The unemployment is probably higher than reported

Bloomberg here

A series of pieces at Calculated Risk 1 2 3 4

They are all distressing but #4 on the increase of personal bankruptcy is especially telling.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics now admits it has been cooking the numbers:

BLS Discloses It Has Overrepresented Payroll Data By 824,000 Or 15%

Zero Master here

If they wait a while, all those unemployed folks will give up and the BLS can proclaim full employment.

Happy days will be here again, as long as you are not one of those 15 million souls camped out in tent city.

---

Most things we could have learned from Japan, but didn't.

The recession is over but the depression has just begun

Edward Harrison here

---

For thirty years there has been a massive transfer of wealth from those that don't have much, to those that already have a lot. But now the claim is made that those plutocrats are falling on… well it is not exactly hard times, is it.

The Greenspan/Bernanke expedition into the great bubble unknown has brought more than just a few back a little closer to earth.

The wealth of all 306,000,000 of us has gone from $62 trillion to $50 trillion.

Of that, 314 plutocrats are now worth a mere $1.27 trillion. That is 0.000001 % of the population with 3% of the wealth.

Brother can you spare a billion?

Forbes 400

America's super rich are getting poorer. For only the fifth time since 1982, the collective net worth of The Forbes 400, our annual tally of the nation's richest people, has declined, falling $300 billion in the past 12 months from $1.57 trillion to $1.27 trillion. Faltering capital markets and real estate prices, along with divorce and fraud, pushed the fortunes of 314 members down and drove 32 plutocrats off the rankings.

here

are worth more than the average worker, wouldn't they have to work 400 times harder than the worker? So they would have to put in 3,200 hours a day instead of the 8 or more that the average worker does. Hmmm, how do they calculate that?

http://sandersunfiltered.com/episodes/

This guy is saying what needs to be said.

i tried last nite to link to my review of the ken burns' nat'l park films...but i was on my itouch and couldn't successfully make a link.

so here goes again:

here's my review

and

here's a list of the parks mrs. skippy and i have enjoyed.

...but I was hoping that after Bernie talked about the social programs in Scandinavia, he would then talk about their economy, standard of living, distribution of wealth, etc. as compared to the U.S.

People here may be receptive to hearing about the child care, education, and health benefits, but they will immediately question the cost. How much do the Swedes pay in taxes? How does it affect the private sector, innovation, etc?

Tough luck on the Olympic bids, Barry. Health care "reform" to jack up Medicare RX rates? Obama's latest job investment plan. Summers says the economy rebounding could take months. Repugs support the illegit Honduras Prez.

that Bernie Sanders does something a little different from most of his cohorts...he actually cares about his fellow citizens...and seems to think that he & others in the government should be doing something for the people that elect them.
Whoa!!! What a concept...too bad it just won't catch on...the pocketbook appears a tad more important to most elected officials.
Valiant effort Bernie & others with your priorities...I'm ever so sad that it just won't be enough.

Grand Ol' Pigs don't care about American jobs. The Senate don't care about jobless benefits.

dont republicans just laugh at things like this? they think working together for a better country/world is a joke.

Find the Moore-isms in this clip more distracting than helpful. While it is true that boomers were raised on cowboys and indians and that could say something about the psychology of competitiveness, clips from the Grapes of Wrath and The Jungle would be more appropriately illustrative of what Sanders was conveying. First impression is that the clip isn't working for me as well as I would like.

...what if we just all switched back to a barter system? don't ask the government to pass a law, just start doing it. Quit using their silly slips of paper and go back to bartering.

If enough of us did it, it'd make all that wealth pretty useless, wouldn't it?

I wonder what the effect would be...?

...lives with the top 1-2% of the wealthiest people in America. They have been controlling the collective wealth of this nation for decades. They control the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, the media, the insurance companies, the banks, the retailers, the hospitals, the schools, the law enforcement and even the Government. Funneling everything to them. Because of this the ranks of the poor and unemployed have grown in that time. Thanks to the criminal Bush Administration this growth has tremendously sped up. Just this morning, it was reported that almost 300,000 more jobs have been shed. And again guess who got the blame? President Obama. Whom has held office less than a year. They want people to forget the eight years of tax cuts for the wealthiest and the deregulation of the banking industry with no oversight...the true reason why this country is having difficulty with economic recovery and is still shedding jobs. More people are having to do with less even losing their homes, while the wealthy laugh all the way to the bank. Frankly when Obama said, after taking office, he would let the Bush tax cuts expire instead of rescinding them on the spot, the writing on the wall became apparent. That was the signal for the Republicans to begin a smear campaign on every level imaginable that borders on outright sedition. President Obama has let this fester for far too long...I only hope his action of 'we will call you out' is not too late and he sticks to it. The Republicans are tirelessly stoking the antidemocratic fires of anti-Obamaism not only at the expense of their own party, but also at the expense of the country itself. Forming divisions in the population where none should exist, just so all the power and wealth can stay in the control of as few hands as possible. Capitalism is no longer a good thing when people start to die because of it.