The US Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported a low unemployment rate for years. Behind these reports are stories about the 50 percent of all inner-city black youth who are unemployed and another story about the 33 percent of all who lost their jobs after age 55 and never found another. A local church bulletin carried this entry for a long time: “Success is getting to Social Security age before you have to file for bankruptcy. The Consumer Bankruptcy Project found that the rate at which older Americans, 65 and older, filing for bankruptcy rose 213 percent between 1991 and 2001. The steepest increase in Chapter 7 filings occurred among people over 55. In 2002, the percentage of Americans over 45 years filing for bankruptcy rose to 39 percent from 27 percent in 1994, the study found.
Another report says that 47 percent of all small business owners maxed out their credit cards trying to keep their business afloat in an economic arena of unfair trade. Many eventually suffered usurious rates of up to 35 percent interest. Apparently, many bankruptcies are not just based on excessive spending by consumers, but on 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, many of whom are “double workers” earning both a salary and retirement income, while in the private sector they 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 US qualify for unemployment insurance. The other 60 percent is in a kind of economic limbo. Either they don’t work long enough at a job or earn enough money in a given period to qualify. (We also don’t know how it all adds up with some people working up to four jobs at once. The BLS seems to report that one job equals one worker.)
Because of this, the Bureau of Labor Statistics stopped using unemployment offices in their reports. Which leaves us with this final conclusion. We don’t need conspiracy theories to know that unemployment reporting is a managed system and a single mom making just $100 a month is considered employed. This would have been laughable during the 1970s. Then the laughter would have turned into something more serious and a congressional hearing would have been called. Now, in the current economic scenario, nothing has been done to expose this terrible vacuum.
The BSL finally admitted about five years ago that many are missing in action for any kind of report that stops them from looking for work. They put this figure at just 4 million while the streets tell us there must be many more than just 4 million. Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans exposed a vast underclass living in a silent depression. The same could apply across our land.
It’s hard to find out that many jobs are full time. From what we have studied, only about 88 million jobs are full-time, confirming that there is an economic limbo with a workforce of at least twice that number. Studying the way in which the unemployment rate is collected is another story.
The BSL reportedly obtains its results by random statistical calling of 50,000 households per month.
The person who answers the phone is asked if they have looked for a job in the last month. If they say no, they are counted as employees. If a person says that she is helping out in the family business or on the family farm without any pay, while she is looking for a regular job, she is also considered employed. We welcome anyone who tells us we are wrong and wish we were wrong. The Get America Working Forum says that 50 percent of US human resources are not being used. The term underemployment has vanished.
Meanwhile, the media keeps telling us how well the economy is doing with our low unemployment rates. They also tell us how well the stock market is doing. However, once upon a time, company stock values would rise based on how many people the companies could hire while still making a decent profit. Today, stock values are now based on people being fired rather than hired. Some American companies now have only about 10 percent of their workforce in the United States. Stock values rise as more low-paid foreign workers are hired. While consumers shop for their jobs at places like Walmart.
President Clinton confirmed free trade with the approval of the NAFTA and GATT trade agreements. President Bush went on to state that this was nothing personal as it was just business to pass Fast Track, making the Executive Branch the CEO of world trade. President Bush tells us that Mexican workers come to the United States to take jobs that Americans won’t do. He neglects to tell us that Mexico also reports low unemployment rates, and apparently, there are many jobs in Mexico that Mexican workers won’t take. The more than 4,000 factories that moved from the US to Mexico evidently did not help the Mexican economy much. He created a new poor working class in the United States 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 won’t. 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 down to the levels of wage slavery and even child labor.
Today, we can travel for miles through our cities and see the empty factories and stores as the government tells us the happy days are here again with Walmart greeters inviting us to spend money on products made far away as our local economies add worth. they have been hacked to pieces like relics of another time. Our industrial might won World War II and restored local value-added economies in Europe and Asia through the Marshall Plan. In the end, the US lost World War II fifty years after the fighting ended.
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