Large Corporate Media Outlet Finally Reports On U-6 Unemployment Number

For the first time that I am personally aware of, a large corporate media outlet has finally reported on the under-reported U-6 unemployment number (which measures total unemployed plus workers whose employers make them work less than full-time but want to work full-time).  In watching CNN this morning, a reporter did start with the U-3 number, newly reported at 10.2%, the highest in 26 years.  In addition, however, the reporter made sure to mention the U-6 number of 17.5%.  To be clear, they spent much more time on the 10.2% number, simply out of convenience and inertia.

I do have a question, though.  Why now?  Is it because a growing number of people outside of the corporate media are pointing toward the U-6 number?  Or could it be perhaps that the 17.5% number sounds really bad for a country with a black President?  CNN hasn’t exactly been the paragon on ethical journalistic practices.  Over the years, they’ve slid toward covering what Fox Propaganda reports on.  Fox’s carrying of the Con’s water has extended and intensified since a year ago when President Obama won the 2008 election.

Whatever their motivation, the U-3 number jumped 0.4% since last month, far more than science-lacking economists were predicting.  Worse, the U-6 number jumped 0.5% since last month.  That clearly shows us that this economy is still very weak.

American corporations have out-sourced millions of jobs in the past 20 years – they’re not coming back unless forced to do so.  The bank bailouts of 2008-09 came with too few strings, so the banks are sitting on trillions of American taxpayer dollars instead of using them to loan money to worthy Americans, ensuring the recovery will take longer than it should.  And instead of helping out the American middle class, the largest driver of our economy, ConservaDems continue to want to give tax breaks to the wealthiest, spend our children’s money on occupying two foreign nations and are working to derail critical health care reform.  If you’re mad about any of this, contact your Congresspersons and tell them to stop holding back what we know is needed.

[Update]: Here is a graph of the percent in job losses in every recession since WWII and the length of time it takes to recover back to pre-recession job numbers.  The 0-line is the peak employment prior to the recession.  This is an excellent way to visualize how devastating the Great Recession has really been for average Americans.  We’ve lost more jobs than were lost in the 1948 and 1958 recessions.  The only worse conditions existed in the Great Depression.  It will take years to recover from this, especially with the Cons shutting down every effort to do something positive.  It took 2.5 and 4 years to recover from the last two recessions by this metric.  Will it take 8 or 10 years to recover from this one?

Sen. Inhofe (R-Denier) Plans Boycott of Senate Committee Vote on Energy/Climate Bill

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) said Thursday that she is planning to hold a markup Tuesday on S. 1733 (pdf), the Senate version of the Energy and Climate legislation President Obama and a majority of Americans are searching for.  In usual fashion, the Cons in the Senate are trying to figure out ways they can continue to stall movement of the bill.  In much the same way that they convinced all-too-willing Democrats to push health care legislation further and further back on the legislative calendar, climate legislation has been bottled up in committee for months now.  If Sen. Inhofe (R-Denier) and his Con colleagues get their way, the energy and climate legislation will either never move out of committee or will be so terribly weakened that there might as well not be any legislation at all.

Sen. Inhofe and six other Cons on the Environment and Public Works Committee are planning a boycott of the markup come Tuesday, which would mean Sen. Boxer couldn’t hold a vote to move it out of committee.  She unfortunately needs 2 Cons to show up to move the legislation further along.  Those same Cons are more interested in trying to show how ineffectual government can possibly be by slowing everything down to no movement (thereby fulfilling their own sick predictions), especially when it comes to energy and climate legislation.  By doing so, they prove they are pleased with recent news that China and other nations are taking over industries the U.S. invented in the 20th century, industries that will determine which country dominates the 21st century.  Enslaved to their failed ideologies, the Cons work tirelessly to ensure it is not the U.S. that continues dominance in these fields and in 21st century geopolitics.

Despite ever-growing proof that our climate forcing is causing changes in Earth’s climate much faster than recently thought; despite ever-growing proof that switching our economy to more efficient and renewable-energy-driven technologies will save us billions every year (costing no jobs, wrecking no economies) and stop our climate forcing, the Cons cannot break away from their dirty energy corporate benefactors and do something positive for this country and the planet.

Instead, the Cons are whining about how Boxer runs her Committee meetings, planning senseless obstructionist tactics and demanding that the EPA undertake study after study after study, none of which will ever get one single Con to vote for the bill anyway.

