By Tyler Durden

While claiming to address the “shortage” of skilled welders, a company called Hirebotics has now engineered the first “robotic welding solution for hire”. The automated welder is paid by the hour, just like skilled manual labor, and is far less likely to need a bathroom break and/or file a grievance with the local union. 

Claiming that traditional robotic welding automation has been a “poor solution” for most fabricators, the company is now offering a product called the BotX welder, which it says can accelerate business growth while eliminating the “headaches” of finding skilled welders. 

The company, which was started with the goal of helping manufacturers, says that the BotX Welder bridges the gap between inflexible, expensive and higher productive traditional automation and manual welding with skilled welders. It says that the BotX can be used both as a tool for a company’s manual welders to get more done each day, and also as a robotic welder that is set up by a skilled welder, but then run by an untrained operator, via app.

The company claims there are four key advantages to its solution:

1. Pay by the Hour Automation


2. No-Programming Robotic Welding


3. Robotic Welding Library Developed by International Experts


4. Industry leading 24/7 support

The company charges $33 per “productive” hour per system to hire its bots.

The company’s mobile app says that it offers “real-time monitoring of your robotic welder tracking parts produced, consumption of welding consumables such as gas and wire, and productivity metrics like arc on time.” The app also includes a pre-set welding library specifically tuned for robotic welding.

And of course – what would any new technological product, run via app, be without offering a “community”?

“when you hire a BotX Welder for your business, you are joining a community of like-minded users that share our philosophy and culture of helping others get the most out of robotic welding,” the company’s website says.

Who wants to sit around and talk about robotic welding all day? A little marketing advice for the future: spare us the bullsh*t, you had us at saving money.

Video of the BotX at work can be seen here.

This article was sourced from ZeroHedge.com

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By Melissa Dykes

The dystopic future is quickly becoming the dystopic present.

This is something we’re about to see a lot more of in the coming years.

A Belgian marketing firm called NewFusion has microchipped its staff, replacing their traditional ID cards with RFID chips implanted in their hands.

The Daily Mail reports:

The radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips are about the same size as a grain of rice and store personal security information which can be transmitted over short distances to special receivers.

RFID chips can already be found in contactless cards, including banks cards and the Oyster system which is used by more than 10 million people to pay for public transport in London.

They are also similar to the chips implanted in pets.

The ones used at NewFusion cost around €100 each (£85 or $106) and are inserted between the thumb and index finger…

In 2015, a Swedish company implanted microchips in its staff which allowed them to use the photocopier, open security doors and even pay for their lunch.

More and more companies are going to start implanting their workers with RFID chips.

At least 10,000 people worldwide have already willingly microchipped themselves, and the practice has progressed to the point that RFID chip implant kits complete with a sterile injector system can be purchased online.

Hannes Sjoblad, the chief disruption officer at the Swedish bio-hacking group BioNyfiken, which implanted the chips into the Epicenter workers, told The Times: “We want to be able to understand this technology before big corporates and big government come to us and say everyone should get chipped – the tax authority chip, the Google or Facebook chip…”

The Facebook chip?

…

Physically microchipping one’s self is already being normalized and pushed as the next technological advance for safety and security. You can already see talk of how “convenient” and “secure” chipping one’s self will be in the future because passwords and ID cards can so easily get lost, right?

Mega tech companies already have microchips for payment like its mark of the beast straight out of the Bible … they just haven’t found a way to necessitate and sell it to the public yet. The casual programming of the population to accept this new tech can be found all over, including commercials like this one:

RFID Scan Blockers – Available for Free (Ad)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eob532iEpqk?feature=oembed&w=777&h=583]

Every time I see this commercial about our trendy, microchipped future, I wonder what happens if someone’s chip were to say get turned off, like Sandra Bullock’s life was in The Net?

The US military has already held meetings to discuss the feasibility of microchipping all of its soldiers to be able to track them via GPS.

In addition, big pharma companies like GlaxoSmithKline are working on “bioelectronics” — implanted microchips that will send electrical signals to various parts of the brain for medical purposes such as healing ailments. Sounds good initially until you think about it for more than two seconds.

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This is to say nothing of the legal and health issues surrounding the implantation of these chips.

And yet, tech experts claim that within the next decade, at least half of Americans will be microchipped.

You might say that sounds crazy, but if you’ve been to Disneyland or Disneyworld any time in the last decade, then you will see how ready and willing people are to scan their fingers and give up their biometric information for convenience. Sure, there’s an opt-out option, but does anyone actually bother or do the majority just go along with whatever they’re told to do for their “safety and convenience”?

If there was for example a “Facebook chip” that allowed people to interact with Facebook faster or a Google chip or a Smartphone texting chip or a video game chip or an insert a thousand other examples here chip … how many millions if not billions of people do you think would readily line up to get one in the name of “safety and convenience”?

But, for all those dissenters who wouldn’t make that choice, there’s always the fact that the House just passed a vaguely worded bill that will allow the government to microchip citizens including children with “mental disabilities.”

Welcome to the dystopic present.

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Contributed by Melissa Dykes of The Daily Sheeple.

Melissa Dykes is a writer, researcher, and analyst for The Daily Sheeple and a co-creator of Truthstream Media with Aaron Dykes, a site that offers teleprompter-free, unscripted analysis of The Matrix we find ourselves living in. Melissa and Aaron also recently launched Revolution of the Method and Informed Dissent. Wake the flock up!

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Also Read: The Era of Cyborg Nanotechnology Has Begun

By Heather Callaghan

And so it begins… A healthcare system has literally fired 50 employees – in one fell swoop – over a draconian flu jab policy

They can’t fire us all if we stand up, right? That might be the inner wishful thinking of those who refuse vaccinations while working in the healthcare system.

But as WGN9 reports:

A Minnesota-based health system has fired about 50 employees who refused to get a flu shot.

Essentia Health announced last month that employees would be required to get vaccinated for influenza unless they received a religious or medical exemption.

The system claimed that it was trying to “keep patients from getting sick at its 15 hospitals and 75 clinics in Minnesota, Idaho, North Dakota and Wisconsin.”

From WGN9:

Essentia says 99 percent of the company’s 13,900 eligible employees had gotten the shot, received an exemption or were getting an exemption by the Monday deadline.

