By Thomas Sowell at IBD Editorials

EXCERPTS:

Similar episodes of unprovoked violence by young black gangs against white people chosen at random on beaches, in shopping malls or in other public places have occurred in Philadelphia, New York, Denver, Chicago, Cleveland, Washington, Los Angeles and other places across the country.

A wave of such attacks in Chicago were reported, but not the race of the attackers or victims.

What the authorities and the media seem determined to suppress is that the hoodlum elements in many ghettos launch coordinated attacks on whites in public places.

Those who automatically say that the social pathology of the ghetto is due to poverty, discrimination and the like cannot explain why such pathology was far less prevalent in the 1950s, when poverty and discrimination were worse. But there were not nearly as many grievance mongers and race hustlers then.

FULL ARTICLE

By Ileana Johnson Paugh

“The Powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the People.” (Tenth Amendment)

While the people of Tombstone, Arizona, are waiting to get water back on line, the federal government is asking them for $80,000 in order to tell me why they cannot have it back unless they use only simple tools to do it with, like hand tools and wheelbarrows. Boulders the size of Volkswagens are trapping the waterlines, buried in some places under 12 ft of mud.

USDA Forest Service alludes to provisions in the Wilderness Act, which forbids the use of heavy machinery. According to Joe Wolverton, II, “water rights granted to Tombstone by the previous title owners predate the enactment of the Wilderness Act by about 80 years.” (The New American)

“The Town too Tough to Die” of 1,600 inhabitants had found itself in the middle of a terrible life and death quandary as a result of the Monument Fire in 2011 which destroyed the Huachuca Mountains pipelines carrying water to the town from the source in the Miller Canyon Wilderness Area. (Joe Wolverton, II, The New American)

According to Hugh Holub, water rights expert, quoted by Joe Wolverton, II,

Sec. of Interior Salazar

“Though the water may originate on National Forest lands, Bureau of Land Management lands, and other federally managed lands, the rights to that water belongs to the farms and ranches and cities.” Lawyers for this administration and environmentalists disagree.

The Club of Rome proclaims in their 1990 publication, The First Global Revolution, on page 75, “The common enemy of humanity is Man.” The paragraph beneath this title describes how they concocted the idea of man-made global warming.

“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea of pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill…The real enemy is humanity itself.”

Water shortages can be real or government manufactured like the case of Tombstone, Arizona. The EPA started a “green war” against farmers in the fertile San Joaquin Valley in California; it left one of America’s main agricultural regions a dust bowl in 2009. The EPA-made drought put many farmers out of business, thousands became jobless, and millions of Americans paid higher prices for fruits and vegetables imported from other countries that could have been grown in California. EPA and the environmentalists protected a tiny fish, the delta smelt, while endangering humans.

Maurice Strong and Al Gore are members of the Club of Rome and involved in privately owned carbon-trading groups who stand to gain billions if the man-made global warming fraud survives and the EPA continues to destroy our economy, jobs, and our way of life.

A world government is gaining tract through social science consensus. There is nothing scientific about social science; it is strictly the opinion of a group of people who are in consensus or agreement concerning the need to regulate the planet in line with their beliefs. Science is exact and a fact. Social science is an opinion and a belief derived from personal experience, perception, or five-point scale surveys of groups of like-minded individuals and ignorant people.

In preparation for the UN Agenda Rio +20 conference in June 2012, F. Biermann et al., 33 social scientists, published in Science magazine on March 16, 2012, their contribution to the “earth system governance and planetary stewardship.” The article appears under the heading Science and Government, “Navigating the Anthropocene: Improving Earth System Governance.”

It does not take a rocket scientist to determine that government policy is not science, consensus is not scientific, and the liberals’ mantra, “global warming science is settled,” is a lie.

Biermann et al. proposed “seven building blocks,” the result of social science-based research conducted in 2011 by the Earth System Governance Project. This paper was designed to “contribute to the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, which will focus on the institutional framework for sustainable development and possible reforms of the intergovernmental governance system.” The writers believe that, in spite of differences of opinion among social scientists, there is an increasing consensus in many areas, therefore the planet must be ready for one world governance, erasing all traces of sovereignty in the name of saving the planet.

1. A global environmental agency similar to the World Health Organization should be formed to set agendas, develop norms, manage compliance, assess science, and build capacity.

1. Integrate sustainable development from local to global levels into a powerful United Nations Sustainable Development Council.

1. “Better integration of sustainability governance requires governments to close remaining regulatory gaps at the global level,” including the sharing of nanotechnology, synthetic biology, and geo-engineering.

Closing regulatory gaps explains the Executive Order on May 1, 2012 on Promoting International Regulatory Cooperation. “The purpose of the E.O. is to encourage the harmonization of regulatory requirements to simplify regulatory compliance, reduce costs for transnational companies and facilitate international trade.” (Jonathan H. Adler)

1. Governments must place a “stronger emphasis on planetary concerns in economic governance.”

1. Voting on global policy must be weighted for some countries and no veto power granted to anyone in order to speed up international norm setting.

1. “Global governance through UN-type institutions tends to give a larger role to international and domestic bureaucracies, at the cost of national parliaments.”

A simple translation – global governance would supersede national governments. Countries would be divided into regions and/or different interests such as environmentalists, industry, youth, etc. The United States would thus no longer have states; we would have regions and regionalism under the aegis of the United Nations Sustainable Development Council.

1. Equity and fairness (read socialism/communism) would guide the transfer of wealth to poorer countries. The paper proposes “novel financial mechanisms to transfer wealth through global emissions markets and air transportation levies for sustainability purposes.” The middle class would completely disappear under such equity and fairness. Everyone would be equally poor and miserable, with the self-appointed global governance elites at the top.

The paper oozes a sense of urgency, like thieves trying to steal as much loot as possible before they are discovered and unmasked. These 33 social scientists do not want to stop just at transfer of wealth, destroying the middle class, erasing national boundaries, and neutering national governments, they want to “change the behavior of citizens,” and re-orient “the private sector toward a green economy.”

Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh ( Romanian Conservative) is a freelance writer (usACTIONnews.com, Canada Free Press, Romanian Conservative), author, radio commentator, and speaker. Her book, “Echoes of Communism, is available at Amazon in paperback and Kindle. Short essays describe health care, education, poverty, religion, social engineering, and confiscation of property. Visit her website, ileanajohnson.com.

Dr. Johnson can be reached at: ileana1959@gmail.com

By Robert Stacy McCain at American Spectator

EXCERPTS:

Soros’s Open Society Institute has given $75,000 to the Center for Social Inclusion, which has also received more than $850,000 from the Soros-connected Tides Foundation/Tides Center since 2005, according to documents obtained by The American Spectator.

In a training session for House Democrats and their congressional staffers last week, Center for Social Inclusion founder and president Maya Wiley described “conservative messages” as being “racially coded,” and suggested that Democrats “raise racial disparities” in public policy discussions, Joel Gerhke of the Washington Examiner reported.

FULL ARTICLE

By Jonah Golberg at National Review Online

EXCERPTS:

… one of the fascinating aspects of “social justice” is that it sounds so pleasing and innocuous, a term any politician can use in a speech or signing statement.

… the United Nations insists that “social justice is not possible without strong and coherent redistributive policies conceived and implemented by public agencies.”

“Social justice” has become an abracadabra phrase granting the state access to every nook and cranny of life.

The only way for social justice to make sense is if you operate from the assumption that the invisible hand of the market should be amputated and replaced with the very visible hand of the state. In other words, each explicit demand for social justice carries with it the implicit but necessary requirement that the state do the fixing. And a society dedicated to the pursuit of perfect social justice must gradually move more and more decisions under the command of the state, until it is the sole moral agent.

FULL ARTICLE

By Cliff Kincaid

On Thursday, May 10, The Washington Post Company held its annual meeting. AIM was there because of our ownership of company stock, enabling us to grill top brass about the condition of the newspaper and the company in general. The value of the company’s stock has fallen by 50 percent over the last five years.

But the worst may be yet to come. Kaplan, the Post subsidiary that has served as the cash cow for the paper that brought us the Watergate scandal that destroyed Republican Richard Nixon’s presidency, is going through scandal and financial turmoil.

In addition to growing concern over Kaplan, a for-profit educational institution, this year’s meeting featured questions about the paper’s controversial financial relationship with newspapers owned and controlled by the Russian and Chinese governments. Post Company chairman Donald E. Graham didn’t have any second thoughts over the paper being used, through paid advertisements, to promote Russian and Chinese propaganda to an American audience.

The meeting started at 9 a.m., before many people had probably seen what the Post was reporting in its print and online editions that day.

Copies of the paper were distributed for free to shareholders. But a story about Mitt Romney supposedly bullying a gay classmate was not in the print edition of that day’s paper. The story was published in the print edition the next day, Friday, and included an old photo of a young Romney playing around by pointing a toy gun to his chin under the caption, “Give a guy enough rope and he’ll hang himself.”

RELATED: Watch the MSNBC Mashup: “Bullying Mitt Romney”

These pranks and jokes happened around 1965, and conservative commentators are having fun mocking the paper for devoting so much attention to these “troubling incidents,” as the paper puts it.

What is more troubling is what has happened to the Post, which does a good job of covering local news through such papers as The Calvert Recorder in Calvert County, Maryland, but which is suffering circulation and revenue declines because of its national newspaper product. The Calvert Recorder is part of the Southern Maryland Newspapers group, which is owned by the Post.

Dana Loesch of Big Journalism points out that the Post has already corrected the Romney story, without acknowledging that a correction was made. The correction was of the paper’s report that a former Romney classmate had “long been bothered” by the Romney bullying incident, when in fact, he wasn’t witness to it and only recently heard about it. It is troubling that the Post would embellish the story and then retract the charge without comment or an apology.

Romney reportedly helped pin a boy down and cut his hair off. There is no evidence Romney knew the boy was a homosexual and Romney can’t remember the incident. Yet, this is being presented by the paper in the context of Obama standing up for the rights of the poor gays, while his Republican opponent has a history of intimidating and harassing them.

There can be no doubt that the Post intended to damage Romney’s candidacy with this “news” story. This is typical of a liberal paper that faithfully promotes most of the liberal policies of the Obama Administration—except when it comes to regulating for-profit educational companies such as Post subsidiary Kaplan.

In a story that AIM has covered extensively, the paper itself is losing money and has been kept afloat by Kaplan, which is supposed to educate people at a profit. Those profits, however, have been hit by Kaplan educational practices that that have been exposed for taking advantage of poor students seeking good jobs but who end up with tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of federal loan debt for classes and degrees that didn’t adequately prepare them for the real world.

At the annual meeting, Post chairman Donald E. Graham did not dispute the claim that the company had spent $1 million lobbying against the regulations. He himself personally lobbied members of Congress and has no apologies for it.

In order to forestall the new federal regulations, the Post even hired a lobbying firm that included former Obama aide Anita Dunn.

The additional federal regulation of Kaplan came after congressional hearings were held into its controversial practices. The scandal came to be known as The Washington Post’s Watergate.

But the Post, of course, didn’t cover this as a scandal. Instead, chairman Graham led an effort to defeat the proposed regulations. In the end, they were watered down, under the lobbying pressure, but have still taken a toll on Kaplan’s profit picture and future earnings.

Those who attended the annual meeting were lobbied themselves, as they were given a free copy of the book, Change.edu: Rebooting for the New Talent Economy, written by Kaplan chairman and CEO Andrew S. Rosen and published by Kaplan itself.

Graham urged people at the annual meeting to read the book as well as a favorable review of the book by Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates. A copy of that review, included with the book given to stockholders, was—not surprisingly—published in The Washington Post.

It was a clear-cut example of how the paper intends to use its resources on its own behalf. These are desperate times and the company is fighting for its survival.

I was tempted to ask Graham that if Gates had submitted a review that panned the Rosen book, would it have been published in the Post. I think we know the answer to that one.

It is a sensitive subject. Melinda Gates, the wife of Bill Gates, was a member of the board of The Washington Post Company from 2004 to 2010. She resigned after the release of a report from The Education Trust, funded partly by her foundation, highly critical of for-profit educational institutions such as Kaplan.

The website for the Rosen book features smiling students who have presumably benefitted from Kaplan. But as Rusty Weiss pointed out in a special report from the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, students and especially veterans targeted by Kaplan have been making some of the most important complaints against it.

Weiss noted that one review said that many students are finding that the grandiose promises of careers and large salaries from Kaplan recruiters “were merely a sales ploy—and in fact, the product offered by Kaplan has substantially less value than that offered by traditional public and private colleges.”

Now, in order to make up for declining revenues, the Post has been engaging in some more controversial financial dealings that may constitute a scandal in their own right. The Post is running paid ads from the Russian and Chinese governments that are made to look like news sections of the paper. The ads, some of them six pages long, even carry a facsimile of The Washington Post masthead.

In relatively small print it says they are paid supplements and have nothing to do with the paper’s news or editorial departments. But The Washington Post masthead or logo is more prominently featured.

In a conversation after the annual meeting, Eric Lieberman, vice president and counsel for the Post, agreed that allowing foreign regimes to use the Post masthead in their advertising might present a problem. But no promise was made to alter the practice.

The ads online are even more questionable, for the Russian ad shows The Washington Post masthead even more prominently featured above the Russia Now title of the section.

Technically, this section, or “pull-out,” from the paper is produced and published by Rossiyskaya Gazeta, an official Russian government paper.

The online China Watch advertising supplement is not as blatant. Still, it shows The Washington Post masthead on one side and China Watch on the other. China Watch is “presented” by China Daily, a state-controlled newspaper.

Readers are thus given the impression that the propaganda has the approval of the Post.

Graham wasn’t concerned about carrying the ads and even indicated he was open to more paid advertisements from questionable regimes. For him, it was a matter of revenue.

Asked if he would take an ad from al-Qaeda, he didn’t rule it out, although he said he thought that would be extremely unlikely. He pointed out that the paper had run a long column by the Unabomber and that it had helped the FBI nab the terrorist. The Unabomber’s “manifesto” was run after the FBI was consulted and agreed that it would help uncover his identity. It was not a paid ad.

The notion that the Post is getting too close to odious regimes is buttressed by the February 13 report from the paper’s ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, in an extraordinary column headlined, “Caving to China’s Demands.” Pexton noted that the Post had published the transcript of an interview with China’s vice president, Xi Jinping, which included questions and answers submitted by the Chinese regime, as if they had come from the paper.

After publishing the “interview,” Pexton said, Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli came to the conclusion that the transcript “could have misled readers into thinking it was a real interview” and so he published a correction explaining how it was manipulated by the regime.

Pexton went on to note, “It is also good to remember that The Post is tied to China through advertising revenue. Once a month The Post prints ‘China Watch,’ an advertising supplement in English that consists of stories aimed at a U.S. audience but written by China Daily, the house organ of the Chinese government. And The Post’s Web site hosts a regularly updated version of China Watch.”

This matter-of-fact statement doesn’t emphasize the questionable nature of this disturbing financial relationship, which also includes the Russian government.

It is time for the Post ombudsman, Watergate reporter Bob Woodward, and other Post reporters and editors to protest the curious financial relationships that are casting a pall over the paper’s journalistic reputation and integrity.

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.

by John Sexton at Big Journalism

EXCERPTS:

The donations by Soros suggest a new media strategy. Rather than fight an expensive air war of negative campaign ads, i.e. paid media, Soros is betting that Brock’s army of trackers will turn up embarrassing video which will result in free coverage via the mainstream media. Given the media’s leanings, that’s probably a safe bet.

A NY Times profile of the group’s activities published last summer described American Bridge as consisting of “dozens” of trackers sent to various key states and a Washington “war room” with a staff of 20 to collect and log video. The story indicates that federal election law prevents outside groups from producing ads based on video captured by DNC or campaign staff. Brock’s group will become a repository of clips available for use by those with outside money, though it’s not clear campaign ads will be necessary.

FULL ARTICLE

Editor’s note: Here is a great map of Soros connections from Muckety.com.

Just double click on the + in the boxes for more connections.

By Cliff Kincaid

Fox News contributor Jehmu Greene, a black feminist, says on her Twitter page that “love can build a bridge.” But racism, not love, was on display last Thursday when she called conservative Tucker Carlson a “bow-tying white boy.”

Greene, a Democratic Party operative who was the national director of Project Vote, a group with close ties to the corrupt ACORN organization, has not offered a public apology. There is no indication that her financial relationship with Fox News has suffered as a result of the racial outburst.

“Jehmu apologized to Tucker by phone after the segment,” Irena Briganti, Group Senior Vice President at FOX News Channel & FOX Business Network, tells Accuracy in Media.

This is apparently the end of the matter for Fox News.

Robert Lifson of American Thinker pointed out that if Tucker Carlson had ever called Louis Farrakhan “a bow-tying black boy,” he would be out of a job.

What’s more, Greene said on the air that she had not done anything wrong.

“Hey, hey, hey,” reacted Carlson, at the slur. “You can’t, wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa…You can use name calling all you like, but you’re ignoring the truth.”

“I didn’t call you a name,” replied Greene.

So calling somebody a “white boy” is acceptable to Greene.

As a Fox News Contributor, Greene is on the Fox News payroll and is paid to be a regular commentator on different programs.

At the time she was hired, ACORN whistleblower Anita Moncrief called Greene a Fox News “infiltrator,” saying, “Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck and other Fox News personalities have been vilified in the mainstream media and threatened in their personal lives for exposing ACORN. It is an insult to them and average Americans to have a former ACORN insider using Fox News to espouse her liberal bias.”

Moncrief asked why black conservatives were not being hired by the channel to be commentators.

Conservative media critics of Fox News were subsequently cheered by the channel’s hiring of Deneen Borelli, a black conservative, as a Fox News Contributor. She wrote the excellent book, Blacklash: How Obama and the Left Are Driving Americans to the Government Plantation, and was recently interviewed by Roger Aronoff of AIM.

But Greene is one of several left-wing commentators also hired by the channel, reflecting what Fox News CEO Roger Ailes has called a “course correction” from the days when it was considered a platform for outspoken conservative opinions.

Other left-wing commentators hired by Ailes include Sally Kohn, a lesbian feminist, and Santita Jackson, daughter of race-baiter Jesse Jackson.

Glenn Beck came under strong criticism when he said on Fox News that he considered President Obama a racist. Beck was forced to apologize and later lost his program on the channel.

Greene’s hiring by Fox News came after sustained criticism by liberal groups such as Media Matters of the conservative programming at Fox. Ironically, one of the Media Matters complaints against the channel was that its commentators too often used “racially charged commentary” and “race-baiting” in criticizing the Obama administration and liberal policies.

“There is an obvious double standard according to which blacks needn’t worry about showing the kind of ‘racial sensitivity’ that is always required of whites,” says Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, an organization that is often criticized by the Left for examining racial issues from the point of view of white self-interest. Taylor’s book, White Identity, argues that whites should not be afraid to exercise the same rights as other racial and groups.

Taylor told AIM that the double-standard that guides media coverage of racial controversies excuses racially-charged comments like those of Jehmu Greene as well as Melissa Harris-Perry of MSNBC. “Last year,” he noted, “Harris-Perry complained that it was ‘racist’ merely for a white person to point out that only 53 percent of Americans pay income taxes.”

“I think that’s just racism,” Harris-Perry had said, arguing that calling attention to such figures is an effort to designate poor black women as the new “welfare queens.”

The Heritage Foundation points out that the percentage of Americans who don’t pay federal income taxes “now accounts for nearly half of the U.S. population” and that “most of that population receives generous federal benefits.”

The explicit racial slur from Greene came during an exchange with Carlson, who sometimes wears a bow tie, about Massachusetts Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren claiming American Indian status at one point in her career but later dropping the designation.

Carlson, co-founder of The Daily Caller and a Fox News Contributor, ridiculed Warren’s claim of being an Indian and came out against racial preferences in hiring, saying, “…no one should gain advantage because of his ethnic background, period.”

Greene responded by saying, in part: “To question this woman [Warren] on her qualifications is going to be something that does appeal to…folks like you, voters like you, bow-tying white boys. But at the end of the day it is going to backfire…”
Fox News host Megyn Kelley said Greene’s slur was “an inappropriate name,” after the exchange on her show “America Live.” She said, “I want to apologize to Tucker and to our viewers for that. I wasn’t sure I heard what I thought I heard. And now I have confirmed—it was that. It wasn’t consistent with our standards and I do apologize on behalf of the program.”

AIM had asked Fox News spokesperson Irena Briganti if Greene would be fired for making the racist remark. That is when Briganti informed us about the private apology, which is apparently supposed to suffice.

Greene learned the art of public speaking and punditry at the Women’s Media Center founded by “Hanoi Jane” Fonda. Greene is the former president of the organization, which is said to be “devoted to making women visible and powerful in the media.”

She has accomplished that goal, with the help of Fox News, which is sticking by her.

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. 

Jehmu Calls Tucker Carlson A “Bow-Tying White Boy”–Megyn Kelly Apologizes;

By Michael T. Snyder

The unemployment crisis in America is much worse than you are being told.  Did you know that there are 100 million working age Americans that do not get up in the morning and go to work?  No wonder why it seems like there are so many people that do not have jobs!  According to the federal government, there are 12.6 million working age Americans that are considered to be “officially” unemployed, but there are another 87.8 million working age Americans that are not working either.  The federal government considers those Americans to be “not in the labor force” so they are not included in the unemployment rate.  In fact, this is one of the key ways that the government manipulates the unemployment numbers.  The Obama administration would have us believe that the unemployment rate is going down and that that since the start of the last recession about as many Americans have left the labor force as we saw during the entire decades of the 1980s and 1990s combined.  Of course that is a bunch of nonsense, but that is what the Obama administration would have us believe.  The truth is that the percentage of working age Americans that are employed is just about the same right now as it was two years ago.  It was incredibly difficult to get a job back then and it is incredibly difficult to get a job right now.  So don’t believe the hype that things are getting much better.  If you still do have a good job, you might want to hold on to it tightly, because there is not much hope that things are going to improve significantly any time soon.

The first chart that I have posted below shows the total number of “officially” unemployed workers in America.  According to the Federal Reserve, that number is currently 12,673,000.  This chart makes it look like the employment picture in America is getting significantly better….

But if you dig deeper into the numbers you quickly see that this is not true.  A lot of those workers that were formerly classified as “unemployed” have now been moved into the “not in labor force” category.  Since the start of the last recession, the number of Americans not in the labor force has risen by more than 8 million according to the Obama administration.  The total number of working age Americans not in the labor force now stands at 87,897,000….

So when you add 12,673,000 and 87,897,000, you get a total of 100,570,000 working age Americans that do not have jobs.

Yes, there are certainly millions upon millions of working age Americans that do not have jobs and that do not want jobs.

But you have to be delusional to believe that there are nearly 88 million working age Americans that do not have jobs and that do not want jobs.

The Obama administration tells us that the labor force participation rate is now the lowest it has been since 1984.  But back then, a very large percentage of women were staying home and raising families.  The percentage of stay at home mothers has declined steadily since then.

So the truth is that the employment statistics that we are being fed are not portraying an accurate picture of what is really going on.

As a CNN article recently explained, there are millions of Americans that say that they would like to have a job even though they have not been “actively” looking for one in the past four weeks.  If those people were included in the unemployment rate, it would immediately shoot up to around 11 percent….

About six million people claim they want a job, even though they haven’t looked for one in the last four weeks. If they were to all start applying for work again, the unemployment rate would suddenly shoot up above 11%.

If you want a much more accurate picture of what is really happening to the employment situation in America, the key is to look at the employment to population ratio.  As I have written about previously, the percentage of working age Americans that have jobs is not increasing.

Let’s take a look at the employment to population ratio for the last six years for the month of March….

March 2007: 63.3%

March 2008: 62.7%

March 2009: 59.9%

March 2010: 58.5%

March 2011: 58.5%

March 2012: 58.5%

The percentage of the working age population that had jobs fell rapidly during the recession and it has stayed very low since then.

When Barack Obama tells you that “America is going back to work” he is lying to you.

The cold, hard reality of the matter is that there are millions of hard working Americans that have been sitting at home for years hoping that a new job will come along.

Back in 2007, approximately 10 percent of all unemployed Americans had been out of work for one year or longer.

Today, that figure is above 30 percent.

The average duration of unemployment in the United States today is about three times as long as it was back in the year 2000.

And according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the number of announced job cuts is actually rising again….

Also, announced jobs cuts rose 7.1% in April, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, to 40,599 — and up 11.2% from last April — another bit of evidence that the jobs market isn’t doing well.

Economic conditions in the United States have been steadily getting worse for quite a while, but that is not the only reason for our employment problems.

There are two other trends that I want to briefly mention.

1) A lot of jobs that used to be very labor intensive are now being replaced by technology.  Thanks to robotics, automation and computers, a lot of big companies simply do not need as many workers these days.  Those are jobs that are never going to come back.

2) As labor has become a global commodity, millions upon millions of U.S. jobs have been sent overseas.  Today, you are not just competing for a job with your neighbors.  You are also competing with workers on the other side of the globe.  Unfortunately, it is legal to pay slave labor wages in many of those countries.  By sending our jobs out of the country, big corporations can also avoid a whole host of rules, regulations, taxes and benefit payments that they would be facing if they hired American workers.

So U.S. workers are at a massive competitive disadvantage.  Why should a big corporation pay 10 or 20 times more for an American worker when they can pad their profits by exploiting cheap foreign labor?

The sad truth is that the value that the marketplace puts on the labor of the average American worker is continually decreasing.

This is making it much more difficult to find a job and it is keeping wages down.

In the old days, pretty much any man that was a hard worker and that really wanted a good job could go out and get one.

But now all of that has changed.  Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs.  Today, less than 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.

And sadly, the vast majority of the jobs that are being lost are good jobs.  As I wrote about the other day, 95 percent of the jobs lost during the recession were middle class jobs.

So how are middle class families making it these days?

Many of them are going into tremendous amounts of debt.  As a recent CNN article detailed, the average debt load being carried by those of us in the bottom 95 percent of all income earners has risen dramatically over the past several decades….

In 1983, the bottom 95% had 62 cents of debt for every dollar they earned, according to research by two International Monetary Fund economists. But by 2007, the ratio had soared to $1.48 of debt for every $1 in earnings.

Unfortunately, many American families are absolutely maxed out at this point.  According to one recent survey, approximately one-third of all Americans are currently paying their bills late.

If your goal is to live a middle class lifestyle, you need to realize that the entire way that the game is being played is changing.

In the old days, you could start out with a company as a young person and stay with that company until you retired.  If you worked hard and you were loyal, there was a really good chance that the company would recognize that and be loyal to you too.

These days, most companies are absolutely heartless when it comes to their workers.  The good job that you have today could be gone tomorrow.  Workers are increasingly being viewed as “liabilities”, and there is a good chance that the moment you become “expendable” to your company you will be kicked out on the street.

That is one reason why I am encouraging people to consider starting their own businesses.  If you work for someone else, your security can be taken away from you at any moment.  But if you work for yourself, you aren’t going to get fired.

Unfortunately, tough economic times are coming and things are not going to be easy no matter what road you take.  It will be imperative to work harder than ever, to stay flexible, and to never, ever give up.

***UPDATE***

Since the monthly jobs numbers were released on Friday I thought I would update this article to reflect the latest figures.

The federal government has announced that the unemployment rate has declined to 8.1 percent.

That certainly sounds like good news.

But knowing better, I immediately went and checked how the employment to population ratio had changed.

Well, it turns out that the employment to population ratio has fallen once again.

That means that a smaller percentage of working age Americans had jobs in April than in March.

The following are the figures for the past three months….

February 2012: 58.6%

March 2012: 58.5%

April 2012: 58.4%

If the percentage of people that have jobs is going down, then how can they claim that things are getting better?

The following are the two Federal Reserve charts posted above after they have been updated with the new numbers.  These charts are very revealing.

1) There are now 12,500,000 workers that are “officially” considered to be unemployed….

2) There are now 88,419,000 Americans that are considered to be “not in the labor force”.  Please note that this number rose by 522,000 in just a single month!….

Okay, so now let’s do the same math that we did before.

12,500,000 unemployed workers plus 88,419,000 Americans that are “not in the labor force” equals 100,919,000 working age Americans that do not have jobs.

That number just continues to climb at a very rapid pace.

When is the mainstream media going to start telling us the truth?

Michael T. Snyder is a graduate of the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia and has a law degree from the University of  Florida. He is an attorney that has worked for some of the largest and most prominent law firms in Washington D.C. and who now resides outside of Seattle, Washington. He is a very active blogger and is also a respected researcher, writer, speaker and activist. He blogs at http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com

By Cliff Kincaid

Speaking at the April 25 New York Times annual meeting, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of The New York Times Company, tried to justify the rejection of an ad calling attention to the alleged oppressive nature of the Islamic religion and the “vengeful, hateful and violent teachings” of Islam’s prophet. He said the ad might incite violence in the Middle East.

At the same time, he justified the placement of an anti-Catholic ad in The New York Times by saying, “We take political ads that we do not agree with. That is the nature of advocacy advertising.”

Representing Accuracy in Media, a shareholder in the company for the purpose of getting access to the annual meetings, I told Sulzberger, his executives and other Times shareholders, “You’re willing to offend the Catholics because they’re not going to come and kill you.”

The full-page, anti-Catholic ad ran on March 9 under the title “It’s time to quit the Catholic Church” and was sponsored by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. It showed a cartoon of a Catholic Bishop going berserk over a birth control pill and urged Catholics to leave the church.

The ad against radical Islam, designed to test the paper’s commitment to fairness and freedom of expression, had a cartoon of a radical Imam upset over a smoldering Koran. It was sponsored and signed by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer of Stop Islamization of Nations and the American Freedom Defense Initiative.

Addressing moderate Muslims, the ad said in part: “In light of the ongoing, ruthless, international jihad against non-Muslims, the 1,400-year record of institutionalized oppression of women, the 18,560 Islamic attacks across the world since 9/11, and the endangering of free peoples across the world, if you’re part of the Islamic jihad, you’re part of the problem.”

Questions over the ad were just one of several headaches for Sulzberger. Several stockholders took to the floor of the annual meeting to grill him over the paper’s editorial, news and advertising policies. One individual attacked the Times for an anti-Israel bias in its news coverage. Another said the company is unaccountable and does not answer legitimate questions from the public.

Sulzberger is also under a lot of pressure because of the company’s falling stock price and financial losses.

Fr. Colin McKenna of Sacred Heart Church in Georgetown, Connecticut, reamed Sulzberger over the anti-Catholic ad, wondering whether the paper would run an ad calling Islam’s Prophet Muhammad a pedophile for having a 6-year-old girl as a child bride.

McKenna, who said he had 100 shares in company stock, and that they had lost 50 percent of their value, said the paper was needlessly offending Catholics, who might be persuaded to buy the paper if it did not have such a strident anti-Catholic bias.

Sulzberger said the only ads the paper rejects are those which are obscene or dangerous to American soldiers. He did not elaborate on that latter point or allude to the fact that the Times had rejected other ads.

“Please do not confuse the ads we run with the positions we hold as journalists,” he said.

He failed to tell McKenna that the Times had rejected the Geller/Spencer ad that was supposed to run with the title of, “It’s Time to Quit Islam.”

We informed the shareholders, “…the fact is, Mr. Chairman, that in March you rejected a similar kind of ad directed at radical Islam submitted by Pamela Geller…You didn’t tell him [McKenna] that.”

Sulzberger shot back: “What I did say was that unless there’s an obscenity or it puts our troops in danger. I did say that sir. I did not mention the ad in particular.”

Sulzberger claimed that the Geller/Spencer ad would have endangered the lives of our troops in Afghanistan, at a time when there was a controversy and violence over the burning of Korans. “And that is why we chose not to run that ad,” he said. He called it a “unique” situation.

Sulzberger added: “If we had run that ad, and one of our troops had died because of it, you’d be here calling me a troop killer.”

Sulzberger did not explain to the shareholders how an ad in the print edition of the Times could have further incited terrorists in Afghanistan to kill American soldiers.

McKenna later told AIM that he was unfamiliar with the fact that the ad was rejected. The Times, of course, did not tell its readers about the rejection.

Pamela Geller rejected the Times’ rationale, saying, “It is most disingenuous for The New York Times to refuse to run our counter-jihad ad based on their ‘concern for US troops in Afghanistan.’ Liars. Who has done more to jeopardize our troops and American citizens than the pro-jihadist New York Times? They are notorious for their treasonous reportage.”

She explained that the paper has “done more to jeopardize the safety of our troops than any mainstream media outlet, with the possible exception of Newsweek. How many front page stories ran on Abu Ghraib? Who leaked the NSA wiretaps under FISA, jeopardizing not just troops but American citizens, or the highly classified Pentagon order authorizing special ops to hunt for al-Qaeda in the mountains of Pakistan?”

Newsweek had run a phony story about American troops flushing a Koran down a toilet.

The rejection of the ad, Geller maintained, amounts to the paper enforcing Sharia, or Islamic law, for the radical Islamists. She added, “What is lower than using our brave men and women to cover for the Times’ cowardice and anti-freedom editorial policies?”

We told Sulzberger that his alleged concern for American lives in the Middle East was hard to believe, considering that the paper has been waging attacks on the New York City Police Department and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly for conducting surveillance of radical Muslims in order to prevent terrorist attacks.

Just three days after the annual meeting, the Times launched an attack on the FBI for trying to prevent terrorist attacks. The opinion piece by David K. Shipler, a former Times reporter, criticized the agency for using undercover agents and informants to identify and apprehend potential Islamic terrorists.

It carried the headline, “Terrorist Plots, Hatched by the F.B.I.,” as if the FBI was to blame for Islamists expressing their desire and willingness to engage in anti-American terrorism.

Rusty Weiss, author of an AIM Center for Investigative Journalism report on the Times campaign against the NYPD, said the attack on the FBI provides additional proof that the paper regards law enforcement as the problem, not the radical Islamists.

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.