say go screw yourself.
All of this aside, with the GOP one can guarantee we'll lose even more jobs with their agenda and policies. Talk about fiction, they are living on planet Zereton, completely out in the economic clueless cold and theoretical wilderness where nonsensical mathematics goes to sprout.
Grover Norquist should be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail. I have no Earthly idea how that guy has so much power, build on a garbage mountain of fiction and lies where he sits on his throne.
Infrastructure, direct jobs, a requirement those jobs go to U.S. citizens only is one good policy, but the problem is this administration won't make jobs conditional on citizenship or buy America provisions. We get all sorts of bull from some various clauses on treaties previously signed and my attitude towards that is to repeal them. They think China worries about their domestic sourcing provisions on the global stage, or even Canada? Hell no. I know they can enforce U.S. citizenship for those jobs though. So many DoD jobs require citizenship due to security, so there is no reason they cannot.
I was watching the blacks at the DNC convention, thrilled over their candidate, overjoyed, clearly going to come out in full force to vote him back in office. I was shaking my head, thinking about how they lost all of their economic gains since 1965 while Obama has been in office. Boy, some help they got back for all of that support, is what I was thinking. Bottom line, infrastructure jobs, by requiring U.S. citizenship, could really help the black community, they are the #1 group, based on ethnicity categories from the BLS, who really need some GODDAMN jobs!
This is as bad as it gets. There is no spin in a non-political world that can make this acceptable. Add this to the fact that millions of people literally cheer both candidates that have created this nightmare and we're screwed because they like blue and MSNBC is better, no, red is better and Fox News is awesome. No one at the top's responsible except when it comes to collecting votes and mega-paychecks, then they do it all.
We've seen the articles and reports here and elsewhere that 1/10 long-term unemployed EVER find a job. Are the unemployed and struggling Americans just supposed to die and vanish because I have yet to hear one word pissed off about that fact by anyone in power (1 in 10 EVER finds a job again, what?!). I know EP says 100,00 too keep up with population growth, I've read elsewhere at least 150,000. Anyway you slice it, nowhere near growth we need to cut unemployment without waiting 20 years (how many people die in the meantime from lost medical care, homelessness, strokes, stress induced heart attacks)? Nightmare! And the jobs we do get no one can retire on or support anyone on. Yes, cheering for both candidates because they speak in generalities that no one with a clue buys. We're screwed.
I'm not sure why you used two sources to explain one the 95% of related party trade. The NAICS Related-Party puts the trade deficit at 887.8 billion representing that related party trade accounts for about 78% of the trade deficit. The more telling factor from this is how globalization no longer creates US jobs. All the trade agreements we've set up to make American goods cheaper and to create a foundation for foreign policy has driven the American wage to a soon to be embarrassing level for the leader of the free world. Also, these statistics don't include support services like customer service, accounting, IT so the trade deficit is probably much higher. Eventually, we have to start thinking about not giving so much money for investors to sit on. We have to start thinking about what is happening to our consumer base so that investors actually have something to invest in. Maybe when the BRIC countries don't pan out we'll finally see some change.
Not quite sure if this is more of the same ECB big talk, followed by backtracking and denials by other key player (i.e., Germany) within 24 hours. Germany is headed towards a recession and has its own political, social, and economic issues to deal with besides apparently financing the rest of the Eurozone. Same story that props stocks up for a day or two, CNBC and Bloomberg go nuts because they can keep ignoring the fact that no real prosperity or hope when Western unemployment at 20%+ and China coming down hard, causing Australia (real estate and commodities bubbles) to also crash hard. Rest of Pacific not going to do well either. Japan still a mess.
What's interesting now is the desperation to keep the Euro going by the banksters in charge and those who profit from it. Same cast of characters at Central Banks, same alums of same Goldman.
If this is such a great deal, wouldn't the populations of these countries be going apesh*t in favor of it? Of course every chance they get they protest against these measures because it rams austerity down their throats and banksters can keep getting paid, and if payments aren't met, the banksters take state assets (like islands and buildings) and sell them for huge profits. The MSM never covers the suicides and other desperate acts in these places. General populace loses everytime, banksters behind Euro in Brussels, Frankfurt, London, NYC (and Goldman HQ) win everytime. Bulgaria just rejected joining the Euro nightmare a few days ago. Other countries repeatedly smack down these propositions for more money for other countries to save the Euro. Those countries are looking out for their people. The Euro is anti-democratic. When you have a small unelected elite alum from the same investment bank telling people to work harder in jobs that don't exist (again, the jobs are gone, people can't work harder for less if there are no jobs) in recessions + depressions or else the non-elected banksters will impose harsher lives on them, who would sign up for that? Investment bankers telling hundreds of millions of Europeans to work harder in jobs that don't exist to merely keep paying interest and to keep a currency afloat?
No, this money printing or whatever bond scheme it's called to save an anti-democratic system at the expense of the regular suffering folks will end badly. Hyperinflation with massive unemployment so that a few people can get richer and save face? History does repeat itself, and it's not that the people at the top are unaware, they just don't care as long as they get richer short-term.
Blue vs. red; D vs. R; Goldman Sachs' candidate of 2008 or Goldman Sachs' candidate of 2012; Koch-unfriendly or Koch-friendly; someone that never struggled in a low-level public service or physically dangerous job for crap wages vs. someone that never struggled in a low-level public service job or physically dangerous job for crap wages; and choosing to shoot our democracy in the stomach with a blue bullet or red bullet in the guise of an election. It's pretty tragic that looking at most politicians today merely confirms that those with the most honesty and brains want nothing to do with politics. And those who have no problem stepping on other Americans or getting rich by stepping on other Americans and think greatly of themselves for doing so fund the politicians or choose such phony "public service" as the means to get rich. Serve the public, go teach kids or sweep streets or do something else necessary, getting elected to become a multi-millionaire and to enjoy tens of millions of dollars of public-funded perks now and forever isn't noble and sure as Hell ain't sacrifice. What wonderful and varied choices we have nowadays.
Here's who will win: the people that "donate"/bribe politicians/puppets, the lobbyists that act like bagmen, and the politicians/whores that do their bidding. As for us, come on now, what do average citizens that want a thriving democracy in the USA 2012 have to do with the political process our Founding Fathers envisioned? Every election we must choose who gets to be rich through "public service" at our expense. Even the losers get rich through said service as they can appear endlessly bemoaning their political opponents for 2-4 years in friendly TV studios. USA 2012 - brought to you by [fill in the appropriate foreign or domestic corporate or other big money sponsors].
It's also false, statistically. If anyone was paying attention, GOP wants more guest workers, which clearly from the labor statistics we do not need. We need those jobs to go to U.S. citizens, the people already here.
Even with these disgraceful figures Obama will probably still be elected because so many are dependent on his hand outs and addicted to the mooching lifestyle.
The lower participation rates of the 1950's are due to less women in the workforce. Beyond the social issues here, the reality is today one needs two incomes to make it and that was not the case, even as late as the 1980's. After 1965 we started to get less discrimination which also increased the labor participation rates.
We are not misrepresenting this. I suggest you view our article on the breakdown of labor participation rates by age group, see our overview on when the 2010 Census data was incorporated, here. One cannot say the low labor participation rates are retirees when looking at the ages of 25-54, the prime working years.
The link to the time series for men is here and we see a decline.
For women, LPR, ages 25-54 is also a decline, the time series, NSA is here.
This is why immigration should be drastically reduced. We cannot provide enough jobs, tax breaks, health care, business grants, food stamps, rental assistance, language classes, etc. for all these immigrants. I read there are over 100000 a month coming in! Many commit comes which costs us the cost of jail, court appointed lawyers, police costs, like the Mexican hit and run driver who hit my daughters car, had no license, no insurance, was stoned, did over 2000 in damage and he'll probably never pay for it. It was his 3 rd offense, driving without a license/insurance! Please help lower immigration before its too late!
There is a hard ratio of the CPS to CES survey to get the number of jobs including self-employed. Using the CPS survey we get 110,990, assuming the same terrible conditions as outlined. The Household, or CPS survey does count self-employed, but there isn't a lot of resolution and these days "self-employed" often equates with being paid below minimum wage, denied benefits and retirement. i.e. contractor, freelancer, "day laborer" and so on.
We overview the data in this post, which has some maps on State and metro employment. If you follow the top link, you'll go to the BLS website which has more information, but you have to query their database as well as read their reports.
We always put at the first link the government site where you can find more information or the direct data from our overviews.
You don't seem to be counting the people who are leaving the labor force because they are retiring. Because the baby boomers are now beginning to reach retirement age, this is an important number.
Your graph that shows that labor force participation is at a record low is distorted because it begins at 1980. Labor force participation was lower before 1980, so it is not really at a record low.
Excellent article! Many points are described clearly to open so many blind eyes. However the many blood suckers will continue to rob unscathed.... I believe that people revolt is not too far away. extremist? May be, bu too many are struggling for those corrupted lies loving politicians tha you now till nov, then they do not you ny longer for many years. Poor America,,,, our Founders mus be turning over and over in their graves
Thank you for writing this. Do you know if there
is a geographical breakdown of where the unemployed
are located?
How does this count self-employed? It seems that many in the work force have switched to being independent contractors. They don't file W-2s.
Payrolls, employed levels are net, not gross. In other words, people lose jobs every day and every day jobs are gained. The BLS employment report is giving you the net monthly amount: (jobs gained - jobs lost). Jobs disappear, new ones are created that never existed before.
There is churn in employment, in other words, people lose jobs but get new ones so fast they never show up in the monthly numbers. So, while monthly initial claims may add up to 1.5 million, there is a large percentage of those initial claims will get jobs or will be denied unemployment in the first place.
Filings are simply filings, not benefits approval and the requirement to get UI is pretty ridiculous. Filings are people who filed asking for benefits. Employers these days try to deny benefits because they eventually will pay more in UI contributions so they lie and claim people were fired for good cause, which denies people benefits.
Anyway, it's not a simple addition of initial claims to get a correlation to jobs at all. Some of those people will have a new job tomorrow, some will be denied, some will stay on the UI rolls and some will run out of benefits and never get a job.
I wrote up an article earlier, initial claims and correlation to payrolls, where I show there is a correlation to jobs but it's not a direct just "add up" the numbers due to employee churn and hires, addition and subtraction. At best you have a scalar multiplier, this is a constant, like pi or e.
(that's a math joke but getting a jobs these days seems to be the result of the magic of the karmic universe)!
I actually show those as scalars in the above link. i.e.. 400k means blood letting stopped, 365k initial claims implies more job growth than population growth, but those are rough numbers. You have time in here, a time variable as well.
Scalar is constant, so a ratio, such as 1 in 7 or 1/4th, just a math definition in case no one is familiar with it. Means "stuck thumb in air, wet it, and gauged how hard the wind is blowing" and plenty of those types of scalars in economics.
I have an naive question. If I look at the U.S. Department of Labor 4-Week Moving Average of Initial Claims I see the following numbers for July and August (randomly chosen example months):
2012-07-07 377,000
2012-07-14 376,000
2012-07-21 368,250
2012-07-28 366,250 or 1,487,500 total new claims in July
2012-08-04 369,250
2012-08-11 364,500
2012-08-18 368,750
2012-08-25 371,000 or 1,473,500 total new claims in August
There was a net decrease in new claims from July to August of 14,000 fewer claims.
The BLS Employment data showing net changes is jobs per month says that July was up 141,000 (preliminary) jobs over June and August was up 96,000 (preliminary) jobs over July.
How does one reconcile jobless claims versus employment change? I would roughly equate new claims for unemployment with jobs lost. Using that definition, we lost something on the order of 1.5 million jobs in August. If we simultaneously added 96,000 new jobs, is it correct to say that we had a difference of 1,473,500 lost minus 96,000 gained, or a net loss of 1,377,500 jobs overall?
Using this approach since 2008 we had 110,233,250 new unemployment claims/jobs lost versus 4,359,000 jobs added (months of negative growth were ignored, since those losses would likely be reflected in unemployment claims).
The end result is a net loss of jobs 105,874,250 over the last four years. Where does my reasoning break down?
Confused
Didn't answer that before, I actually calculate out how many per month, one can do this based on the monthly statistics and will be writing up another article on other parts of the report.
The press quoting "150k" are just aping something else they read one day. I know most do not run the numbers themselves, although a few clearly do. Honestly, so many get these reports wrong, dead ass wrong, and that was the motivation to start writing overviews in the first place. It is just ridiculous as if the press cannot do high school math and the government does make a huge amount of data available to the public, as they should, at least on the Federal level.
Anyway, more is coming and yes, we are becoming a 3rd world nation, we have such income inequality the macro level statistics hide the reality of the median, which is why I do things like graph up actual wages by brackets from gov. data and so on, to show most of America is dead ass broke, in poverty, can barely keep a roof over their heads and many plain can't. Who can afford $800/mon rent when they are making $26k a year, even that's a real stretch. Places like California, New York, DC if you find $800/mon you're living with rats and cockroaches.
