Socialism for the permanent elite and survival of the fittest for the rest of us. Social Darwinism prevails!

Update: 10:29pm There are some villagers upset. Here's what happened at the WTO meeting in Geneva:

The WTO is discussing the world economic crisis. Thoughtful of them, isn't it?

While Alabama begins with better looking numbers, it ends looking almost exactly like Mississippi. Same with the rest of the states you mention. East Texas is worse off than Central Texas, but I think that's accurate.

The whole thing looks like time-lapse photography of mold consuming an orange.

I did inhale.

It's like one of those old Disney documentaries - except in this case the time lapse is a nightmare. Be nice if somebody in power gave a damn but they don't care, they don't have to.

This is a nice way to look at proportional advances in joblessness based on the official numbers. At the same time, there's always the U6 figures, which I suspect didn't lend to the same graphic representation. Check this out. It's a continually updated site that has href="http://www.shadowstats.com/imgs/sgs-emp.gif">U3, U6

and the economists own calculations of unemployment. The general page has other measures, CPI, GDP based on current and former calculations. The sad thing is that we've been in trouble for a long time.

This is the official versus U6 versus author's estimates:

...replicate it, but always come up short - haven't been able to find a definitive description of how they construct their adjustment and how it compares with the BLS estimates. My intuitive sense is that it's a useful "very high bound" estimate that helps bring in some sense of under-employment.

More germane to my original point, the steeper slope on the U6 measure (compared to the U3) might imply that there's more churn going on in the U6, helping keep the labour force numbers "pumped up" higher than they have historically been in these types of reversals, but to really establish this I'd have to spend a goodly amount of time wading through numbers that I just don't have right now and I don't have enough familiarity with the American figures to know how reasonable a theory it is on the face of it. Call it a possible hypothesis for now, I guess.

“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass

but one category is people that took early retirement that would have preferred to continue working. I suspect he also figures a percentage of intentionally false or misleading data, courtesy of our government.

I did inhale.

The Marxist concept of deepening the contradictions until revolution--violent, electoral, or ideological--happens is extremely dubious. Things can always get worse with no prospect for improvement.

What the public wants doesn't matter. A solid majority of the public wanted 'Medicare-E' single payer health reform. The village was more interested in helping the insurance industry hit its executive compensation targets. Medicare-E didn't happen; mandates did. The village wouldn't notice, or care, if half the population was starving.

Even if half the population were starving, a sizable chunk of the public would argue that the real problem was lack of faith in Jesus and not kleptocratic elites. Prosperity theology is a very, very effective social control scheme.

Things are not going to get better and Americans are not revolutionary, in fact our culture has spent the last 350 years or so excising that kind of behavior from the lower economic classes making them into little more than lambs. Lambs only know how to run to the trough when someone opens a bag of feed and are easily led to slaughter.

We need a NATION WIDE STRIKE for Real healthcare reform

...people is an altogether more unpleasant experience than musing about it online whilst sipping one's latte. Fortunately, the average ex-soldier has a rather more developed understanding of this essential truth than the average member of the commentariat.

“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass

I suppose. My point is, what happens when the disgruntled McVeigh types have no more money to buy their coffee and things in their life become more unpleasant than it would be to plan and execute a rampage?