Posted on 07/04/2009 7:22:31 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
One dog has yet to bark in this long winding crisis. Beyond riots in Athens and a Baltic bust-up, we have not seen evidence of bitter political protest as the slump eats away at the legitimacy of governing elites in North America, Europe, and Japan. It may just be a matter of time.
One of my odd experiences covering the US in the early 1990s was visiting militia groups that sprang up in Texas, Idaho, and Ohio in the aftermath of recession. These were mostly blue-collar workers, – early victims of global "labour arbitrage" – angry enough with Washington to spend weekends in fatigues with M16 rifles. Most backed protest candidate Ross Perot, who won 19pc of the presidential vote in 1992 with talk of shutting trade with Mexico.
The inchoate protest dissipated once recovery fed through to jobs, although one fringe group blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995. Unfortunately, there will be no such jobs this time. Capacity use has fallen to record-low levels (68pc in the US, 71 in the eurozone). A deep purge of labour is yet to come.
The shocker last week was not just that the US lost 467,000 jobs in May, but also that time worked fell 6.9pc from a year earlier, dropping to 33 hours a week. "At no time in the 1990 or 2001 recessions did we ever come close to seeing such a detonating jobs figure," said David Rosenberg from Glukin Sheff. "We have lost a record nine million full-time jobs this cycle."
Earnings have fallen at a 1.6pc annual rate over the last three months. Wage deflation is setting in – like Japan. Interestingly, The International Labour Organisation is worried enough to push for a global pact, fearing countries may set off a ruinous spiral by chipping
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
So is Zero and Democrats time in Power.
It is time for some drastic but peaceful & lawful actions against ZERO, mainstream media.
How about digging out every bit detail of MSM’s family mmembers as a starter?
Some 342,000 homes were foreclosed in April, pushing a small army of children into a network of charity shelters. This compares to 273,000 homes lost in the entire year of 1932. Sheriffs in Michigan and Illinois are quietly refusing to toss families on to the streets, like the non-compliance of Catholic police in the Slump.
The REAL reason we haven’t taken the hit the way they did is because of CREDIT. Lots and lots of people are still riding on their credit. Wait til THAT Tsunami hits.
We Yanks are impoverished cowboys, Guv’nuh Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, and we’re all secretly plotting to depose your empire. ;-) ...little irony and sarcasm there, as the incidents that the author spoke of were so isolated and nearly irrelevant to the big picture. ...only another craze.
Interesting statistic that the work week has dropped down to 33 hours per week. I wonder how significant that is? I know that in some businesses, like supermarkets, they deliberately keep most workers under the full 40 hours, so they do not qualify as “full-time workers” and don’t get health insurance and other fringe benefits.
The militia movement had absolutely nothing to do with the blue collar job loss. It was totally a reaction to the Klinton assault on our 2nd Amendment and the atrocities committed at Ruby Ridge and Waco.
And as far as the "group" that did the Oklahoma City bombing, NONE of them were ever blue collar workers either.
Timothy McVeigh had worked as a security guard.
And Terry Nichols was a college dropout who had his real estate license.
Oh yeah, oh so fortunate! Those wankers are the ones prolonging the damned recession.
The Telegraph leans to the center-right and was one of the British papers lectured by Obeyme 1 month ago to “get with the program”...meaning follow the US MSM doctrine of kissing Obama’s ass and not questioning him.
It just happens that one Ambrose-P is the designated lefty loon writer.
As the freeper who invented the term the “frippery slope”, the English guy has it right. We have had too many useless jobs for the last 20-30 years and the problem is that when things start to go, the unnecessary jobs go first. I don’t see a way to get them back outside of monetizing the 100+ trillion dollars the U S is in debt. (No there is not an extra zero there)
A consumer based economy has to have consumers and right now the consumers are going to be cutting back to basics. In a big way. Wait until this holiday season. Over half of retail sales then, and this year I predict will be a bust like we have never seen.
