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Bloomberg is reporting that the Bureau of Labor Statistics will release its annual revision to the unemployment data this Friday February 5th, 2010. Oh by the way, the birth death model was off by 824,000 jobs. For anyone familiar with this fairy tale of statistical manipulation it will come as no shock. Bloomberg does a nice job of explaining the revisions in their interactive analysis.

I have commented before on the utter uselessness of the government’s unemployment statistics. Every month workers mysteriously disappear from the labor force and are no longer counted as unemployed. Must be alien abductions or maybe they all hit the lottery?

The media consistently reports the Bureau of Labor Statistics U-3 number as the “official” unemployment rate. Of course this number does not count people that they have run out of unemployment insurance or those who given up all hope of finding a job or better yet those who have had their hours reduced to 10 hours a week from 40. Those people are counted in the U-6 figure which you never hear about.

The way I figure it, if you start with the U-6 figure, remove out the obviously erroneous birth death model revisions and add back in the people who keep disappearing from the labor force and the real unemployment number is easily over 20%.

Oh but everything is just fine and dandy, we have green shoots. Right up the ass.

Mish Shedlock posted a great blog entry detailing the budget troubles affecting many states and cities. The proverbial shit is hitting the fan to say the least. Anyone who claims this depression is cover is out of their minds. I can’t wait to see how the Government Bureau of Labor Statistics finds a way to manipulate these numbers.

New York City will have to lay off more than 10,000 public workers, in addition to 8,500 teachers, if the state legislature approves the $1.3 billion of cuts the governor proposed in his deficit-closing budget, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Monday.

More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

Phoenix’s budget troubles came into sharper focus Thursday as City Manager David Cavazos proposed shutting down senior centers, libraries and sports complexes, and laying off hundreds of police officers and firefighters for the first time in decades.

Sacramento County could be facing a $150 million general fund shortfall next fiscal year, according to preliminary county projections obtained by The Bee.

Nevada’s budget outlook is so bleak that lawmakers doubt whether state government can remain afloat without drastic cuts to everything from prisons to schools to state parks and services for the poor and elderly.

Schwarzeneggers’s daily stunts to keep his state afloat are getting more ridiculous.
The governor probably wasn’t joking yesterday, when he suggested outsourcing California’s overcrowded prison system to Mexico. Specifically, he would send the state’s 19,000 imprisoned illegal immigrants to prisons south of the border.

Not to mention the corporations that are laying off people by the thousands.

Verizon Cuts 13,000 jobs.

Walmart to cut 11,200 jobs.

Home Depot to cut 1000 jobs.

When you see something like this you just know that the Globalists, New World Order, Bilderberg, whatever the hell you want to call them, are just completely screwing with us. Al Jazeera has found yet another audio tape of Osama Bin Laden. It’s amazing, the only dead guy who gets more air time than Osama is Elvis.

On this new tape Osama blames the industrial nations of the world, especially the US, for climate change.

“This is a message to the whole world about those responsible for climate change and its repercussions – whether intentionally or unintentionally – and about the action we must take,” bin Laden said.

“Speaking about climate change is not a matter of intellectual luxury – the phenomenon is an actual fact.”

In the new recording, bin Laden says “all the industrial states” are to blame for climate change, “yet the majority of those states have signed the Kyoto Protocol and agreed to curb the emission of harmful gases”.

He continued: “However, George Bush junior, preceded by [the US] congress, dismissed the agreement to placate giant corporations. And they are themselves standing behind speculation, monopoly and soaring living costs.

It is bad enough when the global elite dig up old Osama to scare the shit out of the sheeple with terror threats but this is really sinking to a new low. Not only are they using him to tweak the neocon security first sheeple, but now they are getting the tree huggers all riled up as well. What’s next, a PSA for kids to stay in school because Uncle Osama said so?

It appears karma is finally catching up to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Not only has he apparently lost Obama’s ear, but he also has to testify before the house next week on the AIG bailout scandal.

It couldn’t happen to a bigger corrupt creep. Hiring Geithner was the first and biggest mistake that Obama made. It is about time he shitcanned this clown and stopped letting the Federal Reserve bend the American taxpayer over the barrel. Now if Obama could just fire Bernanke as well as himself, we might be getting somewhere.

Cynthia McKinney posted an interesting article detailing how the current situation in Haiti reminds her of the aftermath of Katrina. Basically instead of sending food and water, the US first sent men with guns in response to the disaster. In the case of Katrina it was Blackwater, in the case of Haiti it is US troops.

She also raises the possibility of oil reserves in Haiti as possible motivation to occupy the country. Personally I would not be surprised at all.

George W. Bush, massive military deployment, logistical snags and slow aid delivery are evocative of the Hurricane Katrina debacle. Cynthia McKinney draws attention to the construction of the U.S. fifth-largest embassy in the world in Port-au-Prince, the discovery of oil resources in Haiti, the existence of decade-old plans to exploit Haiti’s deep water ports for oil-related activities. From the beginning, in fact, U.S. assistance to Haiti has looked to her more like an invasion than a humanitarian relief operation.

But, I remember the bogus reports of chaos and violence the led to the deployment of military assets, including Blackwater, in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. One Katrina survivor noted that the people needed food and shelter and the U.S. government sent men with guns. Much to my disquiet, it seems, here we go again. From the very beginning, U.S. assistance to Haiti has looked to me more like an invasion than a humanitarian relief operation.