Sen. Boxer opened the door to alternative approaches for moving the bill, including the use of Senate Rule 14 that allows the majority to discharge legislation out of a committee and bring it directly to the floor.  I hope she does it.  When Cons were trying to force their extremist political nominees and destructive legislation down Americans’ throats, they couldn’t talk enough about “Up or down votes” and how Democrats were holding them up.  Why won’t Cons support “Up or down votes” now?  Because their fringe party is now in the minority.  They’re truly being obstructionists, needlessly so on every issue.  Sen. Boxer and the Democrats should do whatever they can to push the people’s business forward – rolling over the Cons if need be.

Unprincipled Whiners

No matter what the issue, Cons have demonstrated that their only party platform is whatever anti-Obama happens to be.  In a growing number of cases, this holds true … until the Cons end up working for the opposite of what they initially “stood for”.  Confused yet?  Don’t be – let’s look at the latest example.  The Cons were entirely against the stimulus funding late last year and early this year.  They issued their typical free-market-religious talking points that made no sense and patted themselves on the back for opposing anything that President Obama wanted done.

Now, a different story emerges.  The same Cons who voted against the stimulus are now begging for some of those stimulus dollars to be doled out to NASA instead of other places.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  They certainly haven’t had an epiphany about the role that science should play in our society.  No, we’re still a looooong way from that.  Like everything else, this beg-session is all about politics.  In this case, they can bring home some federal money (since they refuse to pay for things themselves, socialists that they are) and pat each other on the back about that.

The best part?  They continue to slam the stimulus funding while begging for it to be redirected toward NASA.  Two opposing viewpoints in the same request!  How uniquely conservative of them.

It would make more sense for these clowns to request an increase in NASA’s operating budget for FY10 or FY11, if they’re really so concerned about the space program.  But that won’t happen.  They’re anti-public-investment, anti-health care reform, pro-rich tax cuts and pro-occupation.  You see, Trillions of future taxpayer dollars can be spent occupying Iraq and Afghanistan.  Billions and billions of taxpayer dollars can be redistributed from the middle class to the rich.  But health care reform and stimulus?  Not a chance!  Unless they can get something out of it politically.  That’s immoral.

Thanks For The Awesome Job Market, Cons

Any Con worth their salt will tell you that the “free-market” will fix everything!  Their zeal to cram their fake religion down everybody’s throats led to the collapse of the U.S. economy in this first decade of the 21st century.  But there is a huge disconnect.  Thanks to both Cons and Democrats looking out for their Wall St. benefactors, most Americans haven’t and won’t feel anything close to a recovery for a long, long time.  While Wall St. has posted stunning gains since their lows earlier this year, millions more Americans have continued to lose their jobs and their livlihoods.

How bad have things gotten for the real average American?  How about a look at a paper published last month by Advance Realty and Rutgers: America’s New Post-Recession Employment Arithmetic.  Here are some choice figures for you to chew on [emphasis mine]:

• The combination of a weak economic expansion sandwiched between two recessions (2001, and 2007–2009) produced what will be a lost employment decade. As of August 2009, the nation had 1.3 million (1,256,000) fewer private sector jobs than in December 1999. This is the first time since the Great Depression of the 1930s that America will have an absolute loss of jobs over the course of a decade.

• To put this new millennium experience into perspective, during the final two decades of the twentieth century, the nation gained a total of 35.5 million private-sector jobs. During the current decade, America appears destined to lose more than 1.7 million private-sector jobs.

• This 1.3 million annual increase in the labor force means that in terms of private-sector payroll employment, the nation has to create an estimated 920,000 jobs per year.  Adding this to the actual private-sector job losses accumulated during the 20 months (to date) of recession equates to an August 2009 employment deficit of 8.6 million jobs. Given conservative estimates of further employment declines (even if the recession ends in the third quarter of 2009) and the continued increase in the labor force, the nation’s employment deficit could approach 9.4 million private-sector jobs by December 2009.

• Erasing this deficit will require substantial and sustained employment growth. Even if the nation could add 2.15 million private-sector jobs per year starting in January 2010, it would need to maintain this pace for more than 7 straight years (7.63 years), or until August 2017, to eliminate the jobs deficit! This is approximately 50 percent greater than the length of the average post–World War II expansion (58 months).

The “free-market” cannot and never will fix this.  It’s going to take the concentrated effort of the federal government working with the private sector to pull us out of this disaster.  Thanks again, Cons!

