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?

Corporate-Dems Trying to Take Wrong Lesson From 2009 Elections

The 2009 election is now behind us. The 2010 election is moving toward us quickly. What have I picked up from this year’s election results? That Democrats, especially those which I label CorporateDems, who run away from the Democratic base will lose, and deservedly so.

If CorporateDems want to chase down Con votes, I say go for it. The Cons won’t vote for them and there’s now proof that progressives won’t turn out to help them. Having a (D) after their name isn’t enough.

Dubya: Popularity Is Fleeting

And he should know.  Can anyone point out another leader that had garnered 90% approval rating from Americans, only to fall to 23% by the time he left office?  I don’t think so.  It wasn’t because he wasn’t affable.  It was because he demonstrated how little he and his cronies cared about American values and priorities.  He occupied a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.  He put the final set of nails on the economic catastrophe that Reagan started.  He lied about anything and everything that Americans cared about.  Then he tells a crowd that they shouldn’t waste energy chasing popularity.  Well, he should know.  He never did.  He did what he set out to do, what leading conservative “thinkers” told him to do.  And the results were disastrous.

Oh, and to CNN’s Alexander Moody, this is a flat-out lie:

The president himself saw wild popularity swings during his eight years in the White House.

Wrong, wrong and wrong.  He had a clear, steady decrease through 7 years, all of his own doing.  You could argue that Truman saw wild popularity swings during his Presidency.  Maybe even Reagan or H.W. had “wild” swings.  But not the Boy King.  He did exactly what he wanted to do, regardless of what people thought of him.  The only question left for him is whether those attending the motivational speaker meeting should follow Bush’s advice.  My advice is stay as far away from Bush’s as possible, lest you end up like he did: among the worst ever.

By the way, this clown obviously learned nothing about being used:

“We are safer than we were before 9-11 because of President Bush,” Powell said.

Not according to any intelligence analyst currently employed, Mr. Powell, and you know it.  To say otherwise reinforces the disgrace you set upon yourself by lying for Cheney.

Good Thing Harsanyi Is An Op-Ed Columnist and Not a Journalist

If there’s one thing the Cons have demonstrated perfectly for years, it’s that one doesn’t have to think to have an opinion. One should be able to think to form a news story, but this is too often not the case in today’s media world where entertainment corrupts journalism.

Some snippets of what has become standard drivel from Harsanyi:

Dunn went on to assert that when the president “goes on Fox, he understands he is not going on it as a news network at this point. He is going on it to debate the opposition.” Who knew debating the future of the nation was such a ghastly thought?

In this opinion piece, Harsanyi asks many questions that he should have asked of the Bush “administration” (they weren’t a legitimate administration any more than Fox is a legitimate news source). What about Bush’s policy of establishing invite-only events that were funded by taxpayers? Democrats, Unaffiliateds and Cons alike paid for these events, but only people who agreed not to debate Bush were invited. Bush definitely thought debate was ghastly. Crickets from the right-wingers’ bench.

Just like every other Con whining and gnashing about the obvious unfairness of the Obama administration labeling Fox as opinion-based, Harsanyi wastes plenty of pixels (ink, too) on how anyone could possibly think that the executive branch should be able to decide who’s legitimate and who’s not. Just like every other Con, Harsanyi tries to hide his hypocrisy from public view. Where was his concern when Bush did the exact same thing to MSNBC? More crickets.

Obama’s Admin: Fox Not Legitimate

It’s time to throw some parties!  It’s not the first time it’s happened, and I don’t at this point think it will be the last either.  Two Obama advisers went on two different Sunday TV talk shows and stated unequivocally what most rational people have thought to themselves for years:

Fox is not a legitimate news outlet.

They’re an biased entity with access to the airwaves.  They have opinions, which everyone and every entity has a right to have.  But having an opinion doesn’t make one a journalist or a news network.  They can think of themselves as whatever they want, but it’s impressive and encouraging that the Obama administration is forcefully keeping Fox away with a 20′ pole.  After all, there are thousands (millions?) of opinion-holders out there.  They can’t all get into Presidential press briefings.  Those should be reserved for widely accepted news outlets.