If you look at the complete economic destruction that's been going on inside the US, it really does look like we are now approaching Third World status. What modern nation can really have people paying $100,000 so that they can join 22% of their fellow citizens unemployed while their government shows it doesn't care about its own citizens and merely serves wealthy domestic and foreign interests? That's the very definition of a banana republic and oligarchy. And given the complete destruction of the rule of law, we are surely at banana republic status. What democratic nation actually allows people to incorporate and then break laws regarding price fixing commodities and interest rates, commit forgeries 10,000+ times, bribe officials, bankrupt towns and counties, illegally foreclose on veterans, commingle and steal billions of dollars, etc., etc. and then escape any justice because they pay for political campaigns and lobby law enforcement and regulators? Doesn't that sound like a banana republic? Or hack thousands of phones, bribe police internationally, compromise child murder investigations, but never get arrested and actually run a US-based media corporation, lobby law enforcement, and actually dictate America's immigration policy? Or view money launderers and terrorist financiers more highly than US citizens because those with the money dictate policies and enjoy a two-tiered legal system? Surely this is a banana republic.
One need only see how people who apparently don't understand supply and demand and labor economics (or are obviously lying about it to get more $ and political power) argue more free trade and unlimited immigration will create jobs? Bloomberg must've missed Econ. 101 despite his business "acumen." In what world could that happen? Even Alice in Wonderland makes more sense then that "logic." Maybe in a world where gravity means things float up and Newton's laws of physics are nonsense but talking points are gospel?
And for those who think this is madness and people who say these words are idiots who have never traveled the world or are Communists or Fascists or some other trite turn-of-phrase, read our postings, our analysis, on the countless blogs out there in 2012. Here and on other sites, do the people who say these words come off as unintelligent, poorly educated, or not well-traveled? Or do the people who spout the endless left vs. right, Dem vs. Republican, freemarket vs. Communism tripe actually sound more ridiculous in the face of facts, facts, and endless facts from around the world?
My candidate says Americans are lazy, I'm not lazy, but he says I am, so he must be right! People should work for free as interns to show their bosses they should pay them?! Karzai is good, he is rich despite being a "public servant" that oversees a heroin empire, but my candidate says he's good, so more $ to him at my fellow citizens' expense and let's keep defending his life and power! My candidate takes money from Goldman Sachs, and so does the other candidate, but my candidate says he's looking out for me and not bankers, so I trust him!
Anyway, the Founding Fathers are rolling over in their graves, and if there is a zombie apocalypse, I hope to God they rise up and have an all-you-can-eat buffet in corporate boardrooms and political halls of power. Sure, the brains won't be nourishing and are in all likelihood very diseased, but it's a start. Let Jefferson and Paine and Franklin feast and make our world a brighter place. When there's a lobbying group listed as a top donor to either candidate that represents the 99%, the long-term unemployed, the outsourced STEM grads and workers, recent grads that could cure AIDS but are now waiting tables or working as interns so teleprompter readers can call them lazy and uneducated, let us know. The rule of law is dead. Spin is endless. And Burundi's or Pakistan's legal system will soon seem more fair to the 99% than our own. This system was paid for by the corrupt and is perpetuated by them. We are locked out. Bring on the zombie Founding Fathers!
Our real problem is we continually get policies, bills demanded by lobbyists instead of policy, legislation putting the U.S. worker first and foremost in priority.
While the DNC convention had celebrities, awesome performers and soaring rhetorical speeches, the reality is Bill Clinton enacted a host of bills which royally screwed the U.S. worker. NAFTA, China PNTR, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, Commodity Futures Modernization Act to name a few.
Of course the GOP will never point that out because they love all of those bills and like even worse agendas which screw the U.S. worker.
The DNC convention looked like the "illegal alien convention". The reality is the U.S. simply does not need even more workers, there just isn't the demand and we need to employ the millions of Americans already here (and legal) who need a job. Instead of facing labor economic reality, we get B.S. and bogus spin trying to claim immigration increases jobs. It's pure bunk and that's from a historical statistical reality check. The economic fiction spun on immigration is like a blizzard of lie snow.
Just disgusting to see them claim they are for the middle class when they continually promote illegal immigrants, or more immigration instead of the U.S. worker. Immigration is simply not the U.S. middle class. When it comes to the people already citizens of the nation, they might as well say go screw yourself.
All of this aside, with the GOP one can guarantee we'll lose even more jobs with their agenda and policies. Talk about fiction, they are living on planet Zereton, completely out in the economic clueless cold and theoretical wilderness where nonsensical mathematics goes to sprout.
Grover Norquist should be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail. I have no Earthly idea how that guy has so much power, build on a garbage mountain of fiction and lies where he sits on his throne.