[h/t MB]

Why Climate Action Is Lacking

From Paul Krugman’s Sunday op-ed [emphasis mine]:

But the larger reason we’re ignoring climate change is that Al Gore was right: This truth is just too inconvenient. Responding to climate change with the vigor that the threat deserves would not, contrary to legend, be devastating for the economy as a whole. But it would shuffle the economic deck, hurting some powerful vested interests even as it created new economic opportunities. And the industries of the past have armies of lobbyists in place right now; the industries of the future don’t.

Indeed.  The G20 summit meeting that just ended failed to come up with any kind of viable plan or steps toward establishing a plan wherein developed nations would pay for the low-carbon development and emissions reductions their actions necessitate.  The result is the continuation of an immoral failure of the U.S. and other nations.  We are not the greatest nations on Earth.  We are countries of unsustainable resource consumers hell-bent on leaving future generations a severely depleted planet.

Misc. News 9/27/09

Occasionally, a number of things catch my eye on the same day.  With so much, I can’t go into detail about all of it.  Instead, I try to sample them with much shorter opinions.  Here’s today’s:

“Democrats Are Jarred By Drop In Fundraising“.  Really?  Democrats are really jarred by this?  A big reason might be it’s nearly October2009 and all the Democratic-led government has done is given away trillions of dollars to rich people and corporations while working feverishly to explain to America that they just can’t put together real health care reform.  It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Americans are unlikely to continue forking over their hard-earned cash to such insipid waffling.

“Petitions target state spending” sounds innocuous, until you realize that the right-wing rag Denver Post decided on the lede.  Three ballot initiative petitions are circulating in CO that would take an additional $1 billion per year away from the government to do things like fix roads and bridges, maintain telecommunications infrastructure and give a big middle finger to local school districts who voted to opt out of spending limits.  It seems the Cons talking point about keeping control local doesn’t apply when people don’t agree with their insane economic policies.  The petitions will gather signatures, there’s no doubt about that.  But asking Coloradans to further weigh the state government down when everything is already being defunded thanks to similar efforts in the past?  I doubt that will resonate.  Who knows, though – Coloradans could again prove how senseless they are.

“Rural counties taking a beating” tries to perpetuate the story that urbanites are likely to overlook rural concerns as the economy tries to recover.  It ignores one simple, basic fact though.  Those “common-sensical” rural folks?  Yeah, they voted for the economic policies that caused the Great Recession for over 30 years.  It seems to me their “concerns” carried too much weight in the past – and it’s brought all of us down.  They want to lead a different kind of life than those of us in the cities?  That’s fine, it’s their right after all.  But it sounds stupid when they complain about conditions they created.  How about the concerns of the majority of Coloradans, who happen to live in cities?

Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman wrote a short piece on the potential greening of the economy.  He relates a very important concept about the energy and climate legislation Congress has stalled on: it’s cheaper to do something about climate change than not.  Point in fact, it’s probably cheaper than even he relates in the column.

Study: $1240 TRILLION In Costs Due To Climate Change With No Adaptation

Many scientists and activists have stated, with good reason, that the 2007 IPCC 4th Assessment Report (4AR) didn’t look deeply enough into the potential costs of doing nothing to change the globe’s GHG emissions.  The good news is that in addition to developing a more robust research methodology to dig into the unknowns of the science surrounding climate change, work has also taken place to assign realistic figures of the costs of adapting to climate change.  The figures available for the past few years were viewed as having major shortcomings: unrealistic assumptions, not accounting for enough of the effects (which have interdependencies and feedbacks of their own), etc.

A new study was issued earlier this month by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) that worked to address some of those concerns.  For reference, I’m going to discuss the Section 8 material.  It is not without its own set of caveats and disadvantages: it looks at the IPCC A2 scenario, for instance, even though our actual emissions have already outpaced this mid-range emissions scenario.  There’s another equally out-dated caveat that I’ll talk about more below.  So, take the results with a grain of salt – realize that these costs continue to be an underestimate of what we’re likely to face!

With that in mind, what are some of the results of this study?  Without adaptation, the mean net present value of climate change impacts under the A2 scenario is $1240 Trillion.

Bill in Portland Maine’s Excellent Question

Dear Conservative Free-Market Capitalism Muckety Mucks,

Why haven’t you fixed the economy yet?

