The Obama administration and its "Amen corner" in the mainstream media were cheering Friday's Bureau of Labor Statistics report that the unemployment rate had dropped to "only" 8.9%.
Not so, said one of Chicago's Big-Labor chieftains.
Speaking for the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)this past Saturday on WCPT's Dick Kay show, the public employee union honcho, Larry Spivak, said the actual unemployment rate in Illinois is more like 15 per cent.
The Labor Bureau reports fail to account for the tens of thousands who have simply thrown in the towel and stopped even looking for a job, Spivak said.
So what gives?
Is Spivak saying that Obama is lying?
Is he saying that after 2 years and billions in economic stimulus cash, Obama and his Congressional Democrats have failed miserably?
Spivak also, inadvertently endorsed one of the key arguments of the immigration control movement.
He lambasted firms like Walmart for paying skinflint wages and giving no healthcare coverage to the people they hire. He said that those firms are parasitically content to let the American taxpayers foot the bill for their employees' healthcare costs.
Isn't that precisely the same argument that the border controllers have been making about the profiteers who hire illegal aliens?
Yet the AFSCME public employees union has been quiveringly giddy in its adoration of Barack Obama. And the AFSCME is an ardent backer of the the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights -- the lynchpin of the illegal alien lobby in Chicago.
With arguments like those he spouted on Dick Kay's left-wing show Saturday, AFSCME's Larry Spivak might consider taking out membership in his local Tea Party group.
When someone gets kicked off of unemployment, they are no longer counted as being in the ranks of the unemployed. There is no longer anything to track them. They aren't getting a check of some kind, there isn't a way to measure them. They just become nameless, faceless, often homeless.
ReplyDeleteSo yes, unemployment is always higher than the numbers show, because there are so many that are simply no longer counted. They have ceased to exist in many ways.
These statistics and percentages are just to fool people, there are thousands of people still loosing their job everyday.
ReplyDeleteI think you're right. I've had a feeling that there is kind of a news blackout on how bad things really are, just to bolster Obama's re-election chances. Just look at how the media were all cheering last week when the reported unemployment rate supposedly went down from 9.0% to 8.9% -- that isn't even statistically significant, yet they were all cheering!
ReplyDeleteYeah, one tenth of one percent, big fat hairy deal, right? Seriously.
ReplyDeleteWe "fell off the map" under Bush, and there are many "99ers" under Obama who have fallen off. Unemployment runs out and so do your options.
And the unemployment rate - nationally - was much less under Bush than it is now. Like 6%ish or so. Although back when it happened to us under Bush, I was reading in the papers that it was actually around 15% in Chicagoland. As usual, we were much higher than the national average.