Author: Dave LIndorff

The White House, and most headline writers around the country, are crowing that the November jobless rate of 7.0%, reported Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is the lowest since 2009 when President Obama took office, when it was 7.3% and rising.

But is this number really something worth cheering?

Not if you look behind it.

That 7.0% number is the BLS’s so-called U3 figure, which is the percentage of the labor force currently unemployed, and it is significantly lower than the figure for November 2012, which was 7.8%. But U3, known as the “official unemployment rate,” doesn’t really count everyone who is unemployed. It doesn’t include, for example, anyone who has even one hour a week of work, or who has not had a job for more than six months, or who in despair has given up looking.

A better number to look at, in terms of getting a true picture of the health of society and the economy, is the BLS’s U6 number, which also counts as unemployed those who are “marginally attached to the labor force,” meaning discouraged people who are not working and have given up looking for work, but who told BLS interviewers that they have looked within the past year and would take a job if one were available. U6 also counts as unemployed those who are currently working part-time for “economic reasons,” meaning that they want full-time work but cannot find it.

The U6 measure of unemployment for November is 13.2%, and while that too is down from 14.4% in November 2012, it is historically very high. Furthermore, as the analytical website ShadowStats points out, even U6 doesn’t tell the whole story. The BLS U6 figure, as ShadowStats’ John Williams notes, doesn’t count long-term discouraged workers — people who have given up trying to find work because they cannot find a job. This group was “defined out of existence” by the BLS during the Clinton presidency in 1994. You can understand why that was done: adding these people to the total gives a current unemployment rate of a whopping 23% — a number that, unlike the U3 and even U6, has been continuing to rise since the start of the so-called Great Recession in late 2008, even through the last four years of “economic recovery.”

As this ShadowStats graph demonstrates, the crucial labor participation rate has been falling since at least 2003 (click on image to go to ShadowStats.com)

Talk about a no-brainer!

The $2.5-trillion Social Security Trust Fund, which current workers, including the much-maligned Baby Boom generation, have been bulking up with our 6.2% payroll tax and the 6.2% that our employers have to pay, is slated to be exhausted by 2036-8. Unless more money is injected into the system to cover the tsunami of retirees born between 1946 and 1964, the program, if it were just running on current payroll taxes, would only be able to cover 75% of promised benefits to current retirees.

At the same time, the rich are getting richer every year, and the rest of us poorer.
Income tax rates for the rich are far lower now than they were in the 1990s, ‘80s or in any prior decade. Meanwhile loopholes and deductions and exemptions for the wealthy keep getting added to the tax code to help make them richer. (Those rich enough to be able to use the Schedule A tax form get to claim all mortgage interest, including for vacation homes. They get to deduct the cost of fancy insurance plans and pricy medical care, they get to deduct their state and local taxes, and they get taxed much less than even a low-income wage-earner on income they earn from investments.)

Everyone, except the rich themselves of course, agrees that the widening wealth gap in the US (now about the same as in Jamaica and Argentina) is a terrible thing, and everyone agrees that something needs to be done to keep Social Security well-funded.

What isn’t being said is that the two problems are linked and can be at least partially solved simultaneously.

Think about it: As things stand, only the first $113,400 of wage income is subject to the Social Security tax — the so-called FICA tax. Even if you earn $2 million or $200 million a year, you still only pay that 6.2% FICA tax on the first $113,400 of it–a maximum tax of $7,030.80 per person or $14,061.60 for employee and employer.

If the cap were eliminated, as was done long ago for the Medicare tax, so that the rich and their employers — or rich people themselves if they are self-employed — had to pay the full 12.4% tax on their income, almost all of the shortfall in the Social Security Trust Fund’s ability to pay for the retirement benefits of the Baby Boomers and subsequent retirees would be eliminated. If, beyond that, investment income was also made subject to the Social Security tax, either as a straight percentage of profits, or as a small 0.25% to 0.5% tax on stock and bond transactions, not only would the entire shortfall be gone, but there would be money to do what an increasing number of Americans are saying must be done: increase retirement benefits.

The chained CPI 'reform' proposed by Obama to "fix" Social Security would rob retirees of tens of thousands of dollars each

I’m going to engage here in a thought experiment which may make some readers a little queasy, but bear with me.

It’s been half a century since the wrenching experience of having a charismatic young president cut down by bullets in what most Americans apparently still believe was a dark conspiracy by elements of the US government unhappy with the direction he was taking the country in international affairs.

Certainly powerful people like ex-CIA Director Allen Dulles and some of the nation’s top generals, not to mention executives of what prior President Dwight D. Eisenhower had labeled the military industrial complex were outraged that in his third year in office Kennedy was trying to dial back the Cold War, to reduce or even end the threat of actual nuclear war, and that he was even thinking of pulling US troops out of Vietnam and of reaching some accommodation with Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

Today we can read analyses like this that compellingly argue that the assassination of President Kennedy was orchestrated by those in the ruling elite who opposed such moves towards peace by a president who had campaigned for office as a hard-line cold warrior.

What then are we to make of recent actions by President Obama, who since his election has been a supporter of aggressive, even criminally aggressive militarism in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, but who, in recent months has been taking steps that appear, at least on their face, to be aimed at tamping down American belligerence?
Take his surprising back-down from a threatened attack on Syria. That prospective war at one point was only two days from being launched, with US ships and planes in place surrounding Syria, all fueled, armed and awaiting orders from the commander in chief.

Is a war-weary Obama suddenly starting to channel the '63 JFK?

A tectonic shift is occurring in the US body politic. Ignore the media-driven sideshow about the 2014 contest for control of the House or about the screwed-up Obamacare insurance-market website. The real political battle is over Social Security and Medicare, and there the story is a historic turn from fighting against Washington efforts to cut those programs to demanding that both be expanded.

A coalition of progressive groups organizations, including of groups like the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, NOW, Paralyzed Veterans of America, Generations United, NARFE and SocialSecurity Works, last week protested outside the White House against a proposal, still included in the proposed Obama 2014 budget, to cut back on the inflation adjustment to Social Security, effectively assuring a gradual, but significant reduction in benefits in future years for elderly retirees and the disabled.

Meanwhile, a small but growing group of US senators and representatives, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent socialist from Vermont, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) and Sen. Bryan Shatz (D-HI), is calling for eliminating the cap on income subject to Social Security taxation, so that all Americans, including millionaires and billionaires, pay the full FICA tax on their income, a move which would effectively end any talk of the Social Security program “running out of money.”

It’s about time.

As Sen. Warren put it in a recent statement on the Senate floor, “We should be talking about expanding Social Security benefits – not cutting them…. Social Security is incredibly effective, it is incredibly popular, and the calls for strengthening it are growing louder every day.”

While Democratic party leaders, like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and President Obama, in thrall to Wall Street lobbyists, have offered to cut Social Security benefits by, for example, adopting a new stingier means of calculating inflation called the “Chained CPI), polls show that Americans consistently and resoundingly support not just protecting Social Security but expanding its currently meager benefits.

Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) want expanded Social Security, not just no benefit cuts

(This article first appeared in WhoWhatWhy News)
 

“I regret to inform you…”
 

Late last May, Reniya Manukyan, the widow of IbragimTodashev, publicly disputed a claim by the FBI that her dead husband was a murderer. Two months later, Manukyan received a letter from her bank informing her that her personal account was being cancelled. She had a month to withdraw her money.

Her “offense”?  Neither the bank nor the FBI will say.

Manukyan was widowed May 22 by seven bullets fired into Todashev under suspicious circumstances by an FBI agent while he was being held and interrogated in his Florida apartment by several agents and Massachusetts State Police troopers.

The FBI subsequently claimed Todashev, along with alleged Boston Marathon bomber TamerlanTsarnaev, had slain three drug dealers in a grisly 2011 murder in Waltham, Mass.

But Manukyan provided an alibi for her dead spouse: bank records of purchases he had made in Atlanta on Sept. 11, 2011, the day of the killing.

After she revealed publicly that she had those records, Manukyan received a bizarre communication from her Atlanta bank. The message, mailed on August 28, 2013, informed her bluntly that her account was being cancelled. No reason was given.

Reniya Manukyan's bank account was closed after she said account records proved her husband, Ibragim Todashev, killed by the FBI during an interrogation, was in Atlanta at the time of a 2011 Massachusetts murder the FBI is trying to pin on him

This article first appeared in the magazine Retirement Income Journal
 

Helsinki—Mikko Kautto, impeccable in a blue suit and open-collared shirt, was sitting at a table in the cafeteria of the modern Centre for Pensions building on the outskirts of Finland’s capital city, answering questions about the operation of his Nordic country’s retirement system.

How, he was asked, does Finland—with its own graying bulge of Baby Boomers, low immigration rate and low birth rate—plan to deal with its version of the impending global retirement crisis?

Kautto, the director of research at the Centre for Pensions, looked surprised and a bit bemused. “We don’t see it as a crisis,” he said. “We see it as having a lot of older citizens that we need to make sure have a comfortable retirement, and we have been planning for that for years. It’s certainly a challenge, but it’s not a crisis.”

Finland's retirees get benefits designed to allow them to maintain their standard of living in retirement

Today my toast looks like Christ,
like planet earth,
like Venus
like me in a dinosaur-proof suit,
bristling with spikes
that I invented when I was afraid to fall asleep.
But I don’t have time for visions. Christ,
I don’t have time for anything!
Bombs in the basement. That’s for the NSA.
A toast to the NSA!
(Lift up your cups, your mugs, comrades!)
The NSA keeps us mad.
Mad as a Hatter.
Without madness I just start
thinking about whether I flossed last night.
I can’t tell you what I’m really thinking.
But it’s whispering.
(I tell spirit in the stone-people’s lodge, I
sweat out truths that are so far beyond
anything I can put to words.
Sometimes sweat speaks louder than words.)
I wish I trusted my instincts!
Damn this
buzzing in my head. Can’t
think clearly. Want a revolution.
You too?
(My toast wants a revolution!)
I’m a Vietnam peace-veteran. And
so much more. They took my childhood,
my youth, my old age.
(Next life I’m going to
get ‘em back.) They took my father’s soul for
Christ’s sake. . .He was a Marine. . .
But he got it back before he died.
I was there. He got it back!
Bombs, bombs, I mean Buddha
in the basement.
Good morning NSA.
It’s a metaphor, you idiots. You literalists.
It’s code for, you guys should get out more.
This whole piece of toast is looking like Snowden now
who looks like Christ, by the way,
who looks like you and me and Buddha
flossing under the Bodhi tree,
who looks like Snowden.
Dear Snowden,
It snowed yesterday.
And I still have gardens to put to bed. . .
 

— Gary Lindorff

So National Security Agency Director Keith B. Alexander, who, along with his boss, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., thinks that “if you can collect it, you should collect it,” now is asking whether it might not be such a good idea in the case of spying on the citizens of US allies like Germany, France, Spain et al.

“What’s more important,” the chief spook reportedly asked, following revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that the NSA has been spying on the electronic communications and phone conversations of millions of people in European other countries around the world. “Partnering with countries may be more important than collecting on them.”

This unusual moment of reflection came before the later disclosure that the Alexander’s super spying outfit was also tapping the cell phones of the leaders of America’s major allies, including France and Germany, not to mention Brazil.

Caught with his electronic pants down, Alexander, who is also a four-star active-duty general, is suddenly acknowledging that spying might have a downside.

In this case, the downside he is acknowledging is a diplomatic one: if you spy on the people — and the leaders — of a friendly state, violating a basic trust that had been taken for granted, you risk losing that trust and losing a long-time friend. Alliances can founder over such abuses of trust.

What Alexander and his truth-challenged boss Clapper are not considering, though, is whether there is also a bigger question: Isn’t maintaining democratic freedoms and the trust of the American people more important than collecting every possible datum of information about them, and monitoring their every move and every communication?”

The answer, of course, is obvious, which is why Alexander and Clapper are not asking it.

Spoof NSA T-shirt: Way back in 2011, the agency threatened to sue the company, LibertyManiacs.com, on the basis of an obsure federal law outlawing the “mutilation or alteration of government seals,” in order to prevent sale of the shirt (click on image to check out the company).

A revealing page-one article in today’s New York Times (“Tap on Merkel Provides Peek a Vast Spy Net”) reports on how the NSA’s global spying program, dating back at least to early in the Bush/Cheney administration, was vacuuming up the phone conversations (and no doubt later the internet communications) of not just leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but opposition leader Merkel before her party took power in Germany.

As the Times puts it, the phone monitoring, which actually dates back to the Cold War Era before 1990, “is hardly limited to the 35 leaders of countries like Germany, and also includes their top aides and the heads of opposing parties.”

That’s pretty far-reaching, and the paper says that it has learned, primarily courtesy of revelations from the documents released by fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden, that the spying went even beyond that, to target up-and-coming potential leaders of so-called “friendly states.”

But the Times buys without question the explanation offered by professional liar James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence and ultimate head of the embattled National Security Agency, that the NSA’s spying on leaders and potential was and is and has been, first of all, well known to presidents, and secondly that its purpose was simply to see “if what they’re saying gels with what’s actually going on, as well as how other countries’ policies “impact us across a whole range of issues.”

That’s pretty broad. The first explanation is really a euphemistic way of saying the NSA wants to see if American’s purported friends and allies are lying. The second is a euphemistic way of saying that the US is spying to gain inside information about its allies’ political goals and strategies, and probably their negotiating positions on things like trade treaties, international regulations, etc.

What the Times does not ask in its entire report on this spying program on leaders and potential leaders is whether there could be another motive for this extraordinary spying campaign on leaders: blackmail.

Is President Obama listening in on others courtesy the NSA, or is the NSA listening in on him, and if so, for whom?

Nonetheless, at the time, most news organizations simply accepted at face value the shifting and thin official accounts of the strange events. Today few give the still-unfolding saga even the most minimal attention. And it is most certainly still unfolding, as we shall see. The Little-Noticed Post-Marathon Hunt The FBI’s strange obsession with marginal figures …

Continue reading “Feds Accused Of Harassing “Boston Bomber” Friends, And Friends Of Friends”