May You Live in Interesting Times: Ship of Fools
Paul Craig Roberts
Is there intelligent life in Washington, DC? Not a speck of it.
The US economy is imploding, and Obama is being led by his government of neoconservatives and Israeli agents into a quagmire in Afghanistan that will bring the US into confrontation with Russia, and possibly China, America’s largest creditor.
The January payroll job figures reveal that last month 20,000 Americans lost their jobs every day.
In addition, December’s job losses were revised up by 53,000 jobs from 524,000 to 577,000. The revision brings the two-month job loss to 1,175,000. If this keeps up, Obama’s promised three million new jobs will be wiped out by job losses.
Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that this huge number is an understatement. Williams notes that built-in biases in seasonal adjustment factors caused a 118,000 understatement of January job losses, bringing the actual January job loss to 716,000 jobs.
The payroll survey counts the number of jobs, not the number of employed as some people have more than one job. The Household Survey counts the number of people who have jobs. The Household Survey shows that 832,000 people lost their jobs in January and 806,000 in December, for a two month reduction of Americans with jobs of 1,638,000.
The unemployment rate reported in the US media is a fabrication. Williams reports that, “during the Clinton Administration, ‘discouraged workers’ those who had given up looking for a job because there were no jobs to be had — were redefined so as to be counted only if they had been ‘discouraged’ for less than a year. This time qualification defined away the bulk of the discouraged workers. Adding them back into the total unemployed, actual unemployment, [according to the unemployment rate methodology used in 1980] rose to 18% in January, from 17.5% in December.”
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