Infrastructure, direct jobs, a requirement those jobs go to U.S. citizens only is one good policy, but the problem is this administration won't make jobs conditional on citizenship or buy America provisions. We get all sorts of bull from some various clauses on treaties previously signed and my attitude towards that is to repeal them. They think China worries about their domestic sourcing provisions on the global stage, or even Canada? Hell no. I know they can enforce U.S. citizenship for those jobs though. So many DoD jobs require citizenship due to security, so there is no reason they cannot.
I was watching the blacks at the DNC convention, thrilled over their candidate, overjoyed, clearly going to come out in full force to vote him back in office. I was shaking my head, thinking about how they lost all of their economic gains since 1965 while Obama has been in office. Boy, some help they got back for all of that support, is what I was thinking. Bottom line, infrastructure jobs, by requiring U.S. citizenship, could really help the black community, they are the #1 group, based on ethnicity categories from the BLS, who really need some GODDAMN jobs!
This is as bad as it gets. There is no spin in a non-political world that can make this acceptable. Add this to the fact that millions of people literally cheer both candidates that have created this nightmare and we're screwed because they like blue and MSNBC is better, no, red is better and Fox News is awesome. No one at the top's responsible except when it comes to collecting votes and mega-paychecks, then they do it all.
We've seen the articles and reports here and elsewhere that 1/10 long-term unemployed EVER find a job. Are the unemployed and struggling Americans just supposed to die and vanish because I have yet to hear one word pissed off about that fact by anyone in power (1 in 10 EVER finds a job again, what?!). I know EP says 100,00 too keep up with population growth, I've read elsewhere at least 150,000. Anyway you slice it, nowhere near growth we need to cut unemployment without waiting 20 years (how many people die in the meantime from lost medical care, homelessness, strokes, stress induced heart attacks)? Nightmare! And the jobs we do get no one can retire on or support anyone on. Yes, cheering for both candidates because they speak in generalities that no one with a clue buys. We're screwed.
I'm not sure why you used two sources to explain one the 95% of related party trade. The NAICS Related-Party puts the trade deficit at 887.8 billion representing that related party trade accounts for about 78% of the trade deficit. The more telling factor from this is how globalization no longer creates US jobs. All the trade agreements we've set up to make American goods cheaper and to create a foundation for foreign policy has driven the American wage to a soon to be embarrassing level for the leader of the free world. Also, these statistics don't include support services like customer service, accounting, IT so the trade deficit is probably much higher. Eventually, we have to start thinking about not giving so much money for investors to sit on. We have to start thinking about what is happening to our consumer base so that investors actually have something to invest in. Maybe when the BRIC countries don't pan out we'll finally see some change.
Samsung already pay the money in the form of cent by track,,,,,
Not quite sure if this is more of the same ECB big talk, followed by backtracking and denials by other key player (i.e., Germany) within 24 hours. Germany is headed towards a recession and has its own political, social, and economic issues to deal with besides apparently financing the rest of the Eurozone. Same story that props stocks up for a day or two, CNBC and Bloomberg go nuts because they can keep ignoring the fact that no real prosperity or hope when Western unemployment at 20%+ and China coming down hard, causing Australia (real estate and commodities bubbles) to also crash hard. Rest of Pacific not going to do well either. Japan still a mess.
What's interesting now is the desperation to keep the Euro going by the banksters in charge and those who profit from it. Same cast of characters at Central Banks, same alums of same Goldman.
If this is such a great deal, wouldn't the populations of these countries be going apesh*t in favor of it? Of course every chance they get they protest against these measures because it rams austerity down their throats and banksters can keep getting paid, and if payments aren't met, the banksters take state assets (like islands and buildings) and sell them for huge profits. The MSM never covers the suicides and other desperate acts in these places. General populace loses everytime, banksters behind Euro in Brussels, Frankfurt, London, NYC (and Goldman HQ) win everytime. Bulgaria just rejected joining the Euro nightmare a few days ago. Other countries repeatedly smack down these propositions for more money for other countries to save the Euro. Those countries are looking out for their people. The Euro is anti-democratic. When you have a small unelected elite alum from the same investment bank telling people to work harder in jobs that don't exist (again, the jobs are gone, people can't work harder for less if there are no jobs) in recessions + depressions or else the non-elected banksters will impose harsher lives on them, who would sign up for that? Investment bankers telling hundreds of millions of Europeans to work harder in jobs that don't exist to merely keep paying interest and to keep a currency afloat?
No, this money printing or whatever bond scheme it's called to save an anti-democratic system at the expense of the regular suffering folks will end badly. Hyperinflation with massive unemployment so that a few people can get richer and save face? History does repeat itself, and it's not that the people at the top are unaware, they just don't care as long as they get richer short-term.
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