The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported a low unemployment rate for years. Behind these reports are articles about 50 percent of all young blacks in the inner city being unemployed and another story about 33 percent of all who lost their jobs after age 55 never finding another one. A local church bulletin carried this notation for a long time - " Success is reaching Social Security age before having to declare bankruptcy. The Consumer Bankruptcy Project found that the rate at which older Americans - those 65 years of age or older - filed for bankruptcy increased 213 percent between 1991 and 2001. The steepest increase in Chapter 7 filings occurred among people older than 55. In 2002, the percentage of Americans older than 45 who entered bankruptcy reached 39 percent up from 27 percent in 1994, the study found.
Another report says that 47 percent of all small business people maxed out their credit cards trying to keep their business afloat in an economic arena of unfair trade. Many eventually suffered usury rates at up to 35 percent interest. Apparently many bankruptcies are not based on just consumers overspending but basic survival. Today many who believed in the Free Enterprise system and the American Dream have to take a bankruptcy education course before filing for bankruptcy. This new law was passed by politicians with many being "double dippers" getting both a salary and a retirement income while in the private sector have to take this course after being in business for many years.
However, the most striking counter statistic is this. Only about 40 percent of all workers in the U.S. qualify for unemployment insurance. The other 60 percent are in some sort of economic limbo. They either do not work long enough at one job or make enough money in any given period to qualify. ( We also do not know how everything adds up with some people working up to four jobs at one time. It appears the BLS reports one job equals one worker. )
The Bureau of Labor Statistics stop using the unemployment offices in their reporting due to this. Which leaves us with this final conclusion. We do not need any conspiracy theories to know the unemployment reporting is a managed system and a single mother making only a $100 a month is considered employed. This would have been laughable during the 1970s. Then the laughter would have turned to something more serious and Congressional hearing would been called. Now in the current economic arena, nothing has been done to expose this terrible void.
The BSL finally admitted about five years ago that many are missing in action from any kind of reporting giving up searching for a job. They put this figure at just 4 million while the streets tells us there must be many more than just 4 million. Hurricane Katrina in News Orleans exposed a vast under class living in a silent depression. The same could apply across our land.
It is difficult to find out many many jobs are full time ones. From what we have studied only about 88 million jobs are full time which confirms there is an economic limbo out there with a labor force of at least double that number. Studying the way the unemployment rate is gathered is another story.
Reportedly, the BSL gets their results by a random statistical calling of 50,000 households a month.
The person answering the phone is asked if they looked for a job in the past month. If they say no, they are counted as employed. If a person says they are helping out in the family business or on the family farm without any pay, while they are looking for a regular job, they too are considered employed. We welcome anyone to tell us we are wrong and we wish we were wrong. The Get America Working Forum says 50 percent of U.S. human resources are not being used. The term underemployment has faded away.
Meanwhile the media keep telling us how good the economy is with our low unemployment rates. They tell us how well the stock market is doing too. However, once upon a time, companies stocks values would increase based on how many people companies could hire while still making a decent profit. Today the stock values are now based on people getting fired instead of hired. Some American companies now have only about 10 percent of their workforce in America. The stock values rise as more low paid foreign workers are hired. As consumers shop their jobs away at places like Walmart.
President Clinton confirmed Free Trade with the passing of NAFTA and GATT trade agreements. President Bush followed affirming it was nothing personal for it was only business in getting Fast Track passed which makes the Executive Branch the CEO of world trade. President Bush tells us the Mexican workers come to the United States to take jobs American will not do. He neglects to tell us that Mexico reports low unemployment rates too and apparently, there are many jobs in Mexico that Mexican workers will not take. The more than 4000 factories that were moved from the USA to Mexico evidently did not help the Mexican economy that much. It created a new working poor class in the USA and an impoverished working class in Mexico. Now many of these factories are moving out of Mexico to places like China because the Chinese will take jobs that Mexican workers will not do. The Globalist Free Traders want a world economy without borders. They say it will spread prosperity but in reality, they are spreading poverty because there will always be someone who will work for less for down to the levels of wage slave and even child labor.
Today, we can travel for miles across our cities and view the vacant factories and stores while the government tells us happy days are here again with the greeters at Walmart welcoming us to spend money of products made in far away places while our local value added economies have been chopped up into pieces as relics of another time. Our industrial might won World War 2 and restored local value added economies in Europe and Asia through the Marshall Plan. In the end, the USA lost World War 2 fifty years after the combat was over.
For more information, see Tapart News and Art that Talks.
See The House of Cards Economy ready to fall and If this is a good economy, I would hate to see a bad one at http://tapsearch.com/tapartnews/ See also http://tapsearch.com/globalization/ and http://tapsearch.com/clinton/
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