The United Steelworkers filed an injunction to try to delay the policy, but a federal judge denied the request. Minnesota Public Radio reports at least two other unions are filing grievances on behalf of workers who lost their jobs.

How do you know when something is truly for the benefit of the people? Why, when you are forced to choose it or lose your entire livelihood, of course!

We’d like to point out that we have heard from workers in other healthcare systems who are being forced to get shots or either lose their jobs or wear masks for over four months of the year. Please remember that it is not just nurses and doctors who are being coerced, but support assistance workers and other department workers in the hospital systems.

Obviously, no one should be forced to take into their bodies any substance or face losing everything. Although the system enforcing these mandates claims it’s for public health, this cannot be the case considering the almost complete lack of efficacy of flu vaccines. (See the Cochrane Collaboration’s review.)

The hospital systems could protect their patients better by cutting down on preventable medical errors which are the third leading cause of death in the U.S.! They could come up with reasonable methods to prevent superbugs and antibiotic resistance among their vulnerable patients.

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We hope that all the unions fighting any healthcare systems using these seriously violating policies go all the way and win back basic rights for these employees.

Also see our important series!:

• The Toxic Placebo Effect Of Vaccines


• The Antibody Deception


• The Influenza Deception

---

DISCLAIMER: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

Heather Callaghan is a Health Mentor, writer, speaker and food freedom advocate. She is the Editor and co-founder of NaturalBlaze as well as a certified Self-Referencing IITM Practitioner.

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James Hall, Contributor
Activist Post

All one hears is that the lack of jobs is the number one economic problem. Well documented are endless examples of systemic destruction in employment opportunities. The negative consequences of off-shoring corporate jobs are undeniable. Up until now, the little attention placed on the psychological mindsets that build the structural impediments for a healthy main street economy, keep a serious discussion on jobs, just going in circles.

The official attitude that government social agencies exist to mitigate economic distress is a staple ever since the New Deal era. Much of the state of mind that created the welfare society emerged from the “do gooders” in New York State. The result from decades of socialization and educational indoctrination left us with the entitlement culture.

One illustration supports the contention. The NYAPRS, New York Association of Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services provides conclusions from a 2009 survey taken from informants who were consumers of employment services, administrators of state agencies, and community providers.

This research revealed several systemic and structural barriers to employment:

Slow transition to a Recovery-oriented system: The public mental health system New York State continues to have a strong focus on helping people to survive with their illnesses rather than to recover and function with the rest of society. This system does not seem to fully embrace the belief that all people with psychiatric disabilities can work. 

Employment is not a priority: The policies and practice standards of the public mental health system, vocational rehabilitation and workforce services do not recognize the harmful effects of long-term unemployment. Therefore, supporting employment has not been a priority. 

Lack of a comprehensive system: The services and supports needed for employment are not organized into single system in which people looking for work can get all of the services they need to find and keep a job. Some of the signs of this ‘fragmentation’ include: Service providers have little awareness of outside programs and agencies; Limited inter-agency collaboration leads to complex, repetitive processes to obtain services (e.g., applications, assessments); Poor referral and follow-up practices; Limited ability to combine resources and use funding efficiently.

Charity for the unfortunate is a noble practice, but condemning vast segments of the eligible work force to government reliance only produces subsistent survival. Note the concept “psychiatric disabilities” that breeds the acceptance that permanent unemployment is the new normal. NYARPS’ solution is more and bigger government.

The philosophical question that society refuses to confront is that work is essential to a healthy life. Most people deny this axiom. Their benefit lifestyle is based upon the tormented thought of actual work as an expenditure of energy and mental stress.

The simple reason why this criterion of torture — feared and evaded with earnest — is that public assistance for the middle class is an integrally important part of public policy. The myth that government services benefit citizens, based upon the false premise, of confiscatory taxation is mentally deranged.

Add in entire segments of illiterate and unassimilated renegades and the prospects of actually engaging in an honest day’s work and you have a national lifestyle that repudiates labor as a means of earning a living.

The parasitic culture is alive and well on its way to be the most vocal stratum demanding more government reimbursement to maintain unemployed status.

However, not all individuals share the futility of dependency. Some still soldier on to earn a legitimate sustenance through honorable work. The basic solution to quash the unemployment mentality cannot be found in sound bites like “creating jobs”. The cornerstone of government repression found in the fulfillment of government assistance programs, is the assault against the individual to keep the fruits of their commerce as a natural right.

The domestic economy has so radically denied the proper reward of conducting business that most citizens have clearly given up. The mental disease that permeates all aspects of government is that the State is the ultimate guarantor of the public welfare.

The reason why there are so many underprivileged beggars on some form of a public dole, rests upon the theft of the effective ability to succeed at an independent business venture. The average person, beaten down for decades, is not willing to take the risk of entrepreneurship.

The black market is the real economy. The intrusive violation into our own business affairs by the encroachment of government restriction on the free market causes systemic unemployment.

The future forecast just grows worse every year. Food stamp dependency is now at an all time high. Capitulation of the long-term unemployed leave the job search. Raising the minimum wage just forces more employees onto the unemployment rolls. Most disturbing is that the underemployed, who are unable to meet their financial needs, suffer from bleak expectations.

The corporate monopolization of access to capital, as the ordinary borrower barred from loans, is the final tipping point for main street commercial enterprises. The top-down economy only benefits the corporatist and magnifies the suffering of the fading middle class. The poor will always exist, but soon the bourgeoisie will be added to the ranks of the wretched.

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The psychiatric rehabilitation, desperately needed to restore the fundamental balance in normal commerce, needs to enforce anti-trust laws. Protection against crony criminals that steal from the true economy is imperative. The country is tilting on its axis because basic common sense is absent under the Corporate/State model.

Solving the unemployment dilemma requires a “single system” of rewarding work and phasing out government dependency. The sickness that saps the lifeblood from the economy requires treatment that restores decentralization and individual business initiatives.

America has an economy deeply afflicted with the mental ailment of futility. The symptom of economic distress is rapidly metastasizing into a culture of hopelessness. Only a revival of financial reward for meaningful work can regenerate needed confidence. The nanny state destroys self-reliance. Job creation is the natural function of the private sector.

It is time to get America back on track.

