Blogging the NYC Mayoral Forum Later Today

by Justin KrebsLater today, the Working Families Party will be hosting a Mayoral Forum for the two[...]

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-mayoral-forum-later-today

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Official Unemployment Hits 9.5%

Unemployment rose to 9.5% in June, a 26-year high, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. A total of 14.7 million Americans are now officially out of work, and payroll employment has fallen by 6.5 million since the downturn began in December 2007, 19 months ago. The BLS also reported this morning that yet another 467,000 non-farm payroll jobs were lost in June. That was more than 100,000 above what a consensus of economists had estimated. Job losses in May were revised to 322,000 from an earlier estimate of 345,000.

The official count – known as U3 and dutifully reported by most of the media – fails to show the true extent of the wreckage. Left out of most reporting is U6, the BLS  calculation that includes involuntarily underemployed people. That is, those who want a full-time job, but can only find part-time work. Also missing from U3 are discouraged jobless people who haven’t looked for work during the past four weeks. The U6 figure rose in June to 16.5%.

The average workweek fell another 0.1 hour to 33 hours, the lowest since 1964 when the BLS began keeping statistics for that factor.

Another set of interconnected gauges of economic misery released today was the number of new claims filed for unemployment benefits, the four-week average of new claims, and the number of continuing claims. There were 614,000 new claims, the four-week average of claims – which levels ups and downs – dropped to 615,250, and continuing claims fell 53,000 to 6.7 million. The continuing claims number, however, may be affected by the fact that a growing number of out-of-work Americans have exhausted their benefits and no longer show up in these statistics. A little less than 40% of workers are covered by unemployment insurance.

In late May, 74% of economists surveyed by the National Association of Business Economists said the economy would begin expanding this quarter although they expected unemployment to continue rising into 2010 before beginning its recovery. One disturbing trend can be found in how long it took in the four previous recessions before the number of workers with jobs equaled the number employed at the beginning of those recessions. In 1974, the job recovery took 19 months; in 1981, 28 months; in 1991, 32 months; in 2001, 47 months.

Jack Healy of The New York Times reports:

"There are going to be massive, massive numbers of people who are out of work for long periods of time," said Andrew Stettner, deputy director for the National Employment Law Project. "It’s one of the most important aspects of where the economy is right now."

Although the number of people filing for unemployment insurance has leveled off recently, more workers are falling back on safety nets intended for the most troubled workers. More than 2.7 million people received emergency or extended unemployment benefits in the first week of June — the most recent period for which data was available — compared with 2 million at the beginning of the year.

For some observers, long-term prospects don’t look so good in other ways either. For instance, on Wednesday, at the Think Tank at The Big Picture, Barry L. Ritholtz hosted Chief Economist and Strategist David Rosenberg of Canada’s Gluskin Sheff. Here’s some of what he had to say:

Most pundits who crow about green shoots and about an inventory restocking in the third quarter giving way towards some sustainable economic expansion live in the old paradigm. They don’t realize, for whatever reason, that the deflationary aftershocks that follow a post-bubble credit collapse typically last for 5 to 10 years. Businesses understand better than the typical Wall Street or Bay Street economist and strategist that everything from order books, to output, to staffing have to now be restructured to adequately reflect a permanently lower level of leverage in the economy.

Indeed, by our estimates, there is up to another $5 trillion of household debt that has to be eliminated in coming years and that process is going to require that consumers go on a semi-permanent spending diet. Companies see this, which is why they are not just downsizing their payroll, but have also cut the workweek to a record low of 33.1 hours. [33 hours as of today’s BLS announcement.] Fewer people are working and those that are still working have seen their hours dramatically cut this cycle.

Companies are finding other ways to save on the aggregate labour cost bill as well, which may be a factor reinforcing the uptrend in the personal savings rate... . For example, a rapidly growing number of employers are now suspending contributions to worker 401(k) plans. According to a joint survey by CFO Research Services and Charles Schwab, nearly 25% of U.S. companies have either suspended their plans or are planning to do so (this is up from 2% at the turn of the year). Again, how we end up squeezing inflation out of the system when the labour market is clearly deflating wages and benefits for the 70% of the economy called the consumer is going to be interesting to watch. ...

It is amazing how many pundits and media types believe we are in a new bull phase and yet the equity market has completely sputtered now for nearly three months above the 900 level on the S&P 500 and 8,400 on the Dow — not to mention the fact that instead of seriously breaking out above the 200-day moving average, the broad market has been struggling at this resistance level for the last few weeks, which is a sign that buying fatigue has likely set in (together with meager trading volumes).

The pair of scary charts below compare the past 40 years. The first shows a huge rise in the current recession over past years of workers who have permanently lost their jobs instead of being temporarily laid off. The second shows that for every job opening there are now nearly six people queued for it.

Digging ourselves out of the hole that 30 years of transferring wealth upward through egregious tax policies, off-shoring jobs, continuing out-of-whack defense spending, and failing to invest adequately in infrastructure and innovation is going to take better tools than we now have available to us. Will the White House and Congress provide them?

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-Hits-9.5

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11th Commandment: The Key Difference Between
Israelis and Americans

Today's Israeli press quotes Prime Minister Netanyahu as telling 27 EU ambassadors that he was willing to "make concessions to the Palestinians" but did not want to be a "sucker" if the Palestinians pocket his "concession" and give nothing in return.

Netanyahu was speaking to the ambassadors in English. If he was using Hebrew, he would say that he didn't want to be a "freier" which is Hebrew (really Yiddish) for sucker. Ha'aretz says that "thou shalt not be a freier" is Israel's 11th commandment. Above all, an Israeli does not want to be taken advantage of which is why he often will take advantage of the other guy first. (The Palestinians have almost always been freiers in their dealings with the Israelis).

Americans don't spend much time worrying about being suckers. The equivalent "thou shalt not be" for us is not to be an "a-hole" which is what we would call the people who make other people into freiers. In my experience, most Americans would rather be accused of being a sucker than of being an a-hole. For Israelis, it is just the opposite.

See this Ha'aretz piece elaborating on this Israeli malady which causes so many problems, especially for those Israelis who have to deal with those adhering fiercely to that 11th commandment and, above all, for Palestinians.

For the record, Rahm Emanuel is not a freier. That is one of the reasons President Obama is not backing down in the face of the pushback from Israel on settlements. I can just hear him tell Obama, "If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times. You can't be a freier when you deal with the Israelis. Trust me on that one, sir."

Sponsored Topics: Middle East - Benjamin Netanyahu - Palestinian people - Israel - Prime minister

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China and India Manufacturing Ramp Up

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UN Official Demands Torture Accountability

Real News CEO Paul Jay talks with Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights about the Obama Administration doing everything they can do to "run away" from the whole issue of accountability for the premeditated, organized and institutionalized torture program of the Bush Administration, about the need for real transparency as opposed to the false claims of transparency from Obama while reports and information are held back or heavily redacted before release, and about demands now coming from UN human rights advocate Navi Pillay for holding accountable senior Bush Administration officials.


Also see:
Obama Vows to Deal With Torture, But His Pledge Doesn't Apply to the Bush Administration
by Jason Leopold
and
Everyone Should See "Torturing Democracy"
by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship



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Saddam Interrogation: US Still Trying to Show
9/11 Connection as Late as Mid-2004

The National Security Archive has posted a bunch of FBI interview reports from Saddam's interrogation. Here's my first take on the reports.[...]

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http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/07/02/the-saddam-interviews/

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Need An Income Investment Keep Dumping General
Electric (GE) and Buy This Stock Instead

Back in January, I advised you to dump everyone’s sweetheart dividend stock, General Electric (NYSE: GE) in favor of TEPPCO Partners (NYSE: TPP).

Many balked at the idea. But the results don’t lie…

Year-to-date, General Electric is the worst-performing stock in the Dow, down 22.3%. Meanwhile, TEPPCO is up 69%, including dividends. Read more ...

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Amazing rescue in Des Moines

You don't find people like Jason Oglesbee every day. There's a video inside the link including a brief interview with the very helpful and very humble Oglesbee who wanted to get back to work after the effort. Des Moines Register:

The boat went over the dam shortly after 4 p.m. and the woman, who was also about 60, became caught in a boil just over the dam. She was wearing a life jacket and was partially clothed when she was pulled from the water by Jason Oglesbee, a construction worker for Cramer & Associates in Grimes.

"They just harnessed me up and dipped me down in the water and I grabbed her and the crane drug her to the boat and that's it," Oglesbee said. "What are you going to do if she's like that? It's no big deal. The whole crew did it."

The construction crew rigged Oglesbee to a crane after an initial attempt to rescue her with the crane was unsuccessful. The woman was too weak at that point to hold on to the crane or to life preservers being thrown to her by a fire rescue crew, said Sgt. Joe Gonzalez with the Des Moines Police Department.

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Washington Post Starts A New Column To Look Into
The State Of What Americans Eat

In yesterday's Washington Post Ezra Klein, commenting on the recently released film Food, Inc., writes that "something is wrong with our food production system... Food, Inc. joins In Defense of Food, Fast Food Nation, Super Size Me and dozens of other polemical books and films in the necessary effort to convince us that checking out at the supermarket is, on some level, a political act, with consequences for ourselves, our families and our world."

I dropped out long ago. I was lucky that a girlfriend when I was in college was a health-conscious vegetarian and a great cook. I never made a decision to become a vegetarian... but it's been almost 40 years (not counting, in the old days, here and there, some chicken-- which my doctor says is worse than beef-- and fish). I do remember, much more recently, becoming a raw foodist. The aforementioned doctor gave me a choice: go raw (or, really, rawish) or die from the cancer that had recently been discovered. I learned-- with little fuss and no hesitation-- to love raw food.

When I started, there were no restaurants serving raw cuisine anywhere near my home. The closest was an hour away. Learning to prepare my own meals was a joy all over again. It's so healthy! Now there are several in L.A. I could walk to in a pinch. Actually now I'm in Bali and there are almost as many restaurants serving raw cuisine here as there are in L.A. In fact, the house I rented just outside Ubud is a paradise for a raw foodist with a Vitamix, a dehydrator and a wonderful chef who just made me some raw yogurt from coconut milk!

If I go to a "straight" American grocery store, it might be to get toilet paper, a light bulb or a battery. And that includes Whole Foods, which is maybe 10-20% more health conscious and more organic and less deadly than supermarkets with far less pretension. Ezra isn't talking about me when he points out that Americans "know rather less about our food than our grandparents did. In part, that's because the process of creating food in a lab is less familiar than the process of growing it in a garden. Food producers might have to print ingredient lists, but no one ever passed a law saying we had to understand them. (How do you hydrogenate an oil, anyway?)"

I know I'm not going to live forever, but my cancer is gone, I lost over 40 backbreaking pounds, I feel better than I can remember in decades, I don't get sick, I have more energy and my feet never itch. I don't eat food created in labs and I feel sorry for folks who eat hydrogenated oils.

But there also has been a concerted effort to pull a curtain across the food production system. You see that twice in "Food, Inc." Once, when a farmer who raises chickens for Tyson agrees to allow cameras onto his farm, only to have Tyson quickly call and persuade him to rescind his offer. And again, when Monsanto refuses to comment on, well, anything. It's one thing to be kept out of Dick Cheney's underground lair(s?). But we're eating this stuff.

Ezra interviews the director of Food, Inc. who points to the Inside the Beltway power structure: "Industry, committees on the Hill, the USDA, and very little input from us." He forgot the FDA. I'm sure Ezra will get around to it in his new twice monthly column on the politics of food, but no one mentioned the fount of death-by-eating, Congress' most corrupt enclave, the Blue Dog-dominated House Agriculture Committee. Forget the Medical-Industrial Complex and the banksters when it comes to running wild over their slices of our lives. Compared to AgriBusiness they are each thriving in an oasis of enlightenment, instead of the den of iniquity run by America's chief poisoner, Collin Peterson.

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US Papers Thu: Saddam Woried Most About Iran

Not a great deal of news from Iraq today, but we really can't complain.

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