B. Traven and His Circle of Friends....click below

Our Unemployment Figures are a Hoax!
A temp agency hires minimum wage lackies to phone "Leave it to Beaver" households and ask if they "are employed" via a small telephone home survey!

By Reuters -- [abridged]

U.S. payrolls outside the farm sector fell by 43,000 in September, in contrast to the 5,000 gain private economists had predicted, the Labor Department said.

Although economic forecasters look to both the payrolls series and the unemployment rate as gauges of the job market and the overall economy, many put more weight on the signals offered by the payrolls survey.

``They are two different surveys. They measure two different things,'' BLS economist Howard Hayghe told Reuters.

``... any time you have payrolls falling, you're taking much needed wind out of the sails of the economic recovery,'' Yamarone said.

The payrolls data are based on a survey of real employers, while a commercial small poll of households is used to calculate the U.S. official unemployment rate!

BLS's Hayghe said that among other differences in the two surveys, the small commercial household survey includes self-employed people while the hard payroll series does not. He said that recently, the household survey has been greatly boosted by the number of teenage workers who have held on to their summer jobs, to the detriment of unemployed masses, rather than leaving the workforce -- as many use to do in the fall.

``This time of year the official telephone based household unemployment data are more subject to inaccurate seasonal swings,'' he said.

***

While European countries have maintained huge social-service programs and paid for them with high unemployment, the United States sharply curtailed its best-known welfare program in the mid-1990's.

But the current downturn is beginning to expose an uncomfortable truth: the American economy looks more like Europe's than most people ever imagined during the 1990's.

Millions of people, particularly men, dropped out of the labor force over the last decade, apparently unable to find work that pays near what they once earned in the blue-collar jobs that have since moved to lower-wage countries. Neither employed nor looking for work, they are not counted in the official U.S. jobless rate statistics, and a surprising and growing number of them instead depend on a government check to get by.

In the last two years, the official jobless rate has risen and an additional two million people appear to have dropped out of the labor force. Today, the real level of unemployment for men probably approaches the level of the recession-mired early 80's [close to 20% like in East Germany today].

Robert H. Topel, an economist at the University of Chicago and author of the most detailed recent study of the changes, says: "Employment opportunities for the less skilled are not what they used to be, so people just leave the labor force."

To pay their monthly bills, many of these missing workers have turned to disability insurance, a government program under Social Security that has become the centerpiece of the new American state. Since 1990, the number of people receiving disability pay has nearly doubled, to 5.4 million, and the government now spends far more on the program than it does for food stamps or unemployment insurance.

People who once may have worked through injuries or chronic pain, particularly those without a college education, are increasingly making a choice economic planners did not foresee. They have decided a government benefit, in the form of the roughly $800 in average monthly disability pay, is more attractive than any job.

They make up the biggest group that has left the labor force and help depress the unemployment rate.

The growth of the prison population � to about 2 million today, up from 1.1 million in 1990 and 500,000 in 1980 � has made another large group of people dependent on the government. [these prisoners and parolees are considered "employed" by our Labor Department].

Other labor-force dropouts are harder to count because the government does not support them. Some have moved in with friends or family, economists say. Still others, caring for children or retired, while their spouse works, are properly not counted as unemployed. [many turn to crime as the last hope of survival].

Some of the biggest beneficiaries [of the 1990s latch-key household syndrome] were women, who poured into the job market and whose wages crept closer to men's. Today, 63 million women hold a job, up almost 9 million from a decade ago, according to the Labor Department.

But even the economy of the late 90's failed to reverse the gradual overall increase in the number of men dropping out of the labor force. It also could not halt the long-term rise in the duration of unemployment for those people who kept looking for work and therefore appeared in the official "employed" statistics.

Many of these workers have now been out of the job market for long enough that they may never come back. If they do, they are almost certain to make much less than they once did, economists say.

"People used to drift in and out of the labor force," said Mr. Topel, whose co-authors were Chinhui Juhn at the University of Houston and Kevin M. Murphy at Chicago. "Now, leaving the labor force is more like death � you leave and you don't come back."

A clear sign of the labor market's quiet troubles has long been evident, though its significance was obscured by the falsified "official" jobless rate. While unemployment was supposedly falling over the last 20 years, the median hourly wage has grown only about 6 percent, after adjusting for inflation, according to the Labor Department.

Reflecting workers' meager bargaining power, the Census Bureau said last week that income for the typical household had fallen in 2001 for the second consecutive year. The poverty rate rose.

With scant reason to think that the economy will grow rapidly in the next couple of years, the labor market's woes present a serious challenge for government.

The country can cut benefits at a time when joblessness is rising and leave relatively unskilled workers to fend for themselves. Or it can maintain and expand a safety net that is already larger than many people had thought, possibly giving more discouraged workers reason to depend on a government check.

LAST week, a mostly Democratic group of senators introduced a bill that would extend unemployment benefits to the same length as in the recession of the early 90's. As for the disability program, even without any legislative changes its costs will rise 15 percent to $69 billion this year, according to the Social Security Administration. Containing those costs would require cracking down on people with bad backs or carpel-tunnel syndrome and few good job prospects.

The country now faces a series of difficult decisions balancing the ideals of a free market with those of a humane economic policy. Only a few years ago, compromises did not seem necessary.

For Germans, a Recession Is a Pretty Smooth Ride

By MARK LANDLER

FRANKFURT -- Sept. 29th, 2002

IT'S hard to think of a cushier place to live through a recession than Germany.

So what if the unemployment rate is stuck near 10 percent, economic growth is close to zero, and the budget deficit is expected to exceed limits set by the European Union? With Germany's welfare payments, unemployment compensation, not to mention union-negotiated job security, salaries and benefits, life, for many, is still pretty good.

The conventional wisdom here is that the German chancellor, Gerhard Schr�der, won re-election last weekend because he shifted people's attention from the country's deepening downturn to Iraq.

Germans react differently to hard times than Americans, in large part because a recession there feels very different from here.

In eastern Germany, where unemployment hovers near 20 percent, many people have not had a job since just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. While they are unhappy, they regard their predicament as a fact of life rather than a failure of public policy, to be remedied at the polls. Their living standard on unemployment is often better than it was with the make-work jobs they held during the Communist era.

Germans are also not as vulnerable to a crashing stock market as Americans. Only one German in five, about 13 million people, owns shares in individual companies. That doesn't approach the United States, where half of all adults own stock, either directly or through employer savings plans. The retirement plans of Germans are rarely tied to the market.

In western Germany, signs of penury are hard to find. The luxury carmaker BMW sold more than 180,000 cars here in the first eight months of this year, an 8 percent increase over last year. Sales of Porsches are up too.

Some economists have begun comparing Germany's economy, the world's third largest, to Japan's, the second largest. More than a decade since its bubble economy burst and fell into a gradual, seemingly inexorable decline, Japan still has not confronted its most basic weaknesses.

click here for timely SUDDEN NEWS FLASH!!

George W. Bush, chip off the old Bush Block, has one and only one thought in his Presidential head:

TO NUKE THE PLANET EARTH!

Germany Announces "Du Bist Kein BERLINER to Prez Gigi Bush

"FEMA Furor As Deadline Approaches
and Only 85 of 72,000
Displaced NYC Workers Given Any Kind of Aid!"

By ANGELINA CAPPIELLO of The New York Post

June 24, 2002 -- With only 100 days left to qualify for emergency aid, about 72,000 New Yorkers displaced by the Sept. 11 terror attacks are desperately waiting for the federal government to review their applications.

So far, only 3,000 out of 72,000 displaced workers and residents [nationally] have received assistance through FEMA's Mortgage and Rental Assistance program, advocates for the displaced said yesterday.

"I think this is such a national scandal. We have only 100 days for this to be fixed so that people who lost their jobs can survive," said Margaret McHugh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition.

In May, FEMA promised to review an additional 7,000 applications - which are only available in English - but got to only 600.

