By Michael Whipple, Editor usACTIONnews.com

As more workers stop filing or run out of benefits they are no longer counted as “unemployed” for the unemployment rate. So as the economy worsens we are actually seeing the rate drop a few tenths of a point which is heralded with great delight in the Obama campaign.

Some are retiring early or signing up for disability benefits. Some just work for cash or struggle in home based enterprises to make ends meet.

Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute in her analysis of the BLS jobs report January 6th 2012:

“Two years ago, in December 2009, the unemployment rate was 9.9 percent, and it is now 8.5 percent. How much improvement does that drop actually represent?  Given weak job prospects, many would-be workers dropped out of (or never entered) the labor force over this period, a trend that reduces the measured unemployment rate but does not represent real improvement in employment.  If the workers who comprise the drop in the labor force participation rate (from 64.6 percent to 64.0 percent) over the last two years were counted as unemployed, the unemployment rate would be 9.5 percent now instead of 8.5 percent.” [emphasis added]

The number of people working is at a low not seen since 1981. The recently released Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report on the economy showed that if the workers that have left the rolls were counted the unemployment rate would be 10%. The jubilation of the Obama campaign press over a miniscule drop in the rate is great for campaign speeches but the reality is much grimmer as the report points out:

Participation in the Labor Force. The unemployment rate would be even higher than it is now had participation in the labor force not declined as much as it has over the past few years. The rate of participation in the labor force fell from 66 percent in 2007 to an average of 64 percent in the second half of 2011,  an unusually large decline over so short a time.

Had that portion of the decline in the labor force participation rate since 2007 that is attributable to neither the aging of the baby boomers nor the downturn in the business cycle (on the basis of the experience in previous downturns) not occurred, the unemployment rate in the fourth quarter of 2011 would have been about 1¼ percentage points higher than the actual rate of 8.7 percent. [emphasis added]

Thus the “real” unemployment rate is almost 10%. The report also shows that increased taxes in 2013 that are already law will have a further negative impact noted as a “dampening effect”:

By CBO’s estimates, the rate of labor force participation will fall to slightly above 63 percent by 2017. The dampening effects of the increase in tax rates in 2013 scheduled under current law and additional retirements by baby boomers are projected to more than offset the strengthening effects of growing demand for labor as the economy recovers further.

CNBC’s Rick Santelli came to basically the same conclusion:

No wonder fears of an economic collapse top a survey of what Americans worry about:

Maybe that is also why so many fear four more years of Obama:

U.S. News reports on Synovate eNation Internet poll conducted December 29-January 2 that shows 33% of Americans fear four more years of Obama. Only 16% are afraid of Obama losing in 2012.

“in results backed up by other polls, older Americans and those earning $75,000 or more are especially worried about the president getting a second term, according to the poll done by Synovate eNation.

Nearly half of Americans 65 and older said Obama’s reelection was their top fear, 39 percent of those making $75,000 or more agreed.”

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Senator Jim DeMint discusses earmarks, term limits, and corporate welfare on CNBC’s Kudlow Report. The Democrat majority in the senate continues to block efforts to eliminate corporate welfare in the energy industry and a ban on earmarks.

“I don’t think we’re going to get it done this year with this president. While he talks about it, we’ve never gotten a Democrat to support  any form of tax reform that I’m aware of. They just like to complain about it.” -DeMint

“So as I get this picture, we are in a heap of fiscal trouble, on the edge of bankruptcy, the economy is badly performing, the jobless rate is too high and what i’m hearing is NOTHING. Nothing. No Simpson-Bowles, no corporate tax reform, no end to corporate welfare, no end to corporate cronyism, no end to earmarks. This is why you see these polls running against congress as high as those polls are. I just don’t understand it.” – Larry Kudlow

If you have any doubts about the Marxist philosophy of the current occupant of the White House consider this prior post:

Mark Levin: Obama is a Marxist

Levin worries that four more years of Obama will ruin America. He says we are already in a post-constitutional era. Levine also says he would vote for a can of orange juice over Obama.

We have been warning about Obama’s tyrannical socialist agenda for two years. Obama taught Saul Alinsky as a community organizer.

Obama is a socialist. Merriam-Webster defines socialism as “any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or government ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.” A socialist is “one who advocates or practices socialism.

Accuracy in Media was one of the earliest to recognize and expose the socialist/Marxist early connections of Obama with posts like Conservatives Behind the Curve on Obama,  The Marxist Roots of Obama’s Rage, Part One , The Marxist Roots of Obama’s Rage, Part Two , and Exposing Un-American Activities.

A Townhall.com article by Terry Jeffrey the Editor-in-chief of CNSNews.com cries ‘Hannity’s Right: Obama Is a Socialist‘. Mr. Jeffrey points out that Hannity has been claiming that Obama is a socialist for some time.:

Obama, for example, practiced socialism with General Motors.

Last year, he directed the government to take 60 percent ownership of GM. Congress had not enacted legislation authorizing him to do this. He simply took money out of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which had been appropriated to buy assets from financial institutions (not manufacturers), and bought the federal government an auto company.

Obama’s greatest socialist act so far, however, is the national health care system he signed into law last month.

Recent books expose like Stanley Kurtz Radical-in-Chief research the socialist past of Obam. Another book, Dupes by Paul Kengor, makes use of Obama’s communist mentor, Communist Party USA member Frank Marshall Davis which was first exposed by New Zeal blogger Trevor Loudon.

Even the mainstream Forbes ran an article proclaiming Obama as a Fabian Socialist as early as the day before the 2008 election. Considering what has happened in the two years since this was written it is amazingly prophetic:

Fabians believed in gradual nationalization of the economy through manipulation of the democratic process. Breaking away from the violent revolutionary socialists of their day, they thought that the only real way to effect “fundamental change” and “social justice” was through a mass movement of the working classes presided over by intellectual and cultural elites. Before TV it was stage plays, written by George Bernard Shaw and thousands of inferior “realist” playwrights dedicated to social change.

That’s the Fabian MO, relentless cultural and journalistic attacks on everything that is, and then a hard pitch for the hope of what might be.

That’s Obama’s world.

He’s telling the truth when he says that he doesn’t agree with Bill Ayers’ violent bombing tactics, but it’s a tactical disagreement. Why use dynamite when mass media and community organizing work so much better?

So here is the playbook: The left will identify, freeze, personalize and polarize an industry, probably health care. It will attempt to nationalize one-fifth of the U.S. economy through legislative action. They will focus, as Lenin did, on the “commanding heights” of the economy, not the little guy.

It may not be health care first; it might be energy, though I suspect that energy will be nationalized much more gradually. The offshore drilling ban that was allowed to lapse legislatively will be reinstated through executive means. It may be an executive order, but might just as well be a permit reviewing system that theoretically allows drilling but with endless levels of objection and appeal from anti-growth groups. Wind and solar, on the other hand, will have no permitting problems at all, and a heavy taxpayer subsidy at their backs.

And now the popular American Thinker site ran an article by Dupes author Paul Kengor relating the interview with Obama’s fellow Marxist from his days at’Moscow of southern California’ Occidental College:

Kengor: You said that Obama was introduced to you at Occidental College as a Marxist? Because you were one [a Marxist] at that point?

 

Drew: Yeah, that’s embarrassing for me, but I studied Marxist economics when I was at the University of Sussex in England. I had a junior-year scholarship over there and I did my senior honors thesis on Marxist economics when I was at Occidental College. And I also founded [the] Democratic Student Socialist Alliance, you know, under a different name, in 1976.

 

Kengor: John, now you had told me before, and I’m reading from my own book here, “Obama was already an ardent Marxist when I met him in the fall of 1980. [Quotation from above continued.]“

 

Drew: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Obama believed, at the time I met him — this was probably around Christmastime in 1980 — because, you know, I had flown out during Christmas break from Cornell, where I was doing my graduate work. Young Obama was looking forward to an imminent social revolution — literally a movement where the working classes would overthrow the ruling class and institute a kind of socialist utopia in the United States. I mean, that’s how extreme his views were his sophomore year of college.

 

Kengor: And you would know this because you were a comrade, so to speak.

 

Drew: Yeah, I was a comrade, but I was kind of more what Michael Savage called the “Frankfurt School” of Marxism at the time. I was, you know, I felt like I was doing Obama a favor by pointing out that the Marxist revolution that he and [our friends] were hoping for was really kind of a pipe dream, and that there was nothing in European history or the history of developed nations that would make that sort of fantasy — you know, Frank Marshall Davis fantasy of revolution — come true.

And there was the slip up Obama had with Joe the plumber during the election where he revealed his true philosophy of ’spread the wealth around’. And he is doing plenty of that. Every major bill Obama supports is a transfer of wealth. They either take directly from those who have money and give it to others or he uses deficit spending to force future generations to pay it. As Alan Greenspan said “Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.”

Obama and his Socialist Democrats know this. Yet Mitt Romney still refuses to call Obama a socialist. Is he afraid he will hurt Obama’s feelings? Is he afraid he will be called a racist? Or is it that since Romney is a Progressive and a progressive is essentially a socialist that Romney just doesn’t know the difference?

Rick Perry has called Obama a socialist. Gingrich has called his policies socialist. Bachmann has said Obama “has ushered in socialism.” Is Romney clueless or afraid to fight?

We have a president who promised a plan that would ‘skyrocket’ electricity rates, and uses the  EPA that bases its illegal and tyrannical power grab on fraudulent data and suppressed any dissent to push his agenda, and an administration that is collectively working to ruin the oil, steel, coal, and cement industries. An administration that ignores the will of the people and its congress and seems to be doing all it can to destroy jobs and the economy while promising to make jobs and economic growth its first priority.

Just look at the ideologues Obama chooses as his advisers.  His cabinets are pushing “environmental justice” as a scheme for redistributing wealth. His energy secretary Steven Chu is on the record as having said we need higher gas prices like those in Europe. Obama warned us during his 2008 campaign that “under my plan electricity rates will necessarily have to skyrocket.” Obama hired an anti-commerce commerce secretary in John Bryson.

Obama also picked a “spread the wealth” progressive lawyer for his top economist.

Saying “We haven’t heard this kind of talk except from pure socialists” Wynn Resorts CEO Steve Wynn railed against Obama’s redistributionist anti-business policies. Wynn, a Democrat,  says:

“But I’m afraid to do anything in the current political environment in the United States. I’m saying it bluntly, that this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business and progress and job creation in my lifetime. Well this is Obama’s deal, and it’s Obama that’s responsible for this fear in America. The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution, and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don’t invest or holding too much money. We haven’t heard this kind of talk except from pure socialists”

Speaking of businessmen, Charles Gasparino a senior correspondent for Fox business Network had this exchange with John Stossel:

“If you talk to some of these guys, you talk to Jamie Diamond the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, big Obama supporter, he said listen I voted for Obama because yes I wanted change. I wanted to help people. I didn’t want to create new entitlements you know, I didn’t want to sort of redistribute wealth.

This is what they really thought. They thought he was a moderate.

You know what I said to these guys? I said have you ever heard of Jeremiah Wright? I mean Jeremiah Wright, his racist rhetoric, its there, but he’s also a Marxist. He teaches liberation theology. How can you vote for a man who considers, and you’re a businessman, considers a Marxist to be his spiritual mentor?”

Bernie Marcus Home Depot co-founder told Neil Cavuto that we will never be able to pay off this debt and that if we continue these policies we will be ‘dead in the water’. ‘I don’t know what he’s smoking’ he said of VP Biden’s stimulus propaganda. He said Obama administration doesn’t “have a clue” on small business.

This is collectivism also known as Marxism. All income belongs to the group, the collective to be redistributed as the government determines what is “fair.” This was Obama’s purpose in spending so much. His argument now is that we must tax (take more) to pay for the spending he has done.

Obama has surrounded himself with Socialists, Marxists and Communists. Yes it sounds extreme but consider:

Anita Dunn former White House interim communications director and chief Fox-basher who praised communist China’s revolutionary murderer Mao as one of her two favorite political philosophers. Or Bill Ayers early Obama friend, political supporter and unrepentant domestic terrorist who coauthored the Weather Underground Manifesto. Author Stanley Kurtz exposed the influence of Bill Ayers in the political development of Barack Obama.

And can we really believe that Obama was unaware of the Mao ornament on the White House Christmas tree?

His appointments reflect his socialist Marxist ideology. His science czar, Holdren, and his recent appointment to Medicare & Medicaid, Berwick have both espoused beliefs in the ’spread the wealth’ philosophy which is Marxism. Marxism is inherently anti-business.

Obama’s pick for his top economic advisory position, Gene Sperling, is a ’spread the wealth’ attorney with little real economic experience. Sperling wrote “Those who create great wealth do so on the backs and shoulders of previous generations of taxpayers…” and “The notion that ‘you earned it’ is more correctly, ‘you earned it with the indispensable help of the government.’”

Sperling is also a former Fellow at The Center for American Progress which is a George Soros funded left wing think tank that includes radical communists like Van Jones a former Obama White House staffer.

Among Obama’s leading advisers were the head of Center for American Progress John Podesta and at least ten additional CAP experts. Bloomberg wrote about it as the Soros-Funded Democratic Idea Factory Becomes Obama Policy Font.

The plain and simple truth is that Obama is a Marxist. He told us in the campaign that he wanted to ’spread the wealth around’. He sat at the feet of avowed Marxist Jeremiah Wright for 20 years and claimed him as a mentor. He had a self proclaimed communist revolutionary on his White House staff as a ‘Green Jobs’ czar in Van Jones. In his own book Obama states that he sought out ‘The Marxist Professors’ in college and points out that he ‘went to socialist conferences’.

Even the mainstream Forbes ran an article proclaiming Obama as a Fabian Socialist as early as the day before the 2008 election. Considering what has happened in the two years since this was written it is amazingly prophetic:

Fabians believed in gradual nationalization of the economy through manipulation of the democratic process. Breaking away from the violent revolutionary socialists of their day, they thought that the only real way to effect “fundamental change” and “social justice” was through a mass movement of the working classes presided over by intellectual and cultural elites. Before TV it was stage plays, written by George Bernard Shaw and thousands of inferior “realist” playwrights dedicated to social change.

That’s the Fabian MO, relentless cultural and journalistic attacks on everything that is, and then a hard pitch for the hope of what might be.

That’s Obama’s world.

He’s telling the truth when he says that he doesn’t agree with Bill Ayers’ violent bombing tactics, but it’s a tactical disagreement. Why use dynamite when mass media and community organizing work so much better?

So here is the playbook: The left will identify, freeze, personalize and polarize an industry, probably health care. It will attempt to nationalize one-fifth of the U.S. economy through legislative action. They will focus, as Lenin did, on the “commanding heights” of the economy, not the little guy.

It may not be health care first; it might be energy, though I suspect that energy will be nationalized much more gradually. The offshore drilling ban that was allowed to lapse legislatively will be reinstated through executive means. It may be an executive order, but might just as well be a permit reviewing system that theoretically allows drilling but with endless levels of objection and appeal from anti-growth groups. Wind and solar, on the other hand, will have no permitting problems at all, and a heavy taxpayer subsidy at their backs.

Alan Greenspan explains the Obama anti-business game plane in his prescient 1966 article  “Gold and Economic Freedom“:

“Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. A substantial part of the confiscation is effected by taxation. But the welfare statists were quick to recognize that if they wished to retain political power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e., they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds, to finance welfare expenditures on a large scale.

Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.”

How could any reasonable person think that Obama cares anything about business? To Obama and his leftover sixties hippie advisers who have spent their entire lives either in the shelter of government or in quasi governmental academia, business is evil and the manifestation of all that is wrong with capitalism.

More recently we have Obama explaining his socialist vision in saying the government should determine how much money you should be “allowed” to keep.

Obama’s idea of taxation is ideological not revenue. In his campaign he noted that he wanted to raise capital gains tax to be “fair” even if it meant LESS tax revenue.

This is why a recent focus group by Frank Lutz showed that more people are realizing Obama really is a socialist. Consider these quotes from political leaders;

Rep. Allen West: “I’m Sick & Tired of This Marxist Demagogic Rhetoric of the President”

Rep. Allen West rips Obama again – “low level socialist agitator”

Obama “is anti-business…it’s starting to look Marxist to me,” – National Black Chamber of Commerce founder

Rep. Bachmann says Obama ‘has ushered in socialism’

“I can’t believe what he says anymore” – Jim DeMint on Obama – “pure socialism”

Hopefully mainstream America is waking up to the fact that Obama is far out of the mainstream. Far left.

Are we going to believe what they SAY or what they DO?

By Michael Whipple, Editor usACTIONnews.com

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By By JIM VANDEHEI | 2/2/12 | at Politico

EXCERPTS:

There are a bunch of real-time numbers coming in that tell a much different tale.

In short, there’s a new Congressional Budget Office report that shows unemployment likely to climb to nearly 9 percent by the election, there’s polling data showing Obama tied or trailing Mitt Romney in the most important swing states (and doing only marginally better against Ron Paul), and there is mounting evidence that the assumption of a decisive Obama fundraising advantage for the fall might be flat wrong. All of this is happening while Republicans are at their worst, with Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrichspending millions of dollars and using all of their air time explaining why the other is untrustworthy, deeply flawed and eminently beatable by Obama.

FULL ARTICLE

By DANIEL HENNINGER at The Wall Street Journal

EXCERPT:

It could work. If we know nothing else about Barack Obama it is that he can play “hope” like a Stradivarius. The version of “An Economy Built to Last” that he performed at Intel is his concerto for re-election.

The Obama-Axelrod-Plouffe team knows that the Republicans instinctively will respond by quoting, endlessly, the poor economic data of the Obama years. They plan to turn this reality on its head as well.

The GOP is appealing, as its candidates so often do, to the American brain. Barack Obama is happy to be left by himself, going for their hearts. If he wins, the Republican will wail at the unfairness, irrationality and illogic of what beat them.

FULL ARTICLE

Grace Wyler  at Business Insider

EXCERPT:

Even Santorum didn’t seem to buy his own positive spin. The candidate wandered around the parking lot virtually unattended, apparently unable to recall the sparkly retail politicking that led to his surprising victory in Iowa just a few weeks ago.

FULL ARTICLE

Mercatus scholars and economists Veronique de Rugy and Jason Fichtner weigh in on the even worse likely future.

VERONIQUE DE RUGY:

“The CBO baseline only takes into consideration current law, so it counts the savings from the expiration of provisions like the Bush tax cuts, doc fix, and AMT patch,” said Veronique de Rugy. The alternative baseline is what we should be looking at, because it’s a more realistic vision based on past experiences. The savings are not likely to materialize because we’ve been extending these types of provisions for years, and are likely to do so again.”

“Unfortunately the alternative baseline is much worse. We’re only a few years away from the biggest explosion of spending since the second world war, and Americans are in denial if they think that the situation can be fixed without radical changes,” said de Rugy. “The U.S. is headed toward bankruptcy. All we have to do is look to Europe to see what happens when countries refuse to face reality.”

JASON FICHTNER:

“For those concerned about our fiscal future, the CBO report is usually a reality check on the cost of servicing our debt” said Fichtner. “The best case scenario is that it would stay constant or lower slightly due to a pickup in economic growth and low inflation and borrowing costs. The more likely scenario is red ink for as far as the eye can see. This means the cost of servicing our debt will begin to take over our ability to pay for what we rely on like defense, education, Social Security, and more.”

“This is the first major report of the year that shows where spending is headed,” said Fichtner. “It’s what the Congress will use as a comparison to the OMB baseline when the president releases his budget on February 13th.”

Mitt finally turns his negative comments to Obama in these highlights from his Florida victory speech.