It’s a shame it took a serial snarkist to ask the most pertinent question of this whole Great Recession.  Want more?

I’m asking because conservatives in fancy suits keep telling me—okay, screaming at me—about how fundamentally sound their ideas are, and how the private sector, not the government, is our best and greatest hope for making the economy leap back to life…

We’ve been in a recession since December of 2007. Why aren’t things all better yet for ordinary Americans? You were so awesome at making the mess, but cleaning up the pile of poopies you left on the nation’s living room rug seems to be proving a bit more, um, problematic. Why?

You’ve got an army of giant, throbbing brains in your right-wing think tanks working day and night. The Heritage Foundation has never been wrong…just ask ‘em! And the U.S. Chamber of Commerce never misses an opportunity to proclaim their infallibility in multimillion-dollar ad campaigns. So…why are we still in Sucksville?

And don’t try and hide behind the fact that there’s a Democrat in the White House. He’s been shoveling money into your coffers faster than Sarah Palin shoveling bullshit through Twitter.

Fix the damn economy on Main Street already, you Ayn Rand-worshipping free-market capitalist wizards. Show us how it’s done. Be the heroes we’ve been holding out for. I’ll check back on your progress in 30 days. I expect Americans to be squatting over solid gold commodes by then. That’s how much I believe in you.

They can’t, of course, because their version of the mythical “Free Market” isn’t designed to help the little person.  It’s always been designed to make the rich filthy rich.  It’s always been designed to screw the little person over.  But they’re damn fine questions.  And I know Billy will check back in 30 days. 

Rethinking Economic Actions By Democrats

After encountering two independent mentions of recent economic actions proposed and enacted by Democrats by sources I’ve come to trust, I find myself looking at them in new light.  The program most in question for me is Cash for Clunkers.  It’s proven wildly popular, and at first I thought that was a great thing.  With additional perspectives, I’m no longer sure it is.

First of all, I’m going to squash a talking point that Democrats are using to justify the program: the environmental benefits.  They don’t exist.  At least not the to the extent that Democrats like Sen. Levin would have you believe.  The environmental benefits of Cash for Clunkers is negligible.  Here are the key stats:

The total savings per year from cash for clunkers translates to about 57 minutes of America’s output of the chief greenhouse gas.

U.S. drivers go through that amount of gas every 4 1/2 hours, according to the Department of Energy.

So we’re giving away $1,000,000,000 dollars to get 250,000 cars off the road to save 57 minutes of carbon emissions and 4 1/2 hours of gas.  Is that really the best use of money that we can come up with?  I don’t think so.  How about investing that $1 Billion in research on battery technologies – that would generate many times the investment in future returns.

China Corners Its Renewable Energy Market; US Won’t Do The Same

China has taken enormous strides in developing its renewable energy sector, recognizing in ways the U.S. has so far failed to do, that renewable energy is of strategic importance.  As one piece of evidence, China passed the U.S. this year as the world’s largest market for wind energy, despite the massive imbalance in per capita energy utilization.  China has already achieved the status of having the world’s largest solar panel manufacturing industry.  All of this comes with massive government support for the renewable energy industry.  China, unlike the U.S., is protecting their domestic industries, thereby laying the foundation to be the dominant market forces when they’re mature.

Contrast that with the insane approach we’re taking in the U.S. up until this year: force the nascent renewable energy industry to fight uphill battles against mature, dirty energy industries.  Renewables in the U.S. have been purposefully kept immature for as long as possible so that the established industries can continue to enjoy their record profits.  There was a way those dirty industries got there though: through government interference!  Decades of subsidies and tax breaks and incentives helped grow those industries – the same kinds of activities that have been denied renewable energy industries in the U.S., but not in China.

Here’s what’s going to happen without a fundamental change in the way we fund research in the U.S.: the dirty energy industry is going to get its wish and remain the dominant player for a long time to come.  In the meantime, the Chinese renewable energy industry will become more adept and mature.  Once it is, it will be able to compete for projects here in the U.S. as it become more and more obvious that renewables are the way to power our country.  Since their industries will have more efficient economies of scale to work with, Chinese industries will win contracts in the U.S.  U.S. companies will not be able to compete either in China (due to their protectionist policies) or here in the U.S.  We’ll send billions of more U.S. dollars overseas, growing the Chinese economy instead of the U.S. economy.  All because the U.S. looks at energy as a monthly profit engine, not strategically important.  Yay for us.