The difference between this administration and the Bush cabal in this arena is stark.  Bush’s cronies used Fox and other non-serious groups (remember the non-credentialed gay prostitute who was allowed into press briefings to lob softballs to the Boy King?) to push their agenda on America by force.  Obama and his staff are serious about actually governing the country.

Cheney’s Daughter Is A Serious Foreign Policy Expert?

The Cons live in a very strange world.  It’s a world in which the “free-market” supposedly fixes everything by itself and so is pursued with religious vigor that would make Orthodox followers scratch their heads.  It’s a world in which every dark-skinned person in a viable, current threat to the safety and security of the Cons’ gated communities, except for the ones that are rich (see: Saudi Arabian royalty, etc).  It’s a world in which the term climate-change is a far-left conspiracy theory that has somehow grabbed power in nearly every country’s government, that nearly every scientist is somehow a part of and that nearly every media outlet is somehow a part of to boot.  It doesn’t have to make sense to the rest of us – the Cons excel at cognitive dissonance.

In this fantasy land, the daughter of the last Vice-President Puppet-Master is somehow considered to be a leader in developing Con opposition to President Obama’s foreign policy initiatives.  Never mind that saying the President’s foreign policies weren’t in America’s interests got you labeled “traitor” and “terrist-lover” by the same Cons just one short year ago.  The difference was the “President” was a Con, so his directives comes down from up-high, don’tcha know?  Now that the President is a half-black man, all that is out the window.  Nothing President Obama can or will do will ever be good enough for these rigid ideologues.

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.

US Missle “Shield” Scrapped By Obama

Good.  Talk about an insane giveaway to defense contractors that would never offer any real defense to the U.S. or European countries.  It was designed to funnel billions to corporations for the easiest profit in the world and ratchet up the arms race versus Russia so they would be forced to respond with their own war program.

The silliest part to this development?  Cons spent their time yesterday slamming President Obama over this decision, saying it would weaken the U.S. stance versus Russia and Iran.

To which I reply, what about terrorism and China?

T-shirts vs. Guns

Back when Bush was busy running the country into the ground, he had events around the country, kind of like what President Obama is doing today.  There are some important differences, not that the corporate media is going to get into them.  Among them:

Democrats couldn’t attend Bush events if they wore the “wrong” t-shirt.  On more than one occasion, they were removed from the area.  Sometimes, they were removed by people who didn’t have the legal authority to remove them.  More than one spent time in jail.  That’s what “free speech” amounted to in the Bush years: agree with Bush or go to jail.

Right-wing cranks are protesting near Obama events with guns on their hips.  Yes, you read the right: a civilian (not a law enforcement person), with a gun on the hip in a holster.  Are you freaking kidding me?!  Right-wing shock jocks will insist that this person had the undeniable right to exercise his 2nd amendment rights – possibly his 1st amendment rights if they strain really hard.  Um, that’s great.  What about those Democrats who didn’t show up to Bush’s events with anything but a t-shirt?  The Cons didn’t stand up for their rights, did they?  I know what would have happened if a Democratic civilian had showed up to a Bush event with a gun in a holster on their hip, and you should too: they’d have been carted off to Gitmo and withheld indefinitely.  Such is the hypocrisy of the Cons.

[Update]: Cenk Uygur sums it up quicker than I did.  Think a Muslim-American could have been anywhere near a Bush rally with a gun on his hip and a weapons permit?

Bush events were carefully screened so that the Cowardly Boy King didn’t have to face opposition to his bat-shit insane policies.  Every single event for years was screened very carefully.

Anti-American Republicans Undermine Obama Israeli Policy

That’s the only thing I get from this ridiculous news article:

The Obama administration’s policy on Israel is misguided, puts too much emphasis on the issue of settlements and ignores the bigger threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, a U.S. delegation of Republican congressmen visiting Israel said Thursday.

The Cons tripped over themselves rushing to microphones to denounce Democrats during the Bush “presidency” when Democrats questioned foreign policy plans that were clearly not in America’s best interest.

Had a Democratic contingent done the same thing from 2001-2008, you can be sure the corporate media would have been only too happy to spread the Cons’ disruptive message.  Now that Obama is in office, it’s suddenly okay to criticize the President’s initiatives and prerogatives.

That is Anti-American.