U.S. Economic/Financial News

Obama's Mass Unemployment Debacle Continues

Aug. 5 (EIRNS)—While the Labor Department's highly massaged jobs survey of employers (the "Establishment Survey") today reported an uptick of 117,000 jobs for July, its survey of employees (the "Household Survey") showed a mass unemployment crisis now uninterrupted for four years and getting worse.

Any statement President Barack Obama makes, boasting about this employment report, will be a criminal lie, and an attack on the 35 million people who would be employed today in a normal, growing American economy, but are not working in NerObama's depression.

There are no more Americans working today than there were in July one year ago, that Household Survey reveals. There are fewer working today than there were when Obama's "recovery" began in July 2009. In the year since July 2010, there are 2.2 million more Americans who have dropped out of (or failed to enter) the labor force because they could not be employed. Just in July 2011 alone, 375,000 potential workers left the labor force, and will no longer even be officially counted as unemployed. The whole labor force has shrunk by another 400,000 during that year, and shrank by 193,000 last month alone. (This made the "official" unemployment rate drop by 0.1% to 9.1%, by shrinking the number of the masses of unemployed who are counted as such.)

Worse, the average length of unemployment has now gone over 40 weeks—almost 10 months—for those who are still in the labor force and actively seeking work. There are 13 million people who've been out of work for more than a year; and 5 million young working people under 25 who have not yet found their first job.

A strong contributing factor to economic decline and misery in the remaining months of 2001 will be the end of unemployment benefits for 3.5 million people and households over those months. The treasonous "Satan sandwich" deal by Congress last week, unless overthrown and reversed, left very little chance of any further extensions of the benefits, which provide about $350 per week on average.

Budget Deal Cuts Will Kill U.S. Science

Aug. 5 (EIRNS)—The long arc of killing U.S. science and the American population's love of it that began with President Kennedy's assassination in 1963, has now put what remains of U.S. government science support on the chopping block, unless NerObama is driven from the Presidency now.

If the Congress does not approve the $1.5 trillion in additional cuts submitted by the unconstitutional "Super Congress" by Christmas, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which funds medical research, the National Science Foundation, which funds basic science, and the Department of Energy, which runs the national laboratories in the U.S., will be gutted.

Even the proponents of the cuts admit that these are the most destructive cuts imaginable. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) told Bloomberg, "The automatic cuts were intentionally designed to be so large, so unimaginable, so irresponsible, that Congress would be incented to approve the select committee recommendations." By plan, these cuts will not take effect until 2013, allowing Obama and his Congressional accomplices to evade them as a 2012 election issue.

* The NIH budget would be cut by nearly 8%, the largest in the agency's history—eight times the $317 million cut this year. The NIH supports 325,000 scientists, who carry out clinical trials for cancer research, among other projects. Big cuts would mean money would go to older "proven" scientists rather than young scientists, and if there is less money, everyone would opt for more conservative, plodding research. Public sector researchers, who get about 70% of their funding from the NIH, contributed to the discovery of 1 in 5 medicines approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration from 1990-2007. NIH funding cuts would mean new and old studies and trials to prevent Alzheimer's would be halted.

* The National Science Foundation cuts include many next-generation physics projects, according to the American Physical Society. These include the James Webb Space Telescope (the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope); participation in ITER, an international collaboration to build the world's largest fusion reactor; and the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams.

Texas Declares Its Fifth Energy Emergency in 2011

Aug. 5 (EIRNS)—Texas has declared an "Energy Emergency" for the fifth time this year, as prolonged intense heat pushed the wholesale price of energy to the state's legal cap of $3,000 per megawatt-hour. On Aug. 4, the Texas grid operator instituted power cuts for big industrial customers and rolling blackouts to others. The heat wave itself knocked out power from 20 plants.

Under the British-Obama energy policy, Houston, formerly the energy capital of the world, and the rest of Texas, now face energy shortages and harsh energy conservation measures.

The Technological Leadership Institute of the University of Minnesota reported that in an average year, U.S. power outages (excluding those caused by extraordinary events) totalled 92 minutes in the Midwest and 214 minutes in the Northeast, while Japan averages only 4 minutes of interrupted service each year (pre-earthquake and pre-nuclear shutdown).

The U.S. energy platform is decrepit. Many coal-fired plants date back to the 1940s. No new nuclear plants have been built in the U.S. for 30 years; so, dozens of reactors are 40 years old. Many of the U.S. transmission lines were built 50 or more years ago.

Energy production and transmission require capital investments, which the Obama Administration is committed to preventing.