The French guy said it: French president Nicolas Sarkozy, with a good nose for popular moods, says: “We must overhaul everything. We cannot have a system of rentiers and social dumping under globalisation. Either we have justice or we will have violence. It is a chimera to think that this crisis is just a footnote and that we can carry on as before.”
parsy, who invented the term “frippery slope”, and hey did I already say that
The work week stat is HIGHLY significant. That is the one apples:apples comparison I think that you can make between now and the Depression - hours worked per week.
The BLS did not count unemployment during the 30’s. The “25% unemployment during the Depression” was a figure created well after the Depression by one BLS economist in the 60’s by the name of Stanley Lebergott. Lebergott made several significant methodology choices, which while sound in the context of his work, are at variance with how we determine unemployment today:
1. Children as young as 14 were considered part of the laborforce. Today, children no younger than 16 are.
2. Men in prison or the military were considered “employable” in Lebergott’s methodology.
3. People who were employed by one of FDR’s make-work programs were not counted by Lebergott, because these jobs were often not permanent. Today, once you quit drawing an unemployment check, even if you’re a rocket scientist who took a job flipping burgers, you’re “employed.”
Given these wide divergences from today’s BLS methods, I think examining the hours worked per week is about the best way of making an apples:apples comparison between then and now.
The 'time worked' (fell by 6.9%) data indicates that the 'green shoots' recovery is BS.
During a recovery employers will work the existing employees on overtime for a period of time (make sure the recovery is real) before hiring additional employees. This will drive the 'time worked' numbers higher not lower as is happening presently. The lower 'time worked' numbers indicates a further reduction in activity.
Except for the extremly wealthy, the government owns everything and everybody in America.
I have been giving the matter similar thought. If the MSM likes to pick on the families of disliked politicians then these reporters have made themselves public and part of the story. Their private lives, past education and jobs, politics and associates are fair game!
These were mostly blue-collar workers, – early victims of global "labour arbitrage" – angry enough with Washington to spend weekends in fatigues with M16 rifles.
And Mark Koernke was a steadily employed maintenance worker at the University of Michigan... hardly a "victim of global labor arbitrage".
I don't know where Ambrose Evans-Pritchard came up with this idiotic "observation", but he obviously is either totally out of touch with reality, or deliberately misinterpreting reality to mislead his readers.
A period of high unemployment. Hey, that’s the perfect time to introduce an amnesty bill. Be sure to increase the number of guest workers on top of those legalized to keep John and Lindsey happy!
The company I retired from has been shutting down 1 week a month. This is to continue at least into the fall. My guess is it will go longer.
Or not. Maybe there is no “longer” in the cards.
McVeigh and Nichols were basically frustrated, undisciplined, LAZY males in plain English.
Neither would last on a blue collar job long enough to pick up a paycheck.
So where does Evans-Pritchard come up with this hooey???
Hey blam! Good to see you’re still here. You always had great science posts!
Yes, “the frippery slope” my term for “ something showy, frivolous, or nonessential” as it relates to so many jobs in our economy.
I think where we will soon find ourselves is that so many of these jobs, (selling $70 new torn jeans, $5 cups of coffee, jobs in boutiques, and much retail) are gone and with no jobs, those employees demand will be for basics, which will further reduce demand, and affect more frippery jobs, then even the non-frippery jobs. Thus we are on “the frippery slope.”
I think this is the problem we get for shipping manufacturing overseas and so many of us having desk jobs. It makes us vulnerable to depressions.
With capacity at less than 70%, no new jobs for a while. This all coincides with massive deficits.
By my calculations with 300 million population, and appr. 60% work age, each trillion of debt is $5,555 per worker. Multiply that by either 10, or 100 and the result is catastrophic. 100 trillion, BTW, is debt with SS and medicare built in, that is unfunded at present.
This is why BO’s useless crap and played bill may work by increasing demand.
parsy, who is glad to hear from you again.
Most in the militia movement were of blue collar origin, and the job losses made them open to the message that the militia stood for.
This is the doomsday scenario the Smart Guys have threatened ever since last fall with Bush - massive unemployment and stagflation. It will be Obamas legacy of FAILure.
