I do not know how The US measures Job losses but I offer the opinion that they are vastly understated and the numbers manipulated.

When I look at Canada they also announce job losses month to month but they rarely have to go back two and three months previous and revise the numbers as the US seems to do.

If they do it no where near the degree of what happens in the United States with their own "revisions".

I can only conclude that the numbers are deliberately understated . People pay more attention to the monthly stated Job losses then they do to the revsions that come 2 and three months later.

That all said I look to more Editorials from the NYT and teh WSJ and the Ecnomist claiming it all rosy and all that needed is more free trade agreements and more money for the wealthy so it trickles down.

PK

It's so frustrating to see politicians, industry leaders and economists talking as if a bad economy comes from outer space--and all we can do is passively wait for the economic meteor storm to pass.
Well, I have a news flash for them: Our financial difficulties are man-made, and it will require man-made solutions.

Those at the top are all too willing to cut off OUR noses to spite their FACES. Heard the same report on CNN this morning that the number of jobs lost has been revised sharply upward for the past three months (some now are even using the "D" word). They say that the answer is retraining us because there are not enough qualified people for the jobs that are available. I know this is largely a lie because my wife over the last several years has lost 3 manufacturing jobs and went back to school TWICE to retrain. When she finished her 'training' there were no jobs in her field because--you guessed it--they'd been outsourced!

To even begin to come back we need to immediately revise NAFTA and GATT (or end those agreements entirely), and start to manufacture some of the things we need again. Those jobs did not disappear overnight and they will not return overnight, so there is no quick fix. This means that most of us will be relegated to a lower standard of living (hopefully, at a bare minimum, we will be able to obtain enough to provide for our basic needs), whether we like it or not. This is the REALITY we presently face, and it most likely also means problems for China (and other countries who provide cheap labor) as our market for their goods continues to shrink. The Obama administration will have to meet this reality head on. Denial and continuation of the status quo will cause things to sink even faster. Unfortunately, this may have to happen before the elite let go of the reigns as they meet their own demise.

As I write this I hear an interview with a former proponent of 'free trade' saying that the trade imbalance with China is growing even faster during this downturn, and that we must now do something about free trade! The 'bow-tie boys' are really sweating now--seems like the 'truth' it getting more difficult to spin. Time to prepare the crow?

Here in the PNW I'd say its closer to 12-15%. And people are starting to be frightened. I know whole families were mother,father,aunts,uncles,children have lost their jobs in the last 6 months. And they were working in different sectored jobs! Blue collar and white.
Silence is Consent.

I read George Will's column in the Washington Post yesterday and I quote: ...93 percent of those who want to work are employed,and more than 93 percent of mortgages are being paid on time..

I emailed him to ask where those figures came from ...

He also said that over the Black Friday weekend, 172 million people spent and average of $372.57. A year ago during the same period, 147 million people shopped and spent $347.55 per person. That is an increase of 7.2 percent of over a year ago.
He suggests that dropping the hundreds of billions of dollars by Washington is having a psychotherapeutic effect. Reckon?

this article fails to note that there have been 1.9 million jobs lost in the USA in 2008.

http://money.cnn.com/2008/12/05/news/economy/jobs_november/index.htm

The unemployment numbers count only those that are actively looking for work, not those that have given up, not those that are homeless, and certainly not those that are unable to work due to physical/mental disability.

it was not uncommon to hear reporters in the 90s say things like "unemployment rates increases sightly last month mostly due to people re-joining the labour force".

To avoid mental depression, we have to take the long view now. Every day more people realize the thinking of Milton Freedman, Ann Rand, Alan Greenspan, etc. was fatally flawed. Only the hard-core idiots still view Reagan and GW Bush economic policies as valid. Most people now understand that we need an intelligent president, not a flag-waving cowboy. Hopefully in a month and a half, a lot of good ideas will emerge into infrastructure jobs that will set us up for much better in the decades ahead. I hope the best ideas can bull rush the stodgy debate and contrary corporate interests. It's perfect timing for a good Shock Doctrine.

GwNorth--Unemployment is manipulated by controlling how many people are in the "labor force"--which means people who worked more than 1 hour the previous month or who were "actively" searching for work. In this NYTimes item, that issue is mentioned, as is the BLS's "broadest" unemployment measure, "U6," which is now over 12% as displayed by the unemployment chart here; where you will also see the SGS Alternative measure which tries to include ALL people over 16 in the country wanting to work (which is most everyone--disabled included) and indicates almost 17%--more than the entire population of California--are unemployed. You will want to note what the Morgan Stanley analysts have to say in the first linked item.

