The Great Unravelling: The Economic Assassination of America and An Even Greater Depression By Stephen Lendman (July 10, 2011)
http://hamsayeh.net/economy/929-the-great-unravelling-the-economic-assassination-of-america-and-an-even-greater-depression-.htmlFriday’s jobs report threw more cold water on so-called recovery. Since 2008, Main Street America’s been in Depression. -- Conditions have worsened, not improved, because of force-fed austerity, not badly needed stimulus to create jobs, reemploy people, and revive real economic growth, not the illusory kind since the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) officially declared June 2009 the end of recession.At 11:05AM on July 8, Obama commented from the Rose Garden, doing what he does best – dissembling and distorting reality to conceal what’s going on and why. His best shot was saying:“ We still have a long way to go and a lot of work to do to give people the security and opportunity that they deserve.” In fact, since day one in office, he’s done precisely the opposite, an agenda still in place. It includes bailing out criminal banks, their complicit counterparties, and other corporate favorites, as well as waging multiple imperial wars. At the same time, he stiff-armed budget strapped states and spurned efforts to create jobs, leaving unemployed Americans largely on their own sink or swim.
(...) By reengineering employment data accurately based on how calculated in the 1980s, economist John Williams reported 22.7% unemployed, not the fictitious 9.2%, showing a very sick economy. The only sensible comments from a Wall Street Journal editorial headlined, “The Jobs Double-Dip” were that: – most “Americans believe the economy is still in recession”– millions of lost jobs since 2008 haven’t been regained; and– “Obama’s economic advisors have been leaving one by one to return to private life, and who can blame them.”Bloomberg’s Timothy Homan quoted Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi’s chief financial economist Chris Rupkey saying he was “stunned” by Friday’s report. In fact, not a single economist surveyed predicted it. Apologists were everywhere blaming reality on “season adjustments (that are) really hard to predict,” according to BLS chief economist Betsey Stevenson, dissembling like Obama along with tout TV experts. In fact, manipulation distorts numbers more than seasonality. Notably, Zero Hedge.com said total full-time employment is the worst on record since data was first collected 43 years ago, based on Household Survey numbers.In addition, the employment to population ratio is the lowest since post-war 1940s when far fewer women were employed.Simply put, conditions are dismally bad, getting worse, but worst of all is yet to come because bad policies assure it.In his latest economic assessment, Progressive Radio News Hour regular, economist Jack Rasmus, headlined his article, “The Predicted Job Collapse Now In Progress,” saying:Months ago he predicted earlier reported job gains would “collapse…. That prediction is now underway,” based on July’s dismal data.
(...) Ongoing bipartisan deficit cutting negotiations plan something on the order of cutting “$3 dollars in spending (for) every tax dollar raised…. mostly (slashing) Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and government aid to education,” the most vital programs to preserve.In other words, back room deals are dismantling America’s social democracy, while assuring largesse for Wall Street, other corporate favorites and war profiteers, continuing America’s road to tyranny and ruin.In fact, Rasmus predicts that the top corporate tax rate will be slashed from 35 – 20%, so for every dollar in tax revenue raised, big business will get back $2 in revenue, courtesy of working household taxpayers. Over the past three decades, “(t)his political shell game” reduced corporations’ tax burden (as a percent of federal revenues) from around 20% to today’s average of 10% or less.”Moreover, gaming the system lets companies like General Electric earn billions of dollars in profits, supplemented by billions back in tax rebates. Meanwhile, global economies are slowing or cratering like Japan, Australia, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Eastern European ones and others. As a result, healthier ones feel the pinch. Consumer spending is affected. Global trade is slowing. So are US manufacturing and service areas. As a result, “there is no ‘light at the end of the economic growth tunnel’ for renewed economic or significant job creation from the (US) private sector” to compensate, in part, for continued federal, state and local government job cuts. It’s not hard seeing where this trend is heading. It portends hard times getting harder when many millions already lost jobs, steady incomes, homes and future prospects because governments at all levels plan tougher than ever conditions ahead to transfer more wealth to America’s super-rich already with too much. While millions rage across Middle East, North Africa, and European countries, it’s hard understanding why Americans so willingly let corrupt government officials steal them blind and destroy their lives. It’s long past time they got mad enough to stop it because nothing will change things otherwise.
Why is the Most Wasteful Government Agency Not Part of the Deficit Discussion? WITH REVEALING GRAPHICS! THE PENTAGON IS THE NEXUS OF SOME OF THE WORST CORRUPTION ON THIS PLANET!
http://onthecommons.org/why-most-wasteful-government-agency-not-part-deficit-discussionRepublicans ignore incompetence, bloat and corruption at the Pentagon -- In all the talk about the federal deficit, why is the single largest culprit left out of the conversation? Why is the one part of government that best epitomizes everything conservatives say they hate about government—- waste, incompetence, and corruption—all but exempt from conservative criticism?Of course, I’m talking about the Pentagon. Any serious battle plan to reduce the deficit must take on the Pentagon. In 2011 military spending accounted for more than 58 percent of all federal discretionary spending and even more if the interest on the federal debt that is related to military spending were added. In the last ten years we have spent more than $7.6 trillion on military and homeland security according to the National Priorities Project. In the last decade military spending has soared from $300 billion to $700 billion. When debt ceilings and deficits seem to be the only two items on Washington’s agenda, it is both revealing and tragic that both parties give a free pass to military spending. Representative Paul Ryan’s much discussed Tea Party budget accepted Obama’s proposal for a pathetic $78 billion reduction in military spending over 5 years, a recommendation that would only modestly slow the rate of growth of military spending.
(...) Adding insult to injury, last September, the GAO found that the new computer systems intended to improve the Pentagon’s financial oversight are themselves nearly 100 percent or $7 billion over budget and as much as 12 years behind schedule! The Pentagon is not just incompetent. It is corrupt. In November 2009 the Pentagon’s Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), the federal watchdog responsible for auditing oversight of military contractors, raised the question of criminal wrongdoing when it found that the audits that did occur were riddled with serious breaches of auditor independence. One Pentagon auditor admitted he did not perform detailed tests because, “The contractor would not appreciate it.”Why would the Pentagon allow its contractors to get away with fraud? To answer that question we need to understand the incestuous relationship between the Pentagon and its contractors that has been going on for years, and is getting worse. From 2004 to 2008, 80 percent of retiring three and four star officers went to work as consultants or defense industry executives. Thirty-four out of 39 three- and four-star generals and admirals who retired in 2007 are now working in defense industry roles — nearly 90 percent. CLIP
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