Truth Has No Agenda (GB)

Archive for November 12, 2009

Shocking numbers: Real unemployment tops 22%

FROM JEROME CORSI’S RED ALERT

Exclusive Report from Dr. Corsi and WND

Obama figures deliberately understate economic downturn


Posted: November 09, 2009
1:16 pm Eastern © 2009 WorldNetDaily

Editor’s Note: The following report is excerpted from Jerome Corsi’s Red Alert, the premium online newsletter published by the current No. 1 best-selling author, WND staff writer and columnist. Red Alert subscriptions are $99 a year or $9.95 per month for credit card users. Annual subscribers will receive a free autographed copy of “The Late Great USA,” a book about the careful deceptions of a powerful elite who want to undermine our nation’s sovereignty.

The true rate of unemployment for October 2009 may be 22.1 percent, not the 10.2 percent reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Jerome Corsi’s Red Alert reports.

Unemployment at 22.1 percent, if accurate, would be at numbers not seen since peak unemployment during the 1973 to 1975 recession.

Economist John Williams, publisher of ShadowStats.com, estimates that the peak of unemployment in nonfarm unemployment in the Great Depression of the 1930s would, by his methodology, have registered at 34 to 35 percent in 1933.

So, how does the Obama administration get away with reporting the lower unemployment percentage?

Corsi explained that the Clinton administration changed the way BLS calculates unemployment statistics by excluding “discouraged workers,” those who had given up looking for a job because there were no jobs to be found.

Since the Clinton years, discouraged workers looking for a job for more than one year are not counted as “unemployed” because they are considered to have dropped out of the labor force.

The BLS still includes in “U6 Unemployment” calculations short-term discouraged workers, as long as they have been looking for a job less than one year.

This definition permits the Obama administration to under-report “U3 unemployment” at 10.2 percent when real unemployment as calculated before the Clinton administration redefinition is twice that amount, Red Alert contends, and U6 unemployment lies somewhere in between.

These differences are illustrated in the following chart that Williams produces in the “Alternative Data” section of his website named “Shadow Government Statistics: Analysis Behind and Beyond Government Economic Reporting.”


(Illustration by shadowstats.com)

“The convenience is that by reporting unemployment at 10.2 percent instead of at 22.1 percent, the Obama administration can clearly continue advancing the argument the U.S. economy is in recovery and the recession is over, even if the truth belies those claims,” Corsi wrote.

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The Real Axis of Evil: Washington, the Fed, and Wall Street

From BigGovernment.com

by Christopher Grey

As Washington extends its reach farther into our lives and limits our freedoms, the Fed destroys the value of the dollar and our savings, and Wall Street continues to make billions of dollars using taxpayer money without creating any sustainable growth for the economy, Americans should begin to ask ourselves who our enemies really are. Sure, Iran, Syria, and North Korea are evil. I would love to see their regimes destroyed, but they haven’t really done anything to interfere with my life as far as I know. On the other hand, I can identify exactly the many ways that Washington, the Fed, and Wall Street are destroying our freedoms and our economy and stealing our and our children’s future.

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Let’s begin with Washington. They want to take a broken health care system and make it worse by further injecting government. They’re going to raise taxes even though people are struggling with the worst economy in decades. They’ve started a job-killing trade war with China–our largest trading partner and our largest lender–to pacify Big Labor. They’ve given hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to insolvent and poorly managed, but politically connected, Wall Street banks and Detroit car companies in the name of saving our economy. We’ve continued to lose millions of jobs anyway. They’ve spent additional hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on a stimulus that was supposed to create jobs. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner says there will be jobs some day, but should we really believe him? This is the same guy who thought subprime lending wasn’t a problem. The same guy who thought it made sense to give billions to lender CIT. How did that work? Oh, right, they’re bankrupt now.

Small businesses create most of the new jobs in our economy, but the agenda in Washington has been hostile to small businesses, with increased regulations and threats of new taxes. They have provided no incentives for small businesses to invest and grow. The banks and Wall Street, despite all the taxpayer bailout money, are not lending to small businesses. They’re hoarding capital for themselves or using it to speculate on commodities and short the dollar. Private equity capital is scared to invest because the government has kept asset values inflated to protect their friends at the banks. No wonder we still don’t have any new jobs even after opening the federal spigot to banks, auto companies and various recipients of ’stimulus’ dollars. We and our children will be paying that money back to the Chinese for decades, and we have nothing to show for it. Some people might call that indentured servitude. At a minimum, it is taxation without real representation because the politicians in Washington are obviously working for the lobbyists and not the voters.

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