At his 1937 Innauguration, FDR delivered his "One-Third of The Nation" speech. About 42.6 Million people represented One-Third of our populace then. About double that number currently have NO health insurance, with propably 120+ Million having none or inadequate policies. (About 128 Million, 1937 population.) In the BLS Press Release, it says the Civilian labor force is 154,616,000, or less than half current population. The real size of the labor force is likely around 220,000,000--over 65 Million MORE (ShadowStats uses a smaller figure than I.) The point is that the current crisis is rapidly approaching the record proportions set during the Great Depression, while the government tries its best to hide the real situation. By Obama's Inauguration, January 20, I would expect the U6 figure to be over 14% and the SGS Alternate to be close to 20%--close to 40 Million people needing work but finding none.

There is a solution for the Bush-Greenspan Depression as well as the Energy and Global Warming Crises--The wholesale retooling of the Military Industrial Complex into a Green Energy Complex with the concomitant rapid rollback of the US Empire--A solution for the Common Folk that obviously runs into longstanding elite vested interests that are easilly seen as parasitic. There will soon be a vast Army of Unemployed whose existence will pose a threat to the Elite. FDR made the right choices to defuse the Class War he faced. Will Obama?

"Basically $100 billion of public investment in such things as roads, bridges and levees would generate two million jobs," Robert N. Pollin, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, said. "That would offset the two million jobs that we are now on track to lose by early next year."

So, to rebuild some of the nation's crumbling infrastructure it would cost about $100 million and offset the 2 million jobs that economists expect to disappear. This compares to the $700 million (so far) given to Wall Street criminals who produce nothing and create hardly any jobs.

Welcome to Amerika, land of opportunists.

Once we built an Empire
But now we're done

I don't know about you all but now I wish I had paid attention to my grandparents when they talked about how they survived the Great Depression.

"Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime;
Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?"

Help reduce the National Debt - TAX CHURCHES!

There are 3 types of unemployment the government recognizes, but it only reports on one. They are 1. what it defines and we all know as 'unemployment' based on monthly totals of aggregated applications for unemployment insurance - often under-reported since not everybody can or will apply; 2. long-term unemployment: those who have used up their unemployment insurance and may or may not be working - we don't know since we don't track that; and 3. structural unemployment based on the elimination of jobs/industries that are gone and will never come back (the textile or shoe manufacturing industries for example) or individuals who have after a year given up on finding work. We don't track that either.

Government does not count long-term unemployment or structural unemployment when reporting unemployment (nor does it count the 'under-employed' for that matter - that is, part-timers who want full employment or are working at jobs below their skill levels). The real unemployment level is often twice what the govenment claims.

The government has always considered a level of around 6% unemployment to be 'full employment'. Interpret this as you will, but it has been suggested that this is to keep pressure on current workers to not make trouble or they can be easily replaced; Alan Greenspan's 'insecure workforce' that contributed to the stockmarket bubble in the '90s.

and today the Stock market shrugged off the dismal, shocking, and frightening fact that we're all going to hell in a hand basket. How many americas are we living in?

These are the chickens of GWB coming home to roost. When history is written, all that will be remembered about Dubyuh is failure, misery and high crimes. That is if there is any truth to the history books.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JI05Dj03.html

voluminous , heavy lifting, extremely precise histories articles by a writer in AsiaTimesonline -- named Henry CK LIU that exposes all these nonsense of the "free market" espoused by the likes of greenspan and friedman and their ilk.

================

sample paragraphs below:

Page 1 of 3
COMMENT
Friedman's misplaced monument
By Henry C K Liu

The University of Chicago's plans, announced in June, to establish an economics research institute to be named after Nobel Prize-winner Milton Friedman, a free-market monetarist professor at the university from 1946 to 1976, faces strong vocal opposition from none other than Friedman's own colleagues in the university.

Friedman was widely regarded as the intellectual leader of the Chicago School of monetary economics, which stresses the overwhelming importance of the quantity of money as an instrument of government economic policy and as a determinant

of business cycles and inflation. He was also an outspoken public defender of free markets, which he inevitably linked with political freedom.

Friedman was the 1976 recipient of the Nobel/Sveriges Riksbank Prize in economics. The press release of the award cited Friedman's coining of the term "money matters" or even "only money matters" as an arresting slogan for monetarism. On November 17, 2006, one day after his death at age 94, the Wall Street Journal printed an opinion piece by Friedman entitled: Why Money Matters.

