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by Administrator
from
TheBurningPlatform Website
23 April 2012
No wonder one third of Americans are obese.
The crap we are shoveling into our bodies is on par with the misinformation, propaganda and lies that are being programmed into our minds by government bureaucrats, corrupt politicians, corporate media gurus, and central banker puppets.
Chief Clinton propaganda mouthpiece, James Carville, famously remarked during the 1992 presidential campaign that,
Clinton was able to successfully convince the American voters that George Bush’s handling of the economy caused the 1991 recession.
In retrospect, it was revealed the economy had been recovering for months prior to the election. No one could ever accuse the American people of being perceptive, realistic or critical thinking when it comes to economics, math, history or distinguishing between truth or lies.
Our government controlled public school system
has successfully dumbed down the populace to a level where they enjoy their
slavery and prefer conscious ignorance to critical thought.
Both parties and their propaganda machines, SuperPacs, and corporate media sponsors will treat the igadget distracted masses to hundreds of hours of lies, spin, and vitriol, designed to divert the public from the fact that both parties act on behalf of the same masters and have no intention of changing course of the U.S. Titanic to avert the iceberg dead ahead.
We will be treated to storylines about,
...and of course the economy, stupid...
Between 1840 and 1900 voter participation ranged between 70% and 82% as Americans took their civic duty seriously and believed their vote counted.
Since 1913, when the politicians relinquished control of our currency to a private bank controlled by a small group of powerful men, voter participation for President has ranged between 49% and 62%. It hasn’t surpassed 57% since 1968.
Now that corporations are people and our candidates are selected by a few rich men, the transformation from a republic to a corporate fascist state is almost complete. During the coming interminable political campaign you will hear about jobs until your ears bleed.
I can guarantee that 98% of the rhetoric will be
false. Neither party wants the American people to understand the truth about
what happened to our economy and jobs over the last 100 years. It has been a
bipartisan screw job and ignoring the facts doesn’t change them.
Here is some truth you won’t get from a politician or media talking head:
Any critical thinking human being would examine the data being reported as fact by our government and regurgitated without question by the corporate mainstream media and conclude it is false, misleading and manipulated.
The economy was booming in 2000 and 67.1% of the working age population were in the labor force. Today the economy is in much worse shape. More people NEED to work in order to just make ends meet, but according to the government, 8 million Americans have chosen to not work.
Only an Ivy League economist or CNBC bimbo pundit would believe such a blatant distortion of reality.
A comparison to prior decades provides all the evidence you need:
This data is so twisted that there is absolutely no doubt the Federal Government is purposely manipulating the numbers to make the economic situation appear better than the reality.
During the Great Depression propaganda and spin had not been perfected. There weren’t multiple definitions of unemployment designed to confuse and mislead the public. The peak level of unemployment in the 1930s was 25%.
The current reported level is 8.3%. On a comparable basis to the 1930s, including short-term discouraged workers, those forced to work part-time, and the long-term discouraged workers which were defined out of existence in 1994 by the BLS, the real unemployment rate is 22% today.
It feels like a depression for millions of
Americans because it is a depression.
The rhetoric from the Obama administration about a jobs recovery is laughable.
Full time employment peaked in July 2007 at 122.4 million. Today there are 113.9 million people classified as full-time, with only 101.3 million working more than 35 hours. There are 8.5 million fewer people with full time jobs today than there were in 2007.
That fact is even more disheartening considering the working age population has grown by 10.5 million over the same time span. Taking an even longer term view provides the perspective needed to assess our true economic state.
Total nonfarm employment hasn’t grown in twelve
years, while the working age population has grown by 30 million people.
Obama will tout the fact that we’ve added 3.6 million jobs since the bottom of this recession.
What he won’t tout is that hiring of temporary workers surged by 37% and accounted for 25% of all the jobs added since 2009. I’m sure these temporary workers, with no health or retirement benefits, are confident about their future.
The facts about jobs and employment are consistent with the 47 million Americans on food stamps (up from 35 million when the recession supposedly ended). It’s a sure sign of recovery when spending on food stamps doubles in the last two years.
No depression here, just move along.
Record numbers of Americans being added to the SSDI rolls for depression and other illusory disabilities is surely a positive development pointing to a strong economic recovery.
In just the first four months of this year, 539,000 joined the disability rolls and more than 725,000 put in applications.
The number of applications last year was up 24% compared with 2008, Social Security Administration data show. Why participate in the labor market when you can collect a government check for life because you are obese or depressed.
These are the people no longer in the labor
force. Once they go on SSDI, they rarely go back to work again.
The government reported figure of 12.7 million unemployed Americans is an utter falsehood. There are in excess of 30 million Americans that are either unemployed or working part-time that want full-time jobs.
Government propaganda doesn’t change the facts.
They are either intellectually dishonest or too lazy to do the most basic of research. They are paid millions to impart false storylines to anyone dumb enough to watch CNBC expecting facts or a smattering of truth. If you want some truth, turn to John Mauldin and John Hussman.
CNBC doesn’t invite these outstanding honest
analysts on their station when they can roll out a shill like Abbey Joseph
Cohen or James Paulson. They wouldn’t want some factual analysis when they
can have Becky Quick do one of her frequent handjob interviews with that
doddering old status quo fool Warren Buffet.
The two charts below, from one of John Mauldin’s recent articles, reveal the truth about the Baby Boomers retiring storyline. The first chart shows the employment level for those over the age of 55 since 2007.
There were 25.3 million people over the age of 55 working in 2007 and there are 30.1 million working today. People over 55 have seen their total employment level rise by 4.8 million jobs since the beginning of the recession, and over 3 million jobs since the 3rd quarter of 2009. Total employment is down by 4 million since 2007, while employment among those over 55 is up 19%.
John Hussman described the reality about employment in his recent weekly article:
I wonder how Larry Kudlow will spin this.
Now for the really eye opening facts.
While the labor participation rate has been plunging, the Boomer participation rate has been skyrocketing. The participation rate for the over 65 age group is now at an all-time high.
Do you think this has anything to do with home
values dropping 36% since 2005, gasoline prices doubling since early 2009,
food prices surging by 25%, the 1.4% annual return of stocks since 1999, or
the 0,15% senior citizens can earn on their money today versus the 5% they
could earn in 2007?
Intellectually dishonest ultra-liberal Ivy League defender of the Federal Reserve-Paul Krugman, had this to say about Ben Bernanke’s zero interest rate policy on senior citizens:
It must be comforting living in an ivory tower or penthouse suite and looking down upon the ignorant masses while caressing your Nobel Prize.
The millions of senior citizens with $100,000 of savings could earn $5,000 of interest income in 2007 to supplement their $18,000 of Social Security income. Today, they can earn $150 while the Wall Street banks receive the benefits of ZIRP by borrowing for free from the Federal Reserve and earning billions risk free.
Paulie doesn’t think the $4,850 reduction in income and the 15% increase in inflation since 2007 had a negative impact on senior citizens. They must be pouring into the work force because they are just bored, after working for the last 45 years.
John Hussman has a slightly different viewpoint, based upon facts rather than a false disproven ideology:
Do you believe Krugman or Hussman?
The key takeaway from the data is the
desperation exhibited by average Americans, while the political governing
elite and Wall Street pigs continue to gorge themselves at the trough of
free money provided by the Federal Reserve, while paying themselves obscene
bonuses for a job well done buying the corrupt Washington politicians.
Over the next six months we will hear unceasing rhetoric from Obama and Romney about how they are going to create jobs.
Neither of these government apparatchiks have a clue about jobs or desire to change the course that was set one hundred years ago with the creation of the Federal Reserve. Obama never worked at a real job in his entire life, while Romney has spent his life firing people and spinning off heavily indebted companies to unsuspecting investors.
The current deteriorating jobs picture has been decades in the making and a truly bipartisan effort.
The rhetoric about America being an engine of growth and the world leader in innovation and entrepreneurship is laughable when examined with a critical eye. We are an aging empire living in the past as the facts portray an entirely different reality.
Our fastest growing industries include:
The “surge” in jobs in the last three months is being driven by these industries:
Is this the picture of a world leading jobs machine or a delusional, paper pushing, self-involved, obese, sickly, overly indebted crumbling empire?
The job openings in industries that actually
produce something are barely identifiable on the chart below. Maybe the
University of Phoenix can successfully retrain construction and
manufacturing workers to be waiters, waitresses, and Wal-Mart greeters if
the Federal government can funnel more of our tax dollars into student
loans.
If you thought low wage work was only for Chinese, Indians, and Vietnamese, you haven’t been paying attention.
The United States is a world leader. We are by far the world leader among developed countries in percentage of low wage workers at 24.8%. I find it hysterical that the dysfunctional insolvent countries of Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Italy have a much smaller percentage of low wage workers than the great American empire. We have 142 million employed Americans and 35 million are slaving away in low paying thankless jobs.
This explains why the half the workers in the
country make less than $25,000 per year.
The top three employment occupations in the country are:
There are high paying good jobs in America, but there aren’t many and on-line college graduates from the University of Phoenix aren’t going to get them.
The highest paying jobs today require a high level of specialization and education, especially in the healthcare and technology industries. This disqualifies the vast majority of government run public school graduates. High paying manufacturing jobs which were the backbone of the country during the 1950s and 1960s are gone forever.
The reasons for this transformation are multifaceted and will be addressed in Part Two of this article. It didn’t happen by accident and there are culprits to blame.
The conversion of our country from making high quality things other countries needed to a debt driven service economy of paper pushers, hash slingers, and retail “specialists” has slowly but surely destroyed the middle class. The masses are distracted by the latest technological marvel that allows them to waste another two hours per day posting how they feel about the latest episode of America’s Got Something or America’s Top Whatever.
We have become a country that glories in our
materialism and shallow culture while acting like a thug around the world
with our unparalleled military machine.
We praise and honor psychopathic criminals while scorning and ridiculing the middle class workers that built this country. The American dream has become a nightmare for the millions of unemployed and underemployed.
The acceleration of debt accumulation and money printing guarantees this rotting carcass of a country will go belly up in the foreseeable future.
In Part Two of this article I will examine how
we got to this point and what is likely to happen next. |