Of those, only 85 of our New Yorkers have been helped.

Even those who had been receiving aid, accused FEMA of bungling their cases and cutting them off without good reason.

Cherry Kwunyeun, who lost her job as a consultant in the World Financial Center and who lives north of Canal Street, said she received three months of assistance before FEMA deemed her ineligible and the checks stopped coming.

"They told me they thought I had moved and that my income was not effected," Kwunyeun said. "But none of that is true."

After several calls and letters written to FEMA, Kwunyeun said she has lost her confidence in the government agency.

Joining the advocates for aid were Democratic Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Nydia Velasquez, who also blasted FEMA's performance.

"To date, FEMA has failed to assist almost 100,000 New Yorkers because of long, red-taped bureaucratic roadblocks," said Maloney.

�GW Strangelove: How He Learned to Love the Bomb�

June 17, 2002

By DAVID E. SANGER, The New York Times

CRAWFORD, Tex., June 16 -

In Berlin last month, Mr. Bush stood in the Reichstag, whose burning in 1933 marked the beginning of Hitler's rise as Europe stood by, and warned his European allies that "wishful thinking" would not eliminate "the new world order totalitarian threat."

Leaders in Berlin, Paris and Beijing, in particular, have often warned against U.S. unilateralism. But Mr. Bush's new policy could amount to ultimate unilateralism, because it reserves the right to determine what constitutes a threat to American security and to act even if that threat is not judged imminent.

Mr. Biden's observation raises the question of how much political pressure - from Congress, from allies, and perhaps from the United Nations - could limit Mr. Bush's freedom to act unilaterally. The administration, not suprisingly, is arguing for the widest possible latitude, making the case that only it can define what poses a major and imminent threat to national security.

Others � worry that other nations could immediately follow the American lead and twist a policy of pre-emption to their advantage. Israel could use it to justify harder strikes into Palestinian territory; India could use it to pre-empt any Pakistani nuclear threat; China could use it to justify an attack on Taiwan.

Peter W. Galbraith a professor at the National War College said "If India adopted the American doctrine of pre-emption, it risks a nuclear war, with devastating consequences for the world. It's a tricky business."

PARASITIC RELATIONSHIPS: �Most Americans Missed the 90s Money Boat ... low-wage workers poured in worldwide with nary a care about green cards, from a cornucopia of impoverished deserts and jungles, and took all our low wage jobs, e.g. our only working class jobs�

By JANNY SCOTT, The New York Times

If the lingering question about the economic boom of the late 1990's remains how widely or narrowly were the winnings shared, the answer has long been expected to lie in the 2000 census data on income and poverty.

Amid the longest peacetime expansion ever, median income actually dropped and poverty rose in a handful of surprising places.

Now demographers and economists are using those data and others to piece together a picture of who made a killing, who merely got ahead and who fell behind, and to figure out why a few places widely assumed to have flourished now look as though they did not.

These things are certain. Nationwide, prosperity � landed disproportionately in the laps of a small fraction of Americans already exceptionally well off.

Inequality increased, as it has since the late 1970's. The fate of people in the middle seems less clear-cut. While the median household income rose in the Northwest, South, Midwest and Southwest, it dropped in parts of the New York metropolitan area, in some other Northeastern cities and in swaths of Southern California.

Many experts suspect immigration explains those patterns. As low-wage workers poured in from places like Central America in pursuit of a better life, the midpoint on the income spectrum in some places with large foreign-born populations inched down. At the same time, native-born people moved out � from the New York region to the Southeast, from Los Angeles to places like Nevada, some demographers say. Their departures helped lower the median in the places they left behind.

"You see how the arithmetic works?" asked Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution. "When you have a lot of people entering from the rest of the world, and many of them enter at the lower rungs of the wage distribution, then you can have a situation where the median income is declining."

But immigration is not the only possible explanation. Americans may tend to forget that the decade began with a recession; incomes for many people declined in the early 1990's and poverty increased.

In some places, like the New York region, the recovery did not begin until the second half of the decade. Only late in the 1990's did median income catch up and exceed the 1989 levels.

At the same time, the job base shifted in some places; lower-wage jobs replaced higher-wage ones. When defense spending shrank and aerospace-industry jobs in Southern California dwindled, what took root were jobs in the garment industry and service sector, said Bruce Katz, director of the Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy at Brookings.

There are those who have doubts about the data itself.

Eric Kober, director of housing, economic and infrastructure planning for the New York City Department of Planning, described as "extremely counterintuitive" the census's finding that the percentage of people in the civilian labor force and the percentage of people employed actually declined nationally and especially in New York City.

Eric Kober, director of housing, economic and infrastructure planning for the New York City Department of Planning, said that the census data for the 25 biggest U.S. cities showed that the percentage of people employed tended to drop in cities with large numbers of foreign-born residents, while the rate increased in affluent cities with lower percentages of foreign-born people, like Denver and Columbus, Ohio.

Mr. Kober suggests that the numbers are wrong. He traces the problem to what he says is a growing unwillingness by people in certain groups to answer the detailed income questions on the census long form. He contends that the data underestimate employment and income in places like Los Angeles and New York City, where median income dropped in four boroughs. "What we're seeing, there is a 50 percent decline in welfare nationally and yet a decline in the percentage of adults working," he said. "It can't be."

In the melting-pot places like California and New York City, Professor Frey sees a "barbell economy" with growth at the bottom and the top and a thinning out for the group in the middle

In many places with big increases, the gains went disproportionately to people in the top of the income spectrum, according to Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College who analyzed the census data for The New York Times. People at the top gained the most and people at the middle and bottom gained considerably less.

"Most of the prosperity has gone into the hands of the rich," said Professor Wolff of N.Y.U., citing his own findings from other data. "The top 2 percent did well in the 90's. And even among that group, it's the top 1 percent that made out like bandits."

He said the pattern was especially pronounced in New York State. Citing city and state statistics, he ascribes the pattern to two things: the high concentration of New Yorkers working in industries like finance that did especially well in the 1990's, and the abundance of others working in low-wage service-sector jobs catering to the first group's needs.

"For every investment banker, you have one or two delivery men to feed them during their long working hours," Professor Wolff said. "So, in a sense, the high-income group in the city also creates this low-income group. It's a sort of symbiotic relationship."

NOTE: Even our nation'a toy poodles, en masse, are suspicious of the real cause of the WTC Towers collapsing as they did. Literally thousands of structural engineers are "coming out" now, and declaring bravely that the jet fuel supernova flare resulting from the impact of a remote controlled jetliner on autopilot could only last seconds aflame, and then consume itself as quickly as an atomic blast or a Space Shuttle midair explosion [can't you all remember how many seconds it took for ALL the Shuttle jet fuel to burn up ... maybe four or five?], and that this impact fire was not enough to collapse any building at any time in all the recorded civil engineering history of our planet.

click here for PART TWO, of Unemployment and Joblessness in the USA ... spiraling EXPLOSIVE social unrest!!

PERMATEMPS: WHAT ARE THEY? click here now ...
click here now for PART TWO of TEMP SLAVERY IN AMERICA: UNEMPLOYMENT DEATH & DESTRUCTION

This dove is the only one from its forest that got away from "dove temp slavery". Look how beautifully it flies!!!

click here for PART TWO

click here for BUSH STANDS ERECT BEFORE CITADEL MILITARY CADETS

Some exceptional websites:

	Where Our Tax Money Really Goes: Military Satellites and Bombs
	Where Our Blood Really Goes: THE RED CROSS
	GIULIANI: Many of Yesteryear
	REMOTE MIND VIEWING by satellite and brain microimplants
	Ezra Pound's View of Economics
	The Philadelphia Experiment--Al Bielek
	HMOs: Homocide Maintenance Organizations
	Anti-War Titan: KUBRICK!!
	TEMP AGENCY SLAVERY
	TIME TRAVEL
	The PRISON RAP SHEET

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