The official press release on the award explained the choice of Friedman as follows:

This strong emphasis on the role of money should be seen in the light of how economists - usually advocates of a narrow interpretation of Keynesian theory - have, for a long time, almost entirely ignored the significance of money and monetary policy when analyzing business cycles and inflation. As far back as the beginning of the fifties, Friedman was a pioneer in the well-founded reaction to the earlier post-Keynesian one-sidedness. And he succeeded - mainly thanks to his independence and brilliance - in initiating a very lively and fruitful scientific debate which has been going on for more than a decade. In fact, the macro-econometric models of today differ greatly from those of a couple of decades ago as far as the monetary factors go - and this is very much thanks to Friedman. The widespread debate on Friedman's theories also led to a review of monetary policies pursued by central banks - in the first place, in the United States. It is very rare for an economist to wield such influence, directly and indirectly, not only on the direction of scientific research but also on actual policies.

The press release was factual in some respects and outright inaccurate in others. It is accurate that Friedman strongly emphasized the role of money. But it is inaccurate to describe Friedman as having reversed the "narrow interpretation" of Keynesian theory because "only money matters" is literally a narrowing spotlight among the broad range of factors that Keynesian theory normally considers in formulating economic policy, including monetary factors.

It is accurate to say Friedman was an early pioneer in reaction to post-Keynesianism, but it is not accurate to label post-Keynesianism one-sided. In fact "only money matters" sounded definitively one-sided to most listeners. Friedman's reaction to Keynesianism is hardly well-founded, though it is admittedly reactionary. As the press report noted, Friedman's emphasis of money is important to the analysis of the business cycle and inflation. But business cycles are not the economy, only one aspect of it. In fact, Friedman's fundamental flaw is his fixation on the business cycle as expressed by the stock market, rather than looking at the whole economy with a wide range of meta-finance concerns such as agricultural economics, labor economics, population economics, the economics of war, pollution, development, and so forth. The list is long and interlinked and any economist ignoring any of part of the list runs the risk of being one-sided.

The market is merely the transactional record of the economy. Students of the market economy tend to confuse business, which is transacted in the market, as the whole economy itself. That is the problem with Business School economists who really should be called "busi-nomists" rather than eco-nomists because by definition and by design they are not concerned with eco, a Greek word oikos, meaning "house". The word describes the complex symbiotic relationships of all living organisms in relation to their environment in the eco-system. Business is only a subsystem of the socio-economic ecosystem. The goal of busi-nomists is to keep the business cycle from recurring crashes even if it means destroying the economy in the process. To achieve this goal, central banking was invented.

This is not to denigrate business experts. All experts, however narrow their field, perform useful functions, and brilliant experts deserve admiration. It is just that they should refrain from fantasizing that they are generalists dealing with the economy. Business exists to make profit for the businessman and there is nothing wrong with that as long as ethical rules are observed. Unlike business, the economy exists to enhance progress in civilization. The former is artificial, the latter is actual. The key problem of the recent decades of Friedman monetarism has not been that money matters but that it matters too much.

So who turned out to be right?

December 5 CTV headline: "Canada loses 70,600 jobs in a month, most since '82"

QUESTION PERIOD - Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Hon. Jack Layton (Toronto—Danforth, NDP): Mr. Speaker, we are facing a crisis. We are in a crisis situation right now. People cannot wait a few months for a speech and measures. They need measures right now. The crisis is hitting hard right now. The automotive industry is falling apart, while the government turns a blind eye. People are losing their jobs, but employment insurance is not there for them and their families when they need it.

Why does the Prime Minister insist on waiting until February? Where is the plan? Where is the leadership? Where are the concrete measures we need right now?

Hon. Jim Flaherty (Minister of Finance, CPC): As I say, Mr. Speaker, we acted in advance in 2006-07 with these various measures.

The member opposite should not talk down Canada. Our car sales are up in Canada. Our home business is solid. We even had one of the Canadian banks yesterday do an equity issue in Canadian markets successfully. That is how solid our system is.

I call on the hon. member to stand up for Canada and stop bad-mouthing Canada.

http://www2.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?Language=E&Mode=1&Parl=40&Ses=1&DocId=3617916#OOB-2559022

The true rate of unemployment in the United States is at least twice the stated government figure and probaly higher. Read Kevin Phillips on how the government has for decades cooked the books and put lipstick on their statistical pig.

Two other numbers of concern; the labour force participation rate is falling quicker than expected and the underemployment figure is at about 12.5%. Scary times ahead folks...