Original article archived here

James Hall is a reformed, former political operative. This pundit’s formal instruction in History, Philosophy and Political Science served as training for activism, on the staff of several politicians and in many campaigns. A believer in authentic Public Service, independent business interests were pursued in the private sector. Speculation in markets, and international business investments, allowed for extensive travel and a world view for commerce.  Hall is the publisher of BREAKING ALL THE RULES. Contact batr@batr.org

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Paul Craig Roberts, Contributor
Activist Post

Friday’s payroll jobs report says that 96,000 new jobs were created in August and that the unemployment rate (U.3) fell from 8.3% to 8.1%. As 96,000 new jobs are not enough to keep up with population growth, the decline in the U.3 unemployment rate was caused by 368,000 discouraged job seekers giving up on finding employment and dropping out of the work force as measured by U.3.

Discouraged workers are not included in the U.3 measure of unemployment, which makes the measure useless. The only purpose of U.3 is to keep bad news out of the news. the U.3 unemployment rate only measures those who have not been discouraged by the inability to find a job and are still actively seeking employment.

The government produces another unemployment measure, U.6, which includes people who have been discouraged by the inability to find a job and have been out of the work force for less than a year. This measure of unemployment is 14.7%, a number that would get attention if reported.

When the long-term (more than one year) discouraged workers are included, the US unemployment rate is about 22%. In other words, the real US rate of unemployment is almost three times higher than the reported–headline rate–of 8.1%. What is the purpose of reporting an unemployment rate that is about one-third the real unemployment rate? The only answer is deception through Happy News.

Let’s have a look at those 96,000 jobs. What kind of high-tech, high-income super jobs is “the world’s only superpower, the indispensable nation, the world’s greatest economy and capitalist heaven” creating? The answer is lowly paid third world jobs, which is why there is not and cannot be an economic recovery. All the good jobs have been moved offshore in order to maximize the incomes of the rich.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 28,300 of the 96,000 jobs or 29% are waitresses and bartenders. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t17.htm

Health care and social services, primarily ambulatory health care services and home health care services, provided 21,700 jobs or 22.6% of the jobs.

So, 52% of the new jobs created by the American superpower are lowly paid waitresses, bartenders, practical nurses, and hospital orderlies.

Highly paid manufacturing jobs declined by 15,000. The incomes lost by these jobs most likely exceed the income gains from the waitresses, bartenders, and hospital orderlies jobs.

Where did the other 46,000 jobs come from?

Formerly, in hard times government employment would expand, but, despite Republican propaganda, not today in today’s mean times. Government (federal, state and local) lost 7,000 jobs.

Professional and business services gained 28,000 jobs, primarily in computer systems design and related services (mainly Indians on H-1B work visas) and management and technical consulting services (mainly former corporate professional employees who now eke out a living by consulting, without pension or health benefits, with their former employers; in other words, they are working the same for less).

These three categories account for 81% of the new jobs.

Where are the remainder?

A few thousand jobs in finance and insurance, jobs that absorb consumer incomes but produce no product. Telephone, cable, water, electricity, and heating produced 8,800 jobs. Transportation and warehousing to store unsold goods produced 5,700 jobs. Retail trade, primarily food and beverage stores (alcohol), produced 6,100 jobs.

And there you have it. The “powerful American economy” is an economy that cannot produce its own clothes and shoes, or the manufactured products, including high technology products, that it consumes, or its own energy, all of which it imports by issuing more debt.

The “great hegemonic American economy” is on the verge of total collapse, because the only way it can pay for the imports that sustain it is by issuing more debt and printing more money. Once the debt and money creation undermine the dollar as world reserve currency, the US will become overnight a third world country, much to the relief of the rest of the world.

Last week Mr. Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank, announced for propaganda purposes that the ECB would buy up the sovereign debt of the troubled EU member governments if, and only if, the assisted member governments agreed to the conditionality that would be imposed.

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In other words, Draghi told Greece, Spain, and italy that the ECB will buy your bonds if you do what we tell you. Draghi’s conditions are a combination of austerity on the countries’ populations and the surrender of the countries’ financial sovereignty. Since the troubled debtor countries already had that option, Draghi’s scheme doesn’t change anything. However, the NY StockExchange used Draghi’s announcement to gin up day-trading profits.

Draghi says that the money that the ECB will pour into purchasing Greek, Italian and Spanish bonds will be offset by draining reserves from the European banking system, hardly a helpful operation to stressed banks and European recession.

It is difficult to image worse news than Draghi’s. Yet, stock markets rose. This result is more evidence that financial markets are not to be trusted.

But you will never, ever, hear this fact from the financial press.

A financial system based on lies and deceptions cannot forever last.

This article first appeared at Paul Craig Roberts’ new website Institute For Political Economy.  Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His Internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Donations to Paul Craig Roberts are much appreciated.

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Dees Illustration

Paul Craig Roberts, Contributor
Activist Post

Today’s employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows 114,000 new jobs in September and a drop in the rate of unemployment from 8.1% to 7.8%. As 114,000 new jobs are not sufficient to stay even with population growth, the drop in the unemployment rate is the result of not counting discouraged workers who are defined away as “not in the labor force.”

According to the BLS, “In September, 2.5 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force.” These individuals “wanted and were available for work,” but “they were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.”

In other words, 2.5 million unemployed Americans were not counted as unemployed.

The stock market rose on the phony good news. Bloomberg’s headline: “U.S. Stocks Rise as Unemployment Rate Unexpectedly Drops,” http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-05/u-s-stock-futures-little-changed-before-payrolls-report.html .

A truer picture of the dire employment situation is provided by the 600,000 rise over the previous month in involuntary part-time workers. According to the BLS, “These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.”

Turning to the 114,000 new jobs, once again the jobs are concentrated in lowly paid domestic service jobs that cannot be offshored. Manufacturing jobs declined by 16,000.

As has been the case for a decade, two categories–health care and social assistance (primarily ambulatory health care services) and waitresses and bartenders account for 53% of the new jobs. The BLS never ceases to find ever growing employment of people in restaurants and bars despite the rising dependence of the US population on food stamps. The elderly are rising as a percentage of the American population, but I sometimes wonder if employment in ambulatory health care services is rising faster than the elderly population. Whether these reported jobs are real, I do not know.