“There is evidence that the United States found oil in Haiti decades ago and due to the geopolitical circumstances and big business interests of that era made the decision to keep Haitian oil in reserve for when Middle Eastern oil had dried up. This is detailed by Dr. Georges Michel in an article dated March 27, 2004 outlining the history of oil explorations and oil reserves in Haiti and in the research of Dr. Ginette and Daniel Mathurin.

There was recently a great article in the New York Times about how homeowners should follow the lead of big banks and just walk away.

Businesses — in particular Wall Street banks — make such calculations routinely. Morgan Stanley recently decided to stop making payments on five San Francisco office buildings. A Morgan Stanley fund purchased the buildings at the height of the boom, and their value has plunged. Nobody has said Morgan Stanley is immoral — perhaps because no one assumed it was moral to begin with. But the average American, as if sprung from some Franklinesque mythology, is supposed to honor his debts, or so says the mortgage industry as well as government officials. Former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. declared that “any homeowner who can afford his mortgage payment but chooses to walk away from an underwater property is simply a speculator — and one who is not honoring his obligation.” (Paulson presumably was not so censorious of speculation during his 32-year career at Goldman Sachs.)

The author raises a good point, businesses go into default or bankruptcy all the time but somehow whether a homeowner walks away or not is a moral issue. These criminal banks have stolen trillions from taxpayers but for some reason we are supposed to feel morally obligated to pay them?

Screw the banks, they wouldn’t think twice about robbing you blind if they could get away with it and it was in their best interest. In fact they have robbed you several times over thanks to their buddies like Hank Paulson & Tim Geithner and their endless bailouts.

Even better than the underwater mortgages, stop paying the underwater credit cards where banks have suddenly jacked up the interest rate to 30%. This is nothing more than legalized theft.

Screw the banks first and leave them holding the bag. They would do it to you. In fact, they already are.

The Government released their unemployment statistics this morning and according to them the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 10% and only 85,000 people lost their jobs.

What a joke. What they don’t tell you is that the real measure of unemployment, U-6 moved up to 17.3%

What they also don’t explain is this:

Nov 2009
Civilian labor force: 153,720,000
Employment: 138,381,000
Unemployment: 15,340,000
Not in labor force: 83,022,000

Dec 2009
Civilian labor force: 153,059,000
Employment: 137,792,000
Unemployment: 15,267,000
Not in labor force: 83,865,000

843,000 more people are now considered “Not in the labor force” from November 2009.

Where did these people go? They all retire? Become independently wealthy? Doubtful! More like they ran out of unemployment benefits or are so disgusted with the labor market that they have given up all hope.

Biggest joke is that the Government thinks Americans are stupid enough to believe their fairy tale numbers.

Urban Survival posted some truly disturbing information last week that revealed what is really going in in the real estate market and the manipulative shenanigans that the government and banks are engaging in.

There were 50 of the most senior and smartest real estate people in the room. They ripped her to pieces. It looked like one of the town hall meetings of August, except everyone there was a very senior, polished professional. At one point everyone was calling out or moaning at her. It was clear to all she had been given a few talking points and she was told to stick to them no matter how foolish she looked. The group told her in no uncertain terms this is terrible public policy. They said for jobs to be created you need to lower rents so the cost of occupancy was at a level to encourage more hiring. If the loan is kept at old levels and building values not reduced, then landlords can’t reduce rents to where they need to be to make taking space by tenants economically viable. Retailers costs remain higher than they should be making it harder to lower prices to induce sales. So there is a massive make believe going on. When I pressed the issue of political interference she said -what do you want us to do, bankrupt all the banks.

The government manipulating the stock market by pumping billions into it? Gee ya think?

The unusual circumstances that led the U.S. market to rally powerfully in 2009 might be explained by secret government moves to buy stocks, according to Charles Biderman, the founder and chief executive of TrimTabs, a research firm that tracks liquidity flows in the market.

“We cannot identify the source of the new money that pushed stock prices up so far so fast,” Biderman said in a statement Tuesday.

The source of approximately $600 billion net new cash necessary to lift the market’s overall capitalization by $6 trillion last year could not be identified by TrimTabs, Biderman said. The money, he said, didn’t come from traditional players such as companies, retail investors, foreign investors, hedge funds or pension funds.

Consumers are starting to fight back against the bailout banks and their criminal credit card activities. A lawyer in California named Ben Pavone is upset that Bank of America jacked up his interest rates while simultaneously lowering his credit limit. So mad in fact that he is not making his payment in protest and threatening to sue them. He said he got the idea from Youtube debtor revolt leader Ann Minch.

Ben Pavone told Bank of America in a letter last week that he refuses to pay off his credit card debt until the bank lowers his interest rate. And, he added, if they try to ruin his credit, he’ll sue ‘em.

“They’ve got to have some kind of obligation to not totally extort the public,” said Pavone.

The San Diego, Calif. attorney is angry about two things: his interest rate, which has gone up to 27.99 percent, and his credit limit, which has gone down to just above his balance. “I’m sure I’m going to be hit with penalties,” he said.

Think of the power we would have as consumers if we ALL stopped paying these criminal institutions.