If you consider 100% employment as 40 hrs., 33 hrs means 17.5% unemployment.
yitbos
Oddly enough, Evans-Pritchard did some very useful investigative work into the OKC bombing while he was writing the Telegraph columns that he turned into his book on Bill Clinton. He was one of the very few MSM reporters who was actually doing his job.
But his investigative work in America ended before the OKC trial and sentencing, and he seems to have sucked up some of the later clinton propaganda about militias without examining it.
Now he’s the Telegraph’s economics reporter. But his clinton book is still worth reading, although others have added a lot that took place later.
But the two Calif marxists saw the racial underclass as their rebels. When this group receives its goodies from the govt they will not be the ones feeling the anger. That will be the productive working class, the small business owner, the self employed craftsman or professional, whose wealth will be taken to re distribute. The result will not be a socialist/communist or statist revolution. It will be something else. Something Cloward and Piven could not have foreseen. Hopefully this madness is stopped in 2010 and 2012. If not, 2016 will be very interesting.
Willie you are back! Hip Hip Horay!
Ambrose writes:
“Some 342,000 homes were foreclosed in April, pushing a small army of children into a network of charity shelters.”
That’s absurd.
In 2009, 75% of foreclosures occur because the value of the home is now dramatically lower than the cost of the mortgage.
People just walk away, they don’t get evicted.
And almost all of those people don’t go anywhere near a charity shelter.
They do what they did before they “bought” a home...they rent apartments or live with other family members.
Let they eat cake.
"Employment is NOT a lagging indicator. Some indicators of employment, like jobless claims and the length of the work week, are actually official leading indicators of the economy. Payroll employment is a coincident indicator."
Most in the militia movement were of blue collar origin, and the job losses made them open to the message that the militia stood for.
Most of the blue collar militia grew up in a rural culture where serving in the military or hunting with firearms was a family tradition. The evermore burdensome federal firearms regulation made them "open to the message" totally regardless of the employment situation.
The linkage that Evans-Pritchard makes is a total fraud.
It’s all part of BO’s plan. Cloward-Piven Strategy:
“...poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.”
I have come to realize over my young life that most poor people are poor because of the bad spending choices they make.
So basically this is a theory based on the revolt of the stupid.
Oddly enough, Evans-Pritchard did some very useful investigative work into the OKC bombing while he was writing the Telegraph columns that he turned into his book on Bill Clinton. He was one of the very few MSM reporters who was actually doing his job.
But his investigative work in America ended before the OKC trial and sentencing, and he seems to have sucked up some of the later clinton propaganda about militias without examining it.
Now he’s the Telegraph’s economics reporter.
Well he may have done some good work back during the Klinton years.
But I remember reading one of his "economics" essays just within the last week or so, and it was just as looney as this one.
Maybe he ate some of that Mad Cow meat they had in Britain during the in-between years.
;^)
“If you consider 100% employment as 40 hrs., 33 hrs means 17.5% unemployment.”
Exactly what I was thinking earlier today.
Not exactly.
It just happens that one Ambrose-P is the designated lefty loon writer.
Anybody who comes up with a link between Ross Perot and the Oklahoma City bombing has got to have a screw loose somewhere.
Actually the main thrust of this article is neither militias nor the Obama administration. He is saying that Europe can not stand the new levels of unemployment, and will proceed to collapse like the Weimar Republic
We are seeing a lot of this.
schu
Now he’s the Telegraph’s economics reporter.
You know, now that I've had a chance to cool down and read the rest of the article, his actual commentary about the pending unemployment wave is really pretty good.
But why did he have to spoil his column with such a nutzy introduction???
He is good, he may even be right this time around.... ;-)
schu
It's my understanding that, that is what the 6.9% number represents, the reduction (in hours) of 'time worked'.
I suppose those hours not worked could be called 'unemployed hours' and could actually drive the unemployed numbers higher if calculated in that way..
How do we go about compiling info on the MSM? I would be willing to devote time to that and turn this back on them.
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