Hot ashes are what you're getting. The political and media elites are giving you hot ashes, and taking your trees. I started Hot Ashes For Trees to tell you where I see this happening, and why.
If Marie Antoinette were alive today, she'd be down with the U3 method of calculating unemployment. This method of calculation is cold-hearted, soulless and a downright infuriating insult to the American people. For it declares some of the worse off among us, those that have exhausted unemployment benefits and have given up looking as non-persons unceremoniously tossed out of numerator and denominator.
Perhaps economic calculations should indeed be soulless, but they shouldn't be Satanic, and the U3 calculation is.
It's simply a way to gin up a better looking number to report, by creating an ever-shrinking "eligible employment base," down to almost 59% of adults these days, from a high of 65% just a few years ago. This measure simply tosses those folks out of the base and recalculates. Poof - through modern day statistical witchcraft, hoards of our fellow Americans disappear. A potion no less offensive than that of the witches of Macbeth, whose brood called for "liver of blaspheming Jew."
By the end of 2009, 1.5 million Americans will be thus cooked out of the sauce. Look for some of theses government-declared non-people to be taking to the streets in food riots by Christmas.
Our government needs to stop hiding the truth in statistical chicanery. The closest measure we have to an apples-to-apples measure of comparison to the way we calculated unemployment during the Great Depression is the U6 method. The U6 method adds back in the discouraged lookers and those who have had to settle for crappy part-time work to put some food on the table. Even that measure does not adjust for the millions of people who are working but have had their hours and pay slashed, sometimes dramatically. By the U6 measure, unemployment isn't far from 18%, and is up in the low twenties in some cities. This is flirting with Great Depression territory, and our government and media needs to start being upfront about this. True, the U6 number is released every month, but it's the U3 that gets all the attention. A number that actually ticked down a tenth ofa percent in July, even as 247,000 more Americans found themselves out of a job.
Let's start reporting honest numbers, using methods that would please a Teddy Roosevelt or Thomas Jefferson, and leave cold-hearted Marie, whose thoughtless inconsiderations have already been judged, to the ash heap of history where she belongs.
OK so imagine, it's 1985. The economy is going gangbusters. And Charles Kuralt of CBS News comes on the tube for one of his "human interest" stories.
He finds "Gus from Huston" living under a bridge. And in his sweet and wistfully somber tone, Charles tells us about old Gus. Playing his harmonica, collecting his bottles, passing the hot and humid Houston Summer days away, remembering the old days and thinking about what he could have become. Then, as we're all softly serenaded by Gus' bluesy harmonica, the piece ends with good ol' Gus slowly wheeling his shopping cart full of lost dreams away into the sunset.
Now back in '85, as a 22 year-old strong buck, enjoying the fruits America had to offer, I would think to myself. "How useless! America is going gangbuster boom, and leave it to the Liberals at CBS News to always find someone left out, and feature him in their human interest pieces." I was disgusted at how on one hand America was in Glorious Morning, and yet the media always insisted on making sure that, 10 times a day, we never forgot there was someone left behind.
But now I understand, that if nothing else, these pieces were importantly cathartic. We at least never forgot that there are so many flavors of people in this world. And not all were able to partake in our boom. Some didn't have the education, the background, or the wherewithal to join our party. While we boomed the good boom, some got left behind, and remembering them was indeed the Christian thing to do.
To be sure, the news media went overboard with it. Because Reagan was President, it got to the point where you'd think all of America was homeless. Stories about the newly discovered homeless were everywhere. Time, Newsweek, CNN, CBS, TV Guide, Modern Maturity, you name it. During the Reagan years, for every story about the boom that was lifting up 99% of us, there were 5 stories about the 1% of us that were not-so-lucky and left out. But at least our valves were depressurized. Those who felt the empathetic sting of their fellow citizens being left behind had an outlet. Times 10.