The rest of the new jobs were accounted for by retail trade, transportation and warehousing, financial activities (primarily credit intermediation), professional and business services (primarily administrative and waste services), and state government education, where the 13,600 reported new jobs seem odd in light of the teacher layoffs and rise in classroom size.

The high-tech jobs that economists promised would be our reward for offshoring American manufacturing jobs and tradeable professional services, such as software engineering and IT, have never materialized. “The New Economy” was just another hoax, like “Iraqi weapons of mass destruction” and “Iranian nukes.”

While employment falters, the consumer price index (CPI-U) in August increased 0.6 percent, the largest since June 2009. If the August rate is annualized, it means bad news on the inflation front. Instead of bringing us high tech jobs, is “the New Economy” bringing back the stagflation of the late 1970s? Time will tell.

This article first appeared at Paul Craig Roberts’ new website Institute For Political Economy.  Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His Internet columns have attracted a worldwide following.

Gregory Patin

Activist Post

According to a report released yesterday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), there were approximately 146,000 jobs added in the U.S. in November and the unemployment rate dropped to 7.7 percent, which would be the lowest since 2008. The report is based on a survey of households and employers, and does not accurately depict the reality of the jobless rate in the U.S. today.

The 7.7 percent rate is the government’s most widely publicized unemployment rate, known as the U-3, which takes into account only those who are collecting unemployment benefits and actively looking for work. It does not take into account those whose unemployment benefits have run out, those who have given up seeking work, those who are underemployed – desiring full time work but forced to work part time, or those who have dropped out of the labor force more than 12 months ago.

There is also a factor in the calculations known as “seasonal adjustments.” The BLS uses a software program known as X-12 ARIMA, a complex modeling algorithm, to factor in seasonal adjustments to the jobs reports. As with any software program, the results are only as good as what the data input is and the results are easily manipulated. Job growth reports from the BLS have a 100,000 jobs margin of error on a monthly basis, but outside of that margin they are 90 percent accurate.

In fact, the numbers in the reports are regularly (and quietly) revised each month. Last month’s jobs report suggested that the economy had added 148,000 jobs in September and 171,000 jobs in October. That has now been revised downward to 132,000 and 138,000, respectively.

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According to the BLS report, 53,000 of the 146,000 jobs added in November were in the retail sector. That would obviously factor in as a seasonal adjustment, because most of those jobs will disappear after the holiday season. Combining that with the potential for a 100,000 job margin of error could mean job losses and a rise in the real unemployment rate last month. It is also difficult to factor in anomalies like the amount of people temporarily out of work due to Hurricane Sandy during the survey week, although the BLS reported that the effects of that were minimal.

Brad Plumer, writing for the Washington Post, explains the potential for discrepancy:

The discrepancy…has to do with what’s known as “seasonal adjustments.” The U.S. economy follows certain predictable patterns in hiring and layoffs every year. School districts always let workers go for the summer and hire in the fall. Retailers always staff up for the Christmas holidays and lay people off afterwards. Students always flood the labor market in June. And this is exactly what BLS does in its monthly jobs reports.

The BLS report releases the highly publicized U-3 unemployment rate along with a lesser known rate called the U-6. There are, in fact, six different scales of unemployment known as “alternative measures of labor underutilization,” that are numbered U-1 through U-6. The U-6 rate is the most inclusive gauge of the statistical unemployment rate in the U.S. because it takes into account “total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force.”

Another BLS report shows, for example, that the official U-6 unemployment rate for the state of Wisconsin is 13 percent. Nevada’s U-6 rate is 21.4 percent, up from just 7.6 percent in 2007. Washington State is at 17.1 percent. Economically troubled California has a 19.6 percent real rate, while Rhode Island is at 18.3 percent, more than double its 8.3 percent rate in 2007. Only four states, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Oklahoma have a U-6 rate that is under 10 percent.

ndeed, many have already pointed out that the lower unemployment rate has more to do with people dropping off the unemployment rolls and out of the labor force than with job creation, as evidenced by a reduction in the numbers reported in the labor force. See here, here and here.

Even the U-6 rate, however, does not accurately measure the true amount of eligible workers who are out of work.

The key words in that report are “marginally attached.” Persons marginally attached to the labor force are described as those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want to work, are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work.

Many Americans have given up on the job market and have not looked for work in the past 12 months. Many do not have a phone or mailing address through which to respond to a household survey. There is no way to count all of the unemployed in America who are no longer “marginally attached” to the labor force and according to some estimates that number is staggering.

These people have been called by CNN “The 86 million invisible unemployed” and that, taken together with some simple math, shows that the true jobless rate in the U.S. is far higher than 7.7 percent.

The total U.S. population is approximately 330 million. 24 percent of those, however, are young people not eligible to work and 13 percent are retired. So the total pool of available workers in the United States is 100% – (24% + 13%) = 63% of 330 million people, or about 208 million workers. The U.S. government officially admits that 7.7 percent of the labor force is “visibly” unemployed, which accounts for about 16 million people. Together with the “invisible” that means about 102 million Americans are available to work but do not have a full time job. And with 102 million out of 208 million available workers not working, the true jobless rate in the US right now is closer to 49 percent, not the 7.7 percent the U.S. government and corporate media is propagandizing about.

That calculation is consistent with a recent survey of income and program participation (SIPP) conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau that shows that well over 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government. And that figure does not even include Social Security and Medicare.

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The implications for the U.S. economy should be obvious. Government benefits for the unemployed merely provide enough for families to get by and cover basic living expenses. They leave no room for the type of discretionary spending that keeps businesses thriving in America. The amount of citizens out of work, not contributing revenue and receiving benefits, combined with billions in defense and war spending, bank bailouts, tax breaks for huge corporations that outsource jobs, etc., is simply unsustainable.

The only solution to the economic downturn in the U.S. is to bring back or create well-paying jobs in the U.S. Even though seasonal retail jobs that pay less than $10 per hour make good headlines in reports, they are not the solution.

Gregory Patin writes for the Examiner where this article first appeared. Patlin earned a B.A. in political science from U.W. – Madison and a M.S. in management from Colorado Technical University. He is currently a freelance writer residing in Madison, WI who considers himself politically independent.

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Paul Craig Roberts
Activist Post

Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) calls the government’s latest jobs and unemployment reports “nonsense numbers.”

There are a number of ongoing problems with the released numbers. For example, the concurrent-seasonal factor adjustments are unstable. The birth-death model adds non-existent jobs each month that are then taken out in the annual downward benchmark revisions. Williams calculates that the job overstatement through November averages 45,000 monthly. In other words, employment gains during 2012 have been overstated by about 500,000 jobs. Another problem is that each month’s jobs number is boosted by downside revision of the previous month’s jobs number. Williams reports that the 146,000 new jobs reported for November “was after a significant downside revision to October’s reporting. Net of prior-period revisions, November’s seasonally-adjusted monthly gain was 97,000.”

Even if we believe the government that 146,000 new jobs materialized during November, that is the amount necessary to stay even with population growth and therefore could not be responsible for reducing the unemployment rate from 7.9% to 7.7%. The reduction is due to how the unemployed are counted.

The 7.7% rate is known as the “headline rate.” It is the rate you hear in the news. Its official designation is U.3.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has another official unemployment rate known as U.6.
The difference is that U.3 does not include discouraged workers who are not currently actively seeking a job. (A discouraged worker is a person who has given up looking for a job because there are no jobs to be found.) The U.6 measure includes workers who have been discouraged for less than one year. The U.6 rate of unemployment is 14.4%, about double the headline rate.

The U.6 rate does not include long-term discouraged workers, those who have been discouraged for more than one year. John Williams estimates this rate and reports the actual rate of unemployment (known as SGS) in November to be 22.9%.

In other words, the headline rate of unemployment is one-third the actual rate.

The drop in the November headline rate of unemployment from 7.9 to 7.7 is due to a 20.4% increase in the number of short-term discouraged workers in November. In other words, unemployed people rolled out of the U.3 measure into the U.6 measure.

Similarly, a number of short-term discouraged workers roll out of the U.6 measure into John Williams’ measure that includes all of the unemployed. Williams reports that “with the continual rollover, the flow of headline workers continues into the short-term discouraged workers (U.6), and from U.6 into long term discouraged worker status (a ShadowStats.com measure), at what has been an accelerating pace. The aggregate November data show an increasing rate of individuals dropping out of the headline (U.3) labor force.” In other words, the headline rate of unemployment can drop even though the unemployed are having a harder time finding jobs.

The U.S. government simply lowers the unemployment rate by not counting all of the unemployed. We owe this innovation to the Clinton administration. In 1994 the Clinton administration redefined “discouraged workers” and limited this group to those who are discouraged for less than one year. Those discouraged for more than one year are no longer considered to be in the labor force and ceased to be counted as unemployed.

If the U.S. government will mislead the public about unemployment, it will also
mislead about Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, Lebanon, Palestine, Russia, China, and 9/11. The government fits its story to its agenda.

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A government that wants to cut the social safety net doesn’t want you to know that the unemployment rate is 22.9%. A government that wants to cut the social safety net when between one-fifth and one-fourth of the work force is out of work looks hard-hearted, mean-spirited, and foolish. But if the government reports only one-third of the unemployed and presents that rate as falling, then the government can present its cuts as prudent to avoid falling over a “fiscal cliff.”

If the “free and democratic” Americans cannot even find out what the unemployment rate is, how do they expect to find out about anything?

This article first appeared at Paul Craig Roberts’ official website. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His Internet columns have attracted a worldwide following.

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Michael Snyder, Contributor
Activist Post

The corporate media is heralding the decline of the official unemployment rate to 7.7 percent as evidence that the U.S. economy is improving. But it is a giant lie. The truth is that unemployment in America is not actually going down. The percentage of working age Americans with a job actually dropped slightly in November. During the last recession, the percentage of working age Americans with a job fell from about 63 percent to under 59 percent and it has stayed there for 39 months in a row.

In September 2009, during the depths of the last economic crisis, 58.7 percent of all working age Americans were employed. In November 2012, 58.7 percent of all working age Americans were employed. It is more then 3 years later, and we are in the exact same place! So how in the world are they able to pretend that the “unemployment rate” is going down steadily? Well, they get there by pretending that hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers “leave the labor force” each month. According to the government, another 350,000 Americans left the labor force during November, and when you keep pretending that huge chunks of workers “disappear” each month it is easy to get the “unemployment rate” to go down. But anyone should be able to see that there is something really funny about these numbers.

Barack Obama has been president for less than four years, and during that time the number of Americans “not in the labor force” has increased by nearly 8.5 million. Something seems really “off” about that number, because during the entire decade of the 1980s the number of Americans “not in the labor force” only rose by about 2.5 million. At this point the official unemployment rate is so manipulated that it is of very little value at all.

But the mainstream media is just eating up this “good news”. They are very excited that the “unemployment rate” has fallen from its peak of 10.0 percent in October 2009 to 7.7 percent now…

But if unemployment was actually going down, we should be seeing the percentage of Americans with a job go up.

Unfortunately, that is NOT happening.

As I mentioned above, the “employment rate” fell below 59 percent during the last economic crisis and it has stayed there for 39 consecutive months…

So all of that stuff about the employment situation getting better is just a load of nonsense. The percentage of Americans with a job has stayed very, very steady since the end of 2009. It is almost as if someone has hit a “pause button” and won’t let unemployment get better or get worse.

This is the first time since the end of World War II that we have not seen the employment-population ratio bounce back in a significant way after a recession has ended.

To me, that is a very bad sign.

I also find it very interesting that the government revised the “job gains” for September and October downward in this recent report…

The government revised down job gains for September and October by a total 49,000. September’s additions were revised from 148,000 to 132,000 and October’s, from 171,000 to 138,000.

So it turns out that the glowing employment reports from those months that helped get Obama re-elected were really not that great after all.

The truth is that it takes somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 new jobs a month just to keep up with the growth of the population. So at best we are treading water.

And who is “creating” those new jobs?

According to an analysis performed by CNSNews.com, 73 percent of the jobs “created” over the past 5 months have been “created” by government.

But government does not create real wealth. Real wealth is only created by the private sector.

It would be very nice if I could report a major employment turnaround, but it simply is not happening. Instead, we continue to see an increase in the number of Americans living in poverty.

If things are getting better, then why are organizations like the Salvation Army seeing record numbers of families coming to them for help this holiday season?

For much more on the continued growth of poverty in the United States, just see this article.

Sadly, an increasing number of Americans find themselves forced to turn to the government for assistance, and the cost of caring for all of them has become extremely expensive…

According to the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee, welfare spending per day per household in poverty is $168, which is higher than the $137 median income per day. When broken down per hour, welfare spending per hour per household in poverty is $30.60, which is higher than the $25.03 median income per hour.

But if you think that things are bad now, you should brace yourself, because things are going to get even worse.

For example, how much worse will things get if a fiscal cliff deal is not reached and millions more Americans find themselves in desperate need of help? According to ABC News, more than 3 million Americans will lose unemployment benefits by the beginning of April if Congress does not do something…

Millions of unemployed Americans have another reason to worry about ‘fiscal cliff’ budget talks that seek to avoid looming tax increases and dire spending cuts come January. 

About 2.1 million people will stop receiving jobless benefits immediately if Congress doesn’t reauthorize federal unemployment insurance programs by year’s end. Another 1 million will lose benefits over the first three months of 2013.

2013 is already shaping up to be a very tough year.

But the mainstream media is not really talking about how the middle class is systematically being destroyed or about how our once great manufacturing cities are being turned into desolate wastelands.

They just want us all to be happy; but the cold, hard reality of the matter is that the U.S. economy no longer produces enough jobs for everybody and it never will again.

Both of our major political parties have fully embraced the emerging one world economic system which puts average American workers into direct competition for jobs with workers in third world countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.

Millions of good paying American jobs have been shipped to countries where workers work very long hours in absolutely horrific conditions for as little as 45 dollars a month.

Are you willing to work for 45 dollars a month?

Meanwhile, Americans that still do have jobs are piling up more debt than ever before. It appears that most people have not learned any lessons from the last major economic crisis. It has just been reported that consumer borrowing in the United States has hit a new record high…

Americans swiped their credit cards more often in October and borrowed more to attend school and buy cars. The increases drove U.S. consumer debt to an all-time high.

The Federal Reserve said Friday that consumers increased their borrowing by $14.2 billion in October from September. Total borrowing rose to a record $2.75 trillion.

Isn’t that lovely?

And of course the biggest offender of all is our federal government. They just keep borrowing money as if there was no tomorrow.

During the first two months of fiscal year 2013, the U.S. government has run a deficit of $292 billion dollars ($57 billion worse than last year) and during that time it has borrowed an average of $4.8 billion dollars a day.

30 years ago, the U.S. national debt was about 1.1 trillion dollars.

Now it is more than 16.3 trillion dollars.

To get an idea how much money 16 trillion dollars is, just watch this 2 minute video.

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How could we be so stupid?

Yes, much of America is still experiencing “prosperity” right now. But it is a prosperity that has been fueled by the greatest debt bubble that the world has ever seen.

When that debt bubble bursts the pain is going to be unbelievable.

If you actually believe that America is going to prosper in the years to come, you are just fooling yourself.

Our economy is declining and has been declining for quite some time. If you doubt this, just read this: “34 Signs That America Is In Decline“.

So that is the bad news.

But the good news is that even though the entire nation is not going to prosper, there will be those that will have prepared and that will have gotten themselves into position to take advantage of what is coming. During the coming crisis a massive amount of money and wealth will change hands. Instead of living in fear and cowering under a blanket, now is the time to figure out how you and your family can thrive during the hard times that are on the horizon.

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During the economic crisis of 2008 and 2009, there were some people that actually did amazingly well. So don’t lose hope just because the U.S. economy is headed for disaster.

Everything that can be shaken will be shaken. But if you understand what is happening and you prepare for it, the times that are coming can actually be a great adventure and a great blessing for you and your family.

But if you just stick your head in the sand and have blind faith in the system and pretend that everything is going to be okay somehow, then you will be blindsided by the coming crisis and you will only have yourself to blame.

This article first appeared here at the Economic Collapse Blog.  Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here.

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Dees Illustration

Eric Blair
Activist Post

President Obama proposed raising the national minimum wage to $9/hour during his State of the Union address drawing cheers from the left.

Unfortunately they have little understanding of economics. Forced minimum wages will destroy or offshore many more jobs in America.

The left doesn’t seem to understand that the state can’t raise the standard of living for a populace through wage legislation. Additionally, raising the minimum wage doesn’t address the root of the problem of why the standard of living is declining in the first place.

Those who genuinely care about social justice look for someone to blame for the declining standard of living; greedy business men, illegal immigrants for driving down wages, politicians who oppose minimum wage laws and so on. None of these are the real enemy.

As G. Edward Griffin wrote in The Creature From Jekyll Island;

The American people have no idea they are paying the bill. They know that someone is stealing their hubcaps, but they think it is the greedy businessman who raises prices or the selfish laborer who demands higher wages or the unworthy farmer who demands too much for his crop or the wealthy foreigner who bids up our prices. They do not realize that these groups also are victimized by a monetary system which is constantly being eroded in value by and through the Federal Reserve System. (pg. 33).

Our fractional reserve fiat monetary system has inflation built into it, causing higher prices for all goods and services. When wages aren’t increased to match the higher cost of living, workers feel the pinch and demand that lawmakers do something.

However, the answer to social justice isn’t raising wages through legislation, because that will in turn just raise the cost of living even more because businesses will have to pass those costs on to customers. Not because they’re greedy, but because they have to survive.

For those who really want social justice, the solution is addressing a blood-sucking monetary system and restore sound money. Until then, all actions will be counterproductive to their good intentions.

Here’s a short video that clearly explains the consequences of raising the minimum wage in global economy:

Read other articles by Eric Blair Here

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
Activist Post

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US economy created 236,000 new jobs in February. If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I’ll let you have at a good price.

Where are these alleged jobs? The BLS says 48,000 were created in construction. That is possible, considering that revenue-starved real estate developers are misreading the housing situation. (Source)

Then there are 23,700 new jobs in retail trade, which is hard to believe considering the absence of consumer income growth and the empty parking lots at shopping malls.

The real puzzle is 20,800 jobs in motion picture and sound recording industries. This is the first time in the years that I have been following the jobs reports that there has been enough employment for me to even notice this category.

The BLS lists 10,900 jobs in accounting and bookkeeping, which, as it is approaching income tax time, is probably correct; 21,000 jobs in temporary help and business support services; 39,000 jobs in health care and social assistance; and 18,800 jobs in the old standby–waitresses and bartenders.

That leaves about 50,000 jobs sprinkled around the various categories, but not in numbers large enough to notice.

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The presstitute media attributed the drop in the headline unemployment rate (U3) to 7.7% from 7.9% to the happy jobs report. But Rex Nutting at Market Watch says that the unemployment rate fell because 130,000 unemployed people who have been unable to find a job and became discouraged were dropped out of the U3 measure of unemployment. The official U6 measure which counts some discouraged workers shows an unemployment rate of 14.3%. Statistician John Williams’ measure, which counts all discourage workers (people who have ceased looking for a job), is 23%.

In other words, the real rate of unemployment is 2 to 3 times the reported rate.

Nutting believes that the U3 unemployment rate has become too politicized to have any meaning. He suggests using instead the work force participation rate. This rate is falling substantially, reflecting the discouragement that occurs from inability to find jobs.

John Williams (shadowstats.com) says that distortions in seasonal factor adjustments overstate monthly payroll employment by about 100,000 jobs. The jobs data that is not seasonally adjusted shows about 1.5 million fewer jobs in the economy.

In a recent communication, statistician John Williams reports that the rigged official annual rate of consumer inflation (CPI) of 1.6% is in fact, as measured by the official US government methodology of 1990, 9.2%. In other words, the rate of inflation is 5.75 times greater than the reported rate. If Williams is correct, the interest rate on bonds is extremely negative.

Over the years the official measure of inflation has been altered in two ways. One is the introduction of substitution for what formerly was a constant weighted basket of goods. In the former measure, if a price of an item in the basket (index) rose, the CPI rose by the weight of that item in the basket.

In the substitution-based measure, if a price of an item in the basket goes up, the item is removed from the basket, and a cheaper item is put in its place. For example, if the price of New York strip steak rises, the new CPI will substitute the price of a cheaper cut.

In this new measure, inflation is held down by measuring not a fixed standard of living but a declining standard of living.

The other adjustment used to restrain the measure of inflation is to re-classify many price rises as “quality improvements.” Price rises declared to be quality improvements do not translate into a higher measure of inflation. In other words, if a product rises in price, the price increase or some portion of it can be assigned to improved quality, not to a rise in component or energy costs. As the incentive is to hold down the inflation measure in order to save money for the government on Social Security cost-of-living-adjustments, quality improvements are over-estimated.

Consumers have to pay the higher prices, and as incomes, except for the 1 percent, are not growing, higher product prices, regardless of whether they are or are not quality improvements, mean a lower standard of living for the 99 percent.

The understated new measure of inflation allows the government to show real GDP growth and thus the end of the December 2007 recession, and it allows the government to show in the latest report real retail sales again matching the pre-recession level. However, when measured correctly, as by statistician John Williams, the true picture of retail sales shows a steep decline from 2007 through 2009 and bottom bouncing since.

The reason real retail sales cannot recover is that real average weekly earnings continues its downward path. Earlier in this new century, the lack of income growth for the bulk of the US population was masked by a rise in consumer debt. Americans borrowed to spend, and this kept the economy going until the point was reached that consumers had more debt than they could service.

John Williams report of real average weekly earnings shows that Americans are taking home less purchasing power than they did in the 1960s and 1970s.

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Reflecting the dollar’s loss of purchasing power, the price of gold and silver in dollars has risen dramatically during the Bush and Obama regimes.

For the last year or two the Federal Reserve and its dependent banks have operated to cap the price of gold at around $1,750. They do this by selling naked shorts in the paper speculative gold market.

There are two gold markets. One is a market for physical possession by individuals and central banks. The rising demand in the physical bullion market points to a rising price for gold.

The other market is the speculative paper market in which financial institutions bet on the future gold price. By placing large amounts of shorts, this market can be used to suppress price rises in the physical market. The Federal Reserve, which can print money without limit, can cover any losses on its agents’ paper contracts.

It is important to the Federal Reserve’s low interest rate policy to suppress the bullion price. If the prices of gold and silver continue to rise relative to the US dollar, the Fed cannot keep the prices of bonds high and interest rates low. If the dollar is widely perceived to be declining in value in relation to gold, the price of dollar-denominated assets will also decline, including bonds. If the dollar loses value, the Fed loses control over interest rates, and the US financial bubble pops, with hell to pay.

To forestall armageddon, the Fed and its dependent banks cap the price of gold.

The Fed’s fix is temporary, and as the Fed continues to create ever more dollars, the price of gold will eventually escape the Fed’s control as will interest rates and inflation.

The Fed has produced a perfect storm that could consume the US and perhaps the entire Western world.

Dr. Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury for Economic Policy in the Reagan Administration. He was associate editor and columnist with the Wall Street Journal, columnist for Business Week, and the Scripps Howard News Service. He has had numerous university appointments. His latest book, The Failure Of Laissez Faire Capitalism And Economic Dissolution Of The West, is available online.

Michael Snyder
Activist Post

The jobs recovery is a complete and total myth.  The percentage of the working age population in the United States that had a job in March 2013 was exactly the same as it was all the way back in March 2010.  In addition, as you will see below, there are now more than 101 million working age Americans that do not have a job.

But even though the employment level in the United States has consistently remained very low over the past three years, the Obama administration keeps telling us that unemployment is actually going down.  In fact, they tell us that the unemployment rate has declined from a peak of 10.0% all the way down to 7.6%.  And they tell us that in March the unemployment rate fell by 0.1% even though only 88,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy.  But it takes at least 125,000 new jobs a month just to keep up with population growth.  So how in the world are they coming up with these numbers?

Well, the reality is that the entire decline in the unemployment rate over the past three years can be accounted for by the reduction in size of the labor force.  In other words, the Obama administration is getting unemployment to go down by pretending that millions upon millions of unemployed Americans simply do not want jobs anymore.  We saw this once again in March.  According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 600,000 Americans dropped out of the labor market during that month alone.  That pushed the labor force participation rate down  to 63.3%, which is the lowest it has been in more than 30 years.  So please don’t believe the hype.  The sad truth is that there has been no jobs recovery whatsoever.

