Tag: Unemployment

Especially related to their elected Representatives handlers, the big money, the corporations, wall street, the banks, them at the top who have more then enough cash to control but not to invest in growth and the Countries economy for all!

This Cornyn makes a real good ‘brownshirt soldier’ for the collective, not for policy for this country but the power hungry commanders that give the orders, ask him a question you get the same answers in those very old and well practiced talking points.

Barack Obama, Memorial Day, 2011

In the long view, for the past twenty years an average of about 62% of the over-16 population had jobs, and now that percentage has apparently stabilized at around 58%, reflecting a loss of about 9,000,000 jobs for an over-16 population of 225,000,000 Americans.  

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Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Ed Schultz rails against the latest attack on the middles class, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s bill ending collective bargaining on health care for state employees and reducing their benefits.

This is an outrageous attack on state employees and unions that will hurt them for years. The bill will increase the costs of contributions to pension funds and limit access to health care at the same time it could increase subscriber costs by several hundred percent.  It removes the right to choose where they go for treatment unless they purchase an even more expensive plan. Most public employees have no collective bargaining rights except for health care, this bill ends that right.

It also freezes retirees cost of living adjustments (COLA) for the next 30 years. These raises have fluctuated and for the last two years have been 0%. Without some raises the elderly in New Jersey may well find themselves impoverished.

While the bill was opposed by many Democrats, it was the Democratic leadership, including Senate President Stephen Sweeney, Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver and Assemblyman Lou Greenwald, who sold out betrayed the fundamental Democratic values. Any Democrat that voted for this horrendous bill should be primaried by a real Democrat.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

The Republicans in the House have been so busy with the really important issue of finding new ways to restrict a woman’s right to choose that creating jobs were left to wait until now.

On day 141 since the GOP took control of the House Republicans finally released their jobs plan. It was a minor distraction from their laser-like focus on your uterus. Racel Maddow takes a look at waht they’re trying to do in the House and states like Louisiana, Georgia and Florida.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

GRAPH: An Average CEO At America’s Big Corporations Earns 200 Times The Salary Of A Navy SEAL

   In the wake of their successful assault on Osama Bin Laden’s hideout, ABC News did a short feature on the Navy Seals. The report tells us that the people who hold this highly demanding and dangerous get paid about $54,000 a year. It then adds that:

   “The base salary level [of Navy Seals] is comparable to the average annual salary for teachers in the U.S., which was $55,350 for the 2009-2010 school year, according to the Digest of Education Statistics.’ That is one possible comparison. There are other possible reference points. For example, the CEOs of Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan both pocket around $20 million a year.

GRAPH: Income Inequality In U.S. Worse Than Ivory Coast, Pakistan, Ethiopia

Exxon Makes $30.5 Billion, So GOP Votes Unanimously To Give Them Tax Breaks

The War on the Middle Class

Former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich shares is thoughts on the rise in pay for CEO’s and the rise in unemployment number

Robert Pollin is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and is a founding co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI).  His research centers on macroeconomics, conditions for low-wage workers in the U.S. and globally, the analysis of financial markets, and the economics of building a clean-energy economy in the U.S. His books include A Measure of Fairness: The Economics of Living Wages and Minimum Wages in the US and Contours of Descent: US Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity.

In February 2010 Pollin talked with Paul Jay of The Real News Network and during the interview outlined a careful combination of job-generating public investments, incentives to mobilize private investment, and policies that protect economically vulnerable populations that can create the economic, regulatory and policy environment that Obama could have already been using to create 18 million jobs and lower the unemployment rate to only 4 percent by 2012 – a proposal that has never been given any serious consideration by the Obama administration, policy makers or mainstream media.

Instead the Obama administration chose to continue listening to people like Ben Bernanke whom Obama had re-nominated as Federal Reserve Chairman in August 2009, and who, as the top bank regulator in the country, had played a central role in the creation of the ongoing economic crisis we are experiencing.

In another interview published today, Pollin again talks with Paul Jay discussing Obama’s speech the other day in which he made clear that he is more or less taking on the argument that the big problem is the debt and that austerity for the masses is his plan for reducing it, pointing out that Obama is accepting the notion of the debt being a bigger problem than a recession, that Obama’s premise is “wrong to begin with”, and that:

  I’ve been out of work for 96 weeks. That’s about four times the combined duration that I was previously unemployed in my life, starting when I graduated high school a quarter century ago.

 It’s been a hard pill to swallow. It undermines your sense of self-worth. It’s very humbling.

 You can’t go through something like this without taking a good, hard look at your life and figuring out a few things.

 For those of you who are unemployed now, or expect to be in the near future, you might be interested in what I’ve learned. Maybe you already know these things. If you do then perhaps you can share your insight with the rest of us.

 If you don’t know these things, then you should.

  The unemployment rate is dropping through the floor, and Republicans are taking credit for it. Don’t believe me? Then look at the latest employment report.

 The unemployment rate is suddenly sinking at the fastest pace in a half-century, falling to 9 percent from 9.8 percent in just two months – the most encouraging sign for the job market since the recession ended.

 That certainly sounds like the job market is going gangbusters to me.

  Now here’s the trick: only 36,000 jobs were created to get the unemployment rate to drop by 0.4%.

 Given those facts, I did a little math.

No doubt the Obama administration will tout today’s news that unemployment has fallen .4% to 9.0% as an indication the US economy is improving. It will be quite a back aching twist of logic in the face of poor job growth of only 36,000 jobs in January far below expectations. So what’s really happening? David Dayen at FDL explains the drop in the face of such dismal job growth:

How does this happen? Well, January is always a month when the establishment survey gets revised. New population estimates get incorporated into the survey, and the seasonal adjustment factors get updated. So there is a difference in the January survey of 600,000 less unemployed people; that number is down to 13.9 million according to the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics).

Does this mean that those people got a job in this month? Not really. The employment/ population ratio rose slightly to 58.4%, and the labor force participation rate declined to 64.2%, the lowest rate since the early 1980s. Basically, the drop in the top line unemployment rate is entirely due to changes in the total population estimates and other adjustments.

The U-6, which counts not only people without work seeking full-time employment (the more familiar U-3 rate), but also counts “marginally attached workers and those working part-time for economic reasons.” Note that some of these part-time workers counted as employed by U-3 could be working as little as an hour a week. And the “marginally attached workers” include those who have gotten discouraged and stopped looking, but still want to work, is currently 16.1%.

Another explanation of the job growth numbers is the horrendous weather across the country since late December:

January’s snowstorms probably had some effect on the anemic numbers, given that sectors like construction and transportation and warehousing shed jobs. The private sector added 50,000 jobs, so government layoffs, particularly at the state and local level, also restrained growth. Analysts had forecast an increase of about 145,000.

However, the real problem is what kind of jobs are being created, the number of people who have had to settle for part time employment as their job benefits run out and the number of jobless who are no longer counted in the numbers that are reported.

The other bad news is, this rate may not hold since austerity measures by the states and localities, facing huge budget deficits and no hope of relief from Congress, will most likely be laying off huge numbers of workers in attempts to salvage education and other vital programs.

President Barack Obama’s goal of driving the unemployment rate below 9 percent this year is threatened by state and local budget cuts that are likely to intensify as Federal stimulus money runs out.

Austerity measures may add as much as 0.25 percentage point to the unemployment rate this year, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics Inc.

“This could make the difference between ending 2011 with unemployment above or below 9 percent,” he said. “There’s no more serious drag on economic growth than the severe budget cutbacks at the state and local level.”

Cross Posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette