When it Comes to Jobless Figures Dishonesty and Propaganda Reign | NationofChange

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Once again we got a cheery re­port from most of the media about em­ploy­ers hir­ing, al­beit “not enough,” and about the job­less rate falling, al­beit “it’s still too high.”

The prox­i­mate cause of this lat­est round of pro­pa­ganda from the cor­po­rate media is the lat­est monthly job­less fig­ure re­ported out by the Bu­reau of Labor Sta­tis­tics, which said that em­ploy­ers had added 80,000 net new jobs (ac­tu­ally they found that pri­vate sec­tor em­ploy­ers had added 104,000 jobs while pub­lic agency em­ploy­ers had pink-slipped 24,000 peo­ple), and that the of­fi­cial un­em­ploy­ment rate was 9.0 per­cent, just a notch lower than last month’s 9.1 per­cent fig­ure.

The As­so­ci­ated Press, which is now the de facto na­tional desk for the evis­cer­ated na­tional news­me­dia, trum­peted these ane­mic re­sults with a head­line read­ing: Em­ploy­ers add 80K jobs, Rate dips to 9.0 pct. This was fol­lowed by an up­beat lead, cred­ited to AP Eco­nom­ics Writer Christo­pher S. Ru­gaber (who surely should know bet­ter if he’s an eco­nom­ics spe­cial­ist) that read: “WASH­ING­TON (AP) — The U.S. jobs cri­sis may be eas­ing slightly on the strength of a fourth straight month of mod­est hir­ing and a dip in the un­em­ploy­ment rate.”

Only it’s not that sim­ple. For one thing, econ­o­mists agree that the econ­omy would have to be adding 100,000 jobs a month just to keep up with the num­ber of peo­ple who are en­ter­ing the labor force, and dou­ble that to make any real progress to­wards low­er­ing the job­less num­ber, so 80,000 jobs is re­ally going back­wards. For an­other, most of the jobs being cre­ated are low-pay­ing and often tem­po­rary, which is not going to do much if any­thing to boost con­sumer spend­ing, which ac­counts for al­most three-quar­ters of Gross Do­mes­tic Econ­omy in the hol­lowed-out US econ­omy. (In fair­ness to Ru­gaber, a day later he wrote a bet­ter, less rosy piece, in which he pointed out that among the coun­try’s 14 mil­lion of­fi­cially job­less, the per­cent­age re­ceiv­ing un­em­ploy­ment ben­e­fits has fallen from 75% last year to just 48% this year, be­cause so many peo­ple have been out of work for more than a year–a third of all those un­em­ployed–that their ben­e­fit checks have run out. That tells you how se­ri­ous the job­less­ness re­ally is.)

Credit goes to Yahoo! News, which at least ac­knowl­edged right away that these lat­est stats from the BLS mean things are ba­si­cally bad, not good news. In this dis­patch, head­lined Oc­to­ber Jobs Re­port: Deja Vu All Over Again, re­porter Daniel Gross cor­rectly called at­ten­tion to the fact that the pub­lic sec­tor was un­der­min­ing the mea­ger job gains made by the pri­vate sec­tor, as well as the fact that the de­cline in the job­less fig­ure is not the re­sult of the new jobs, but of more peo­ple just giv­ing up look­ing for non-ex­is­tent jobs and being dropped from the sta­tis­tics.

Gross also properly noted that the so-called U-6 figure for unemployment, which was used as the standard measure for unemployment until the 1980s when it was deep-sixed by the Reagan administration in favor of a measure that no longer counts people who have given up looking for a job and people who have taken part-time employment because they cannot find full-time work, is still at 16.2 perc     jjj Gross also properly noted that the so-called U-6 figure for unemployment, which was used as the standard measure for unemployment until the 1980s when it was deep-sixed by the Reagan administration in favor of a measure that no longer counts people who have given up looking for a job and people who have taken part-time employment because they cannot find full-time work, is still at 16.2 percent.To continue re To see the variations of statistics (deception) in graph form and to continue reading, click on the link below.

Gross also properly noted that the so-called U-6 figure for unemployment, which was used as the standard measure for unemployment until the 1980s when it was deep-sixed by the Reagan administration in favor of a measure that no longer counts people who have given up looking for a job and people who have taken part-time employment because they cannot find full-time work, is still at 16.2 percenvia When it Comes to Jobless Figures Dishonesty and Propaganda Reign | NationofChange.

Poverty in America: Faces behind the figures – CBS News

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Story

In this Sept. 16, 2011 photo, Kris Fallon holds her 4-month-old daughter Addison, in Palatine, Ill., as her 15-year-old son Gared Fallon looks on.

(Credit: AP)

At a food pantry in a Chicago suburb, a 38-year-old mother of two breaks into tears.

She and her husband have been out of work for nearly two years. Their house and car are gone. So is their foothold in the middle class and, at times, their self-esteem.

“It’s like there is no way out,” says Kris Fallon.

She is trapped like so many others, destitute in the midst of America’s abundance. Last week, the Census Bureau released new figures showing that nearly one in six Americans lives in poverty — a record 46.2 million people. The poverty rate, pegged at 15.1 percent, is the highest of any major industrialized nation, and many experts believe it could get worse before it abates.

The numbers are daunting — but they also can seem abstract and numbing without names and faces.

Associated Press reporters around the country went looking for the people behind the numbers. They were not hard to find.

There’s Tim Cordova, laid off from his job as a manager at a McDonald’s in New Mexico, and now living with his wife at a homeless shelter after a stretch where they slept in their Ford Focus.

There’s Bill Ricker, a 74-year-old former repairman and pastor whose home is a dilapidated trailer in rural Maine. He scrapes by with a monthly $1,003 Social Security check. His ex-wife also is hard up; he lets her live in the other end of his trailer.

There’s Brandi Wells, a single mom in West Virginia, struggling to find a job and care for her 10-month-old son. “I didn’t realize that it could go so bad so fast,” she says.

Some were outraged by the statistics. Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund called the surging child poverty rate “a national disgrace.” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., cited evidence that poverty shortens life spans, calling it “a death sentence for tens and tens of thousands of our people.”

Overall, though, the figures seemed to be greeted with resignation, and political leaders in Washington pressed ahead with efforts to cut federal spending. The Pew Research Center said its recent polling shows that a majority of Americans — for the first time in 15 years of being surveyed on the question — oppose more government spending to help the poor.

“The news of rising poverty makes headlines one day. And the next it is forgotten,” said Los Angeles community activist and political commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson.

Such is life in the Illinois town of Pembroke, one of the poorest in the Midwest, where schools and stores have closed. Keith Bobo, a resident trying to launch revitalization programs, likened conditions to the Third World.

“A lot of the people here just feel like they are on an island, like no one even knows that they exist,” he said.

Struggling on $18,000 a year

It’s hard to find some of the poorest residents in Pembroke. They live in places like the tree-shaded gravel road where the Bargy family’s dust-smudged trailer is wedged in the soil, flanked by overgrown grass.

By the official numbers, Pembroke’s 3,000 residents are among the poorest in the region, but the problem may be worse. The mayor believes as many as 2,000 people were uncounted, living far off the paths that census workers trod.

The staples that make up the town square are gone: No post office, no supermarket, no pharmacy, no barber shop or gas station. School doors are shuttered. The police officers were all laid off, a meat processing plant closed. In many places, light switches don’t work, and water faucets run dry. Residents let their garbage smolder on their lawn because there’s no truck to take it away; many homes are burned out.

Ken Bargy outside his trailer in Pembroke, Ill.

Ken Bargy outside his Pembroke, Ill., trailer.

(Credit: AP)

Ken Bargy, 58, had to stop working five years ago because of his health and is now on disability. His wife drives a school bus in a neighboring town. He sends his children, 15 and 10, to school 20 miles away. In the back of the trailer, he offers shelter to his elderly mother, who is bedridden and dying of cancer.

The $18,000 the family pieces together from disability payments and paychecks must go to many things: food, lights, water, medical bills. There are choices to make.

“With the cost of everything going up, I have to skip a light bill to get food or skip a phone bill to get food,” he says. “My checking account is about 20 bucks in the hole.”

About 75 miles away, in the Chicago suburb of Hoffman Estates, dozens of families lined up patiently outside the Willow Creek Care Center as truckloads of food for the poor were unloaded.

Among those waiting was Kris Fallon of nearby Palatine, mother of a teen and an infant, who hitched a ride with a friend.

Original Source Link Below

Poverty in America: Faces behind the figures – CBS News.
Think you are immune to unemployment or underemployment for a time? Get food storage now while you can afford it, so your family will eat even if you can’t afford if an employment emergency were to visit you..

Click here for the Why, What and How of Your Emergency Preparedness, Survival gear, freeze-dried food food storage, bug out bags, camping gear and apparel, gold and silver, finances, economical solar power, solar back up, conventional home back up power generators.

Peter Schiff: Americans must prepare for deepening unemployment, inflation and possible breadlines – YouTube

VERY Important Interview to listen to…Take his advice and get your self prepared. He knows his stuff!
Go through this website thoroughly, it has all you need to get prepared…Watch the video and then click on the page link (in the black area above) “Your Finances and the Prospects of a Dollar Collapse!” to get started in preparing for hard times…time is running short!

Peter Schiff: Americans must prepare for deepening unemployment, inflation and possible breadlines – YouTube.