If things were getting better, there would not be more than 101 million working age Americans without a job. So exactly where does that statistic come from?

Well, the following explains where I got that number…

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 11,742,000 working age Americans that are officially unemployed.

In addition, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says that there are 89,967,000 working age Americans that are “not in the labor force”.  That is a new all-time record, and that number increased by a whopping 663,000 during the month of March alone.

When you add 11,742,000 working age Americans that are officially unemployed to the 89,967,000 working age Americans that are “not in the labor force”, you come up with a grand total of 101,709,000 working age Americans that do not have a job.

When you stop and think about it, that is an absolutely staggering statistic.

And anyone that tells you that “a higher percentage of Americans are working today” is telling you a complete and total lie.  During the last recession the percentage of working age Americans with a job fell dramatically, and since then we have not seen that number bounce back at all.  In fact, this is the very first time in the post-World War II era that we have not seen the employment-population ratio bounce back after a recession.  At this point, the employment-population ratio has been under 60 percent for 49 months in a row…

Since the end of 2009, the employment-population ratio has been remarkably steady.  Just check out these numbers…

March 2008: 62.7 percent
March 2009: 59.9 percent
March 2010: 58.5 percent
March 2011: 58.4 percent
March 2012: 58.5 percent
March 2013: 58.5 percent

We should be thankful that the percentage of working age Americans with a job did not continue to decline, but we should also be quite alarmed that it has not bounced back at all.

If there was going to be a recovery, there would have been one by now.  The next major economic downturn is rapidly approaching, and that is going to push the employment-population ratio down even farther.

So why is the U.S. economy not producing as many jobs as it used to?  Well, certainly the overall decline of the economy has a lot to do with it.  We are a nation that is drowning in debt and that is getting poorer by the day.

But since the end of the last recession, corporate profits have bounced back in a big way and are now at an all-time high.  So you would figure that the big corporations should be able to hire a lot more workers by now.

Unfortunately, that is not the way things work anymore.  Big corporations are trying to minimize the number of expensive American workers that they have on their payrolls as much as possible these days.

One way that they are doing this is through the use of technology.  Thanks to robots, computers and other forms of technology, big corporations simply do not need as many human workers as they used to.  In future years, this trend is only going to accelerate.  I wrote about how this is changing the world of employment in one of my previous articles entitled “Rise Of The Droids: Will Robots Eventually Steal All Of Our Jobs?“

Another way that big corporations are replacing expensive American workers is by shipping their jobs off to the other side of the globe.  Big corporations know that they can make bigger profits by making stuff in foreign countries where they can pay workers less than a dollar an hour with no benefits.  How in the world are American workers supposed to compete with that?

For much more on how U.S. jobs are being killed by offshoring, please see this article: “55 Reasons Why You Should Buy Products That Are Made In America“.

And of course immigration is having a dramatic impact on the labor market in some areas of the country as well.  Cheap labor has dramatically driven down wages in a lot of professions.  For example, once upon a time you could live a very nice middle class lifestyle as a roofer.  But now many roofers really struggle to make a living.

When you add everything up, it paints a very bleak picture for the future of the American worker.
The cost of living keeps rising much faster than wages do, and the competition for good jobs has become incredibly fierce.

Meanwhile, the government continues to make things even easier for those that are not working.  This has caused some Americans to give up completely and to be content with letting the government take care of them.  The following is from a recent article by Monty Pelerin…

As we make it easier to get unemployment benefits for longer time periods, more people take advantage of the system. So too with food stamps and disability. All programs are at or near record levels in what is supposed to be four years into an economic recovery. For many, the benefits of becoming a government dependent exceed what they can earn. One study reported that a family of four, collecting all the benefits for which they were entitled, would have to earn $65,000 per annum to have the same after-tax purchasing power.

If you are a product of the government schools and are legal to work (i.e., have skills enough that you are affordable at the minimum wage or higher), at what point do you realize that there is no need to go through the hassle of actual work. You can live pretty well by staying home and taking advantage of the entitlements available to you. That is exactly what a larger and larger percentage of the population are realizing. In many cases, it is economically irrational to work.

This behavior creates a social pathology that only worsens over time. Kids learn from their parents that work is not necessary and the many ways to game the system. In this regard, look for this problem to become worse over time unless these programs are cut back.

In some areas of the country, it actually pays not to work very hard.  According to Gary Alexander, the Secretary of Public Welfare for the state of Pennsylvania, a “single mom is better off earnings gross income of $29,000 with $57,327 in net income & benefits than to earn gross income of $69,000 with net income and benefits of $57,045.”

But the truth is that most Americans still want to work hard and would gladly take a good job if they could just find one.  The following is one example that was featured in a recent Fox News article…

After a full year of fruitless job hunting, Natasha Baebler just gave up.

She’d already abandoned hope of getting work in her field, working with the disabled. But she couldn’t land anything else, either — not even a job interview at a telephone call center.

Until she feels confident enough to send out resumes again, she’ll get by on food stamps and disability checks from Social Security and live with her parents in St. Louis.

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“I’m not proud of it,” says Baebler, who is in her mid-30s and is blind. “The only way I’m able to sustain any semblance of self-preservation is to rely on government programs that I have no desire to be on.”

And that is how most Americans feel.

Most Americans do not want to be dependent on the government.

Most Americans want to work hard and take care of themselves.

Unfortunately, our economy is not producing nearly enough jobs for everyone and it never will again.

So there will continue to be millions upon millions of Americans that find that they cannot take care of themselves and their families without government assistance no matter how hard they try.

And this is just the beginning – things are going to get much worse during the next major wave of the economic collapse.

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Yes, at the moment there are more than 101 million working age Americans that do not have a job, but that number is actually going to go much higher in the years ahead.  The anger and frustration caused by a lack of employment opportunities is going to shake this nation.

That is why it is important to try to become less dependent on your own job.  In this economic environment, a job can disappear at literally any moment.  Anything that you can do to become less dependent on the system would be a good thing.

This article first appeared here at the Economic Collapse Blog.  Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here.

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