As the planet’s economy keeps stumbling, the phrase “worst recession since the Great Depression” has become the new “global war on terror” — a term whose overuse has rendered it both meaningless and acronym-worthy. And just like that previously ubiquitous phrase, references to the WRSTGD are almost always followed by flimsy and contradictory explanations.

Republicans who ran up massive deficits say the recession comes from overspending. Democrats who gutted the job market with free-trade policies nonetheless insist it’s all George W. Bush’s fault. Meanwhile, pundits who cheered both sides now offer non sequiturs, blaming excessive partisanship for our problems.

But as history (and “Freakonomics”) teach, such oversimplified memes tend to obscure the counterintuitive notions that often hold the most profound truths. And in the case of the WRSTGD, the most important of these is the idea that we are in economic dire straits because tax rates are too low.

This is the provocative argument first floated by former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer in a Slate article evaluating 80 years of economic data.

“During the period 1951-63, when marginal rates were at their peak — 91 percent or 92 percent — the American economy boomed, growing at an average annual rate of 3.71 percent,” he wrote in February. “The fact that the marginal rates were what would today be viewed as essentially confiscatory did not cause economic cataclysm — just the opposite. And during the past seven years, during which we reduced the top marginal rate to 35 percent, average growth was a more meager 1.71 percent.”

Months later, with USA Today reporting that tax rates are at a 60-year nadir, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a Brookings Institution audience that “the rich are not paying their fair share in any nation that is facing [major] employment issues … whether it is individual, corporate, whatever the taxation forms are.”

A prime example is Greece. While conservatives say the debt-ridden nation is a victim of welfare-state profligacy, a Center for American Progress analysis shows that “Greece has consistently spent less” than Europe’s other social democracies — most of which have avoided Greece’s plight.

“The real problem facing the Greeks is not how to reduce spending but how to increase revenue collections,” the report concludes, fingering Greece’s comparatively “anemic tax collections” as its economic problem.

via Are low taxes exacerbating the recession? – Great Recession | Economic Recession, Economic Crisis – Salon.com.

Year over year, productivity growth was at its highest level in over 50 years last quarter, pushing corporate profits to record highs and helping the economy grow.

But a huge group of people are being left out of the party.

Millions of workers who have already been unemployed for months, if not years, will most likely remain that way even as the overall job market continues to improve, economists say. The occupations they worked in, and the skills they currently possess, are never coming back in style. And the demand for new types of skills moves a lot more quickly than workers — especially older and less mobile workers — are able to retrain and gain those skills.

via The New Poor – The Economy Shifts, Leaving Some Behind – NYTimes.com.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“These guys on Wall Street, they don’t render any services at all. They don’t help the economy any except their own employees, their own little family.” — protester Paul Akers

“Wall Street has taken so much money from the American people and haven’t given anything back, and it’s absolutely absurd.” — Jim Brown, operating engineer

“Our lives and our livelihoods are all bound together,” he said. “We are one country! When greed runs amok on Wall Street it means lost jobs and shut stores on Main Street. We need to go back to basics where good jobs, not bad debts drive our growth, an economy where Wall Street is the servant, not the master of Main Street.”

He put a number on the carnage. “Eight million jobs destroyed and 3 million more never created – that’s the price of greed.”

AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka via t r u t h o u t | A New Blueprint for Taking on Wall Street.

Add to that the homes lost, taxes that will never be collected, social services costs of taking care of the unemployed, families decimated by poverty, etc. The carnage is much greater than anyone wants to admit.

About 40% of freelancers had trouble getting paid in 2009, according to a survey released in mid-April by the New York-based Freelancers Union, a 135,000-member organization for independent contractors across the country in fields such as media, technology, and advertising. It was the first year the group asked the question on its member survey. And more than three out of four freelancers said they’ve had trouble getting paid over the course of their careers, according to organization.

The problem could become more acute as independent contractors emerge as a more central piece of the work force. The financial crisis and the resulting high unemployment thrust many professionals into the ranks of freelance workers, which may continue to grow despite signs of an economic recovery.

Littler Mendelson, a San Francisco-based employment law firm with 49 offices nationwide, predicts that in 2010 half of previously eliminated positions filled will be filled by contingent workers—such as independent contractors, freelancers, and temp workers—accounting for as much as 25% of the work force nationwide— based on client interviews and a survey conducted by a staffing analysis firm.

Since independent contractors aren’t covered by most federal employment laws, they don’t enjoy the same legal protections on wages as permanent employees, says a spokesman for the Department of Labor. If a permanent employee doesn’t get paid, federal or state labor departments can fine companies and even prosecute company executives. But independent contractors often have to turn to the court system, in most cases small claims, if they go unpaid.

To some, small-claims court can be more trouble than it’s worth, says Sara Horowitz, executive director of the Freelancers Union. Depending on the state, it will cost about $50 to file a claim and it can take months for a case to be heard. Even if a freelancer wins, small-claims judgments must be collected by the plaintiff.

via Freelancers Fight to Be Paid – WSJ.com.

One evening last month, the mayor of Detroit, Dave Bing, took to the podium at a downtown theater. The occasion was the state of the city address, and despite the mayor’s best effort to project optimism, the truths facing America’s 11th largest city are grim. The budