Slimes of our Lives, Part One

Slime One is of course the oil itself: 60,000 to 75,000 barrels of oil a day of it, which is 2,520,000 to 3,150,000 gallons a day of the bird, fish, and economy killing gook. As of July 29 the gusher will be 100 days old and we already know it will be alive and well even on that date. So between 6 and 7.5 million barrels of oil will be in the Gulf as of July 29, or between 252 and 315 million gallons of oil.

As foul as it is, the slime that in southern Louisiana has ruined lives not already ruined by the failed US economy has served to reveal other slimes as bad or worse as the slime of the moment. Before we start on those other slimes, a quick word about the slime most in the limelight at the moment:

THE SLIME OF THE MOMENT
It has gradually become apparent that neither BP nor any other huge oil Corporation knows of a good way to stop a gusher like this within a week or a month or a quarter of a year. They have plenty of resources but the technology to stop it apparently simply doesn't exist or is too expensive even for a huge corporation.

So why was BP allowed to drill the well in the first place and why wasn't all big corporation oil money invested in renewable energy instead? Or, at a minimum, why does the US have to play the role of oversized third world country by for example refusing to adopt Norway's deep see oil drilling regulations which reduce the chance of a gusher to just about zero in the first place?

As for the US government, even if the technology to quickly stop the gusher existed the government wouldn't have the resources to buy it and, in any event, the elites controlling the government rule out the government being in charge of anything currently controlled by huge corporations. All non-military large scale industrial equipment is owned and controlled by huge corporations, which also of course have far more discretionary money than does the government. The rich had to get their tax cuts you know, so that they could invest in companies like BP. So the Government is broke while BP has all the money and all the industrial equipment.

Big corporations including BP are supposed to have all the answers too, but since in US society money itself is more important than the answers I guess we'll have to excuse BP for not having all the answers. BP having all the money will have to suffice. Poor, naive Obama actually thought that BP literally has all the answers with regard to oil but when the gusher became a month and a half old he apparently at least partly abandoned that mistaken belief.

OTHER SLIMES NUMBER ONE: THERE IS NO PRESIDENCY ANY MORE
After President Obama’s oval office speech of June 15, most people (and basically all people in Louisiana) were unimpressed and were disappointed that he wasn’t tough enough on gusher well owner British Petroleum (BP). In fact, Obama’s speech was the same as all his other speeches: long on rhetoric and very short on announcements of real (legally binding) actions that actually change anything. It is a waste of time to listen to his speeches because very little and rather often nothing changes from them. You could listen to frogs at the pond and be just as satisfied about what they say about the oil gusher.

The night before his speech there was talk that Obama would announce a multi billion dollar plan to reroute the Mississippi River so that the wetlands could be substantially rebuilt and so that the oil could be cleaned up more quickly. This was just hot air from Anderson Cooper at CNN and so forth. Obama is someone who would begin a very large new government investment program that would change things for the better only in fantasy land.

There was even more talk in the days before the speech that the President would announce that BP would be compelled to put at least 10 billion dollars and preferably 20 billion dollars into an escrow account controlled by a third party from which claims would be paid. Translated into plain English and into real legal terms, Obama actually announced that he would merely request that BP voluntarily start the escrow and relinquish control of those funds to the third party. He will ask nicely and see what the big bosses at BP have to say about the proposal.

What is the largest overall implication of Obama’s waste of time speech in general and about what was not stated in particular? It’s clearly that Obama is not the President the way, say, Eisenhower and a few before and a very few after him were the President. Obama has less power and less real money to work with than Eisenhower or Jimmy Carter did. Much of Eisenhower and Carter’s power now resides with huge multi billion dollar corporations such as BP. Obama is just a junior partner to top corporate executives nowadays: they call the shots including as in this case the shots about how the oil gusher will be stopped (or not stopped to be more accurate). Obama can seek to advise BP CEO Tony Hayward about things, but the final say is Hayward’s, not Obama’s.

Since the locals don’t understand who really controls the Louisiana coast and whether and how much oil will be sitting on it, they were especially disappointed and frustrated about the speech in particular and about the response (non-response to be more accurate) to the gusher itself in general. For example, Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser (let’s all hope he doesn’t have a heart attack on TV) has repeatedly explained to anyone with a brain that “no one is really in charge” and that it is totally unclear whether BP or the Coast Guard or the federal government in Washington is in charge.

Well, as we have very recently stated, BP executives such as CEO Tony Hayward are in charge, though they do often take orders from the Coast Guard in general and from “Incident Commander” Thad Allen in particular. They don't mind taking orders from the Coast Guard because they have public assets to help with the gusher that BP doesn’t have to pay for and because the Coast Guard doesn’t have the political power to make expensive, multi-billion dollar demands on BP. The Coast Guard can only make small, relatively inexpensive demands of BP. The other branches of the military have little power over huge corporations and the Coast Guard as the little junior partner to the other services has even less power.

So for executives such as Tony Hayward, taking orders from President Obama is another thing entirely. Were President Obama able to and disposed to act like Presidents of yore, if he were to for example demand that BP put twenty or thirty billion dollars in escrow controlled by a third party, Hayward could be saying no because that’s real money needed for BP shareholders and executives. The shareholders and executives are far more important to Hayward and other top BP executives than are President Obama and the people of Southern Louisiana.

If BP eventually agrees to the escrow (and I’ll believe that if and only if I see it) it will be a free choice of theirs and it will be because if they do not BP's credit rating and/or its stock price will collapse completely if they refuse.

And that of course is the root of the problem. When most of the power resides with the executives and shareholders of huge multi-national Corporations and little of the power resides with the government that the people elect, what any government official wants is substantially irrelevant. More broadly, that means that what you, I, or the people of Southern Louisiana want is irrelevant to the executives and shareholders who are in control.

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READING LIST:
A small sample of items discovered recently that I am convinced are important and that are more true than false.

Brazil is far, far ahead of the US in renewable energy

Corporations playing God in unregulated pursuit of massive amounts of ultimately fake money
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COMMENTS
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Summary of the Unemployment Calculation Scam: the Two Biggest Flaws

In the last post, the one titled "More Than Fifteen Million Unemployed Americans are not Recognized or Counted as Unemployed by the U.S. Government" I reported how the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics distorts unemployment reporting. Today I set out to find out what the real, true unemployment rate is. In other words, I set out to design my own system. I have made quite a bit of progress, but I do not yet have a publishable system. I am currently having a lot of trouble trying to figure out how to deal with college students and I have a few smaller problems to deal with.

While designing this new system, I have become more convinced than ever that much of what the Bureau of Labor Statistics does with respect to employment and unemployment counting is pure garbage. Specifically and especially, the "Current Population Survey," from which all of the unemployment rates are calculated, is total garbage. It is complete and total garbage and is useless with respect to measuring employment and unemployment.

The other main BLS survey, the Current Employment Statistics, is a survey of employers and is nowhere near as flawed as is the Current Population Survey. One problem with the Current Employment Statistics, however, is that agricultural employment is totally ignored. And there are a few other relatively minor flaws but on the whole its a good product. But never forget, Current Employment Statistics is NOT used in any way to determine unemployment rates, so the fact that it is nowhere near as flawed as the other survey is not all that relevant.

Notice that stock market investors react to the number of jobs gained or lost coming out of the Current Employment Statistics and they generally ignore the “official unemployment rate” coming out of the Current Population Survey. Investors do this because they long ago realized that the Current Population Survey and the official unemployment rate are largely garbage.

I gave many and hopefully most of the reasons these are garbage in that previous posting. But I thought it would be useful to emphasize the two biggest flaws of all in what BLS does, to in other words summarize the last, much longer posting.

THE FIRST OF THE TWO BIGGEST FLAWS
The first of the two biggest flaws of all is that BLS assumes that people who are not looking for a job do not want a job. These people are pigeonholed into the Orwellian world of "not in the labor force". BLS is living in a fantasy world, because there are tens of millions who would like a job but who never look for a job except maybe once in a blue moon.

Strange as it may sound, some of them wait for someone to more or less come looking for them with a job (a friend, a former associate, a family member, etc.) which happens more often than most would think.

But for the majority of those who never (or almost never) look for a job, it’s a matter of simple microeconomics. Looking for a job costs money that many millions of people do not have. If you don't make certain job hunting expenditures than you almost certainly will not get a job, period. To look for a job you need money for transportation, you need money for clothes, you need money for producing resumes, you need money to get on the computer for research, and so on and so forth. If there are almost certainly (or definitely as the case may actually be) no jobs for a particular person, than any time and money at all spent looking for a job is 100% wasted. Obviously, if someone doesn't have a job, he or she may have so little money to begin with that wasting even a very small amount of money is going to create a lot more hardship than already exists.

Also, it should be realized that roughly half of the employed population has either never looked for a job or has spent only a small number of days or weeks looking for a job during a working lifetime. But now with the advent of the 2nd Depression, unemployed people are apparently expected to spend months and even years in the unpaid job of "looking for a job". Something doesn't seem quite right about that. A career in "looking for a job" at no pay seems just a little unfair even by American standards if you know what I am saying. Increasing millions are saying "no way" to the total insanity and to the gross unfairness of months and years of unpaid work "looking for a job".

U6 IS A (SMALLER) SCAM
For those who think that the U6 unemployment measure (the one that includes "discouraged workers," but only some of them actually) absolves BLS of being to blame for a misleading and useless unemployment calculation, consider:

(a) Someone is counted as unemployed under U6 only if they have looked for a job within the last year. But there are increasing millions who have been too discouraged and/or too poor to look for work for longer than one year.

(b) U6 is not promoted as the official or real unemployment rate, U3 is. Few people other than economists and policy wonks know about U6 and U6 is rarely if ever reported in the mainstream media. The common man has no idea what U6 is.

(c) U6 counts self employed people who make little money or who lose money as employed as do all of the other measurements (U1, U2, U3, U4, and U5) which leads us to....

THE SECOND OF THE BIGGEST TWO FLAWS
The second of the two biggest flaws is that BLS assumes that anyone self employed is employed. Let me emphasize, its NOT that the self employed are considered to be not in the labor force (which arguably could be partially justified.) It's that they are considered to be employed that puts BLS in that fantasy world again. They are employed whether they make any money or not. They are considered employed even if they lose money!

In the real world, someone is employed only if someone is working AND making money. Those who are self employed but who are making less than about 1.5 times the poverty line per year should be classified as unemployed. Moreover, by rights anyone who is "working" but not making at least above the poverty line (or better yet 1.5 times the poverty line) should be classified as unemployed.

The previous post was wonkish (but very accurate if I do say so myself, laugh out loud). This one sums up the Bureau of Labor Statistics scam more concisely. As I said in the prior post, the list of types of people who are unemployed but are not counted as unemployed seems to go on and on and on.

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More Than Fifteen Million Unemployed Americans are not Recognized or Counted as Unemployed by the U.S. Government

Always multiply the main, most commonly reported "unemployment rate" in the US by two to get a conservative estimate of the real unemployment rate. Multiply by 2.2 to get a middle of the road estimate and multiply by 2.5 to get a high end but still reasonable estimate. You would have to multiply by 2.5, for example, if you wanted to include inmates who would not have committed crimes had they had a job at the time they ran afoul of the law.

That 50% unemployment for blacks in New York that Kay Johnson mentions in these comments must have been calculated in accordance with this calculation reality. Because of the way unemployment rates are falsely calculated, there never has and never will be an official 50% unemployment rate reported out for any group anywhere. The way the unemployment rate is cooked up, probably the highest possible official unemployment rate you could have for the US as a whole is roughly 12 percent (not far from the 10.2 percent that was actually reached recently) and the highest possible official overall or regional black unemployment rate you could possibly have would be roughly twice that (25%).

Note that the multipliers above apply to the current situation. Those multipliers will have to be gradually increased in the years ahead if the growth in jobs remains trivial or worse, because if so, the official unemployment rate will be more and more distorted downward.

Although people who read real news are generally aware that if you stop looking for work because you have concluded you most likely can't get one you are not counted as unemployed, what even they are not aware of is that once you have been unemployed for more than a year or two, you are generally not counted as unemployed even if you ARE actively looking for a job. The "actively looking for a job" thing applies, if not officially, certainly unofficially to only those who did have a job within the last year or two. At the very least, it can be said that the survey and statistical methods used preclude picking up as unemployed many and probably most of those who are actively looking for a job but who have not had a job for more than a year or two.

Furthermore, if you are self employed in any way shape or form (including even if your "business" loses money) you CAN NOT be counted as unemployed in the US even if you would much rather have a job and so you are actively looking for a job at the same time you are self employed. If you are “self employed” (and who isn’t who is “unemployed,” really?) you are BY RULE not counted as unemployed even if you make virtually no money from your self employment, or even if you lose money. This distortion is never ever mentioned even by all the “why the unemployment rate is much more than reported” articles.

The upshot of all of this is that the only real way to get at unemployment in the US is to look at the number of jobs (with any income or else above a certain pay level of your choice) and then divide that number into the number of people who you think in a perfect full employment economy would have a job (for example, say, 80% of those between the ages of 25 and 60). Then you would subtract that percentage ratio from 100% to get a real unemployment rate.

In practice, to save a lot of time you can use the multipliers or, better yet, you can get at real unemployment by using the employment to population ratio, which is, ironically, reported out monthly by Bureau of Labor Statistics itself. (Who would have known that BLS actually does have information with which the actual unemployment rate can be determined, laugh out loud?)

That ratio, expressed annually, declined sharply from a peak of 64.4 percent in 2000 to 59.2 percent in 2009. This means that 5.2% of the population (about one in twenty people) had a job in 2000 but did not have a job in 2009. The latest percentage reported is even worse, about 58%. Note that this methodology is excellent for tracking the real change in the labor market, although to use it to calculate a real unemployment rate would require you to estimate what percentage of the entire population would not need or be able to have a job even if jobs could be automatically obtained.

Then you would have to adjust the raw employment to population ratio accordingly. If you did that, you would probably arrive at a similar place as with the multiplier method: the employment to population ratio right now when those who definitely don’t need or can not have a job are removed from the population is roughly 78%, meaning that the real unemployment rate is roughly 22%.

In summary:

--58% of the population has a job
--20% of the population would not need or could not function on a job even if they could automatically get one. This would include true criminals and also self-employed who do better self employed than they could with a job.
--22% of the population is unemployed: they need a job and there is no job for them.

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Someone begged to differ with the above overall, but he started off with an apparent agreement, which ironically I construed as a disagreement....

Unity Progress said:

Although people who read real news are generally aware that if you stop looking for work because you have concluded you most likely can't get one you are not counted as unemployed....

The Doubting Thomas said:

Correct, that's because you are not considered part of the work force if you don't have a job and are not looking for one.

Unity Progress:

And you are wrong. Most people are part of the work force whether they are looking for a job or not. Anyone who could theoretically work is part of the work force. People who are self employed are part of the work force; whether they are gainfully employed should be determined by whether and how much money they are making.

During World War Two and at the end of the First Great Depression, factory employers virtually came looking for people who were not actively "looking for a job" to work in the war factories.

Where is it written that people have to waste valuable time and money "looking for a job" that probably does not exist for them? Money and time spent looking for a job is money and time not available for self employment or for just enjoying life which, unlike "looking for a job," is free of charge.

What about people who don't have good clothes or who don't have transportation with which to "look for a job"? What about people whose teeth have rotted out because they can't afford dental care? Are they going to get a job after even a year of looking for a job? What about the millions of homeless people? What about people who have no phone service? Unless you toe the right wing line, all of these people are part of the work force.

The most well known requirements for being counted as unemployed are analogous to the requirements for voter registration. How so? Americans have been brainwashed into thinking that it is no big deal to have to register to vote in any way the local government sets up those requirements. And yet voter registration has been a perpetual source of opportunities for shady right wing operators to deny people the right to vote. In recent years brand new identification requirements have been added to the list of voting registration requirements in various states. People have lost their lives in disputes about and there have been numerous court cases over the years over the seemingly innocuous requirements that are actually sometimes onerous and not possible to meet requirements for voter registration.

Americans are conditioned to think that things such as voter registration and needing to look for a job to be counted as unemployed are no big deal, but unfortunately, they are a very big deal indeed when all of the facts and all of the diverse circumstances of real people are taken into consideration. In many other countries, voter registration is much more automatic than it is in the United States. Similarly, being counted as unemployed when you are unemployed is much more automatic than it is in the States.

The person who begged to differ was especially dubious of this line from my original:

What even they are not aware of is that once you have been unemployed for more than a year or two, you are generally not counted as unemployed even if you ARE actively looking for a job.

To which he said:

"I call BS. Where do you get this information and why do you think it's true?"

To which I responded:

In real life, anyone who has been unemployed for more than a year or two will have one or more of the following characteristics:

--They will be homeless, so there is no way they can be interviewed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to be counted as unemployed.

--They will not have a phone at all, so there is no way they can be interviewed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to be counted as unemployed.

--They will have a cell phone number only, which traditionally and so far as I know can still not be used by survey takers including BLS.

--They will have an internet phone number only, and such numbers are most definitely not used by survey takers including BLS.

--They will have joined the military and are not in any BLS classification. But clearly they are unemployed from the civilian labor force, or else employed with respect to the civilian plus military labor force combined, take your pick. They are not, as BLS claims, in no relationship whatsoever with respect to the labor force.

--They are in prison and are not in any BLS classification. But clearly they are unemployed from the civilian labor force.

--Anyone who works even an hour a week is counted as employed! As absurd as that is, it is literally true.

--Anyone who is self employed, who in other words has even the tiniest and/or the flimsiest of businesses, including one with no customers(!) is counted as outside the labor force, and so that person is not employed even if looking for a job while operating that business. The first question in the BLS unemployment survey is: “Does anyone in this household have a business or a farm?” If the answer is yes, than that person (or those persons) are not part of the universe from which employed and unemployed is calculated.

--All persons who did at least 15 hours of unpaid work in a family-owned enterprise operated by someone in their household are classified as employed, even though they made no money!

--All persons who were temporarily absent from their regular jobs because of illness, vacation, bad weather, industrial dispute, or various personal reasons, whether or not they were paid for the time off, are classified as employed!

--Certain ways of looking for a job don't count as looking for a job according to BLS. Only certain, traditional kinds of "active job search" qualifies an unemployed person for being declared to be and counted as unemployed. According to BLS, “passive methods of job search do not have the potential to result in a job offer and therefore do not qualify as active job search methods. Examples of passive methods include attending a job training program or course, or merely reading about job openings that are posted in newspapers or on the Internet.”

And even this is not a complete list of people who are unemployed but are not counted as unemployed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The list of loopholes, of categories of people who are unemployed but are not counted that way goes on and on and on. A certain number of unemployed people commit suicide every year due to the many ravages caused by unemployment.

A very substantial percentage (very possibly a majority) of those suicides are not even considered to be unemployed by the Government. In other words, there are people every year who lose their lives due to a condition that the Government does not even recognize as having affected them!

The BLS page for this matter is here: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
You will see that this page covers most of the above loopholes if you take the time to read it through.

The BLS itself publishes more expansive measures than the “official unemployment rate” that is reported by the Corporate Media, but even the most expansive one leaves several of the loopholes above intact.


The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.

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