But now the pressure is building and it has nowhere to go. Seems these days everybody knows someone who has been unemployed for at least 6 months or more. Foreclosures are at record historic levels. Long-term unemployment is worse than at any time since the Great Depression. Personal bankruptcies are through the roof. People in huge numbers are under employed, forced to settle for meager, benefitless part-time work at record rates.
And yet we don't get a single human interest story to help us blow off steam, because Obama is President. The news media has their guy in, so everything must be "green shoots." And it's zapping the American Spirit. Nothing zaps the spirit more than to not be empathized with. Recently I saw a story that looked like it might be about displaced people during the housing crisis, but it was about this lady who found an unusual job "house-sitting" multi-million dollar homes so that they looked lived in. She gushed about how much she enjoyed that unusual lifestyle, and how it was a "hidden green shoot" that is only now gloriously possible because of the state of the economy.
The American people so desperately want their pain to be felt, but they can't have it felt because Barack Obama is President. Feeling their pain would mean that all is not well. All is not well could be interpreted as Barack Obama doing something wrong. And Barack Obama doing something wrong goes completely against the narrative that the news media has created. Barack Obama is our great savior, and the news media will not permit anything to go against that narrative.
And so this is creating pressure that is not being released. As what the American people feel and experience every day on the ground gets worse and worse, and the news media sticks to their guns and proclaims that things are getting better and better. Thousands upon endless thousands of human interest stories about evictions, destitution, increasing hunger, are out there and growing larger by the day. Never have we needed them told more than we do now. But we can't have them told, because Barack Obama is President.
If California fell into the ocean, it would cause the national unemployment rate to go down, since California's unemployment is higher than the national average.
The AP would immediately report this as a green shoot. Proof that the Stimulus is working.
"There is a silver lining to this report card Mom. Most of my grades were better than expected. I'm continuing to flunk trig, but at a slower rate. My bad grades are starting to bottom out. Most teachers surveyed think I'll do better next semester."
When will we get honest, when will we get real? Why do we let them do this to us?
This latest market run-up is not being driven by real productivity, it's being driven by trillions of dollars in TARP funds being pushed into the market (on Bernanke-greased-skids) through the back door. But TARP funds are borrowed.
What they want you to say is "Oh that Bernanke, he really fixed things, that Obama, he's really making things better." Now, do you have a child? Are you happy the market has gone up of late? Well, take a good look at that child - because he is paying for it. All they've done is borrowed trillions from the Chinese, shoved that over to the banks, and now the banks are laundering it into the markets. And now they want you to jump up and down yelling "green shoots!" But it's a ponzi scheme. The market run-up is fueled by debt!
Debt your kids are on the hook for. To prop up banks that should have failed, and to opiate you into thinking all is well. Everything we're getting these days from the government and Wall Street is gimmickry. This whole "Q2 Earnings Better Than Expected" rally we just saw is a sham. Revenues across the board to the Fortune 500 are in the drink. So all they did was throw so many people out onto the streets, cut so many costs, that they made their earnings look better on paper - by shrinking!
More opium for you. Are you feeling good yet?
I need to use an analogy here - and I apologize to any 700 pounders I may offend, but I need to borrow your fatness for a minute to make a point. Imagine someone who has a job, and has spent all their money eating themselves into 700 pounds. Now, that person loses his job. So a group of strategists meet in the den to figure out a strategy for him. Instead of prescribing a diet, to bring food consumption in line with new income, and make the man healthier to boot, they decide to go out and borrow several year's worth of food budget and continue to prop up the same old eating habits.
A simple analogy? Maybe, but this is exactly what the clowns at the Federal Reserve have done. They went out and borrowed or printed a mountain of cash to keep the 700 pounder at maximin weight. So now a heart attack or stroke looms even larger. The Financial Heart Attack we're now due is tremendous. This is just another money transfer scheme. After all this, after all we've suffered, you'd think that money transfer schemes are the last thing your government would be doing to you. No, they are the first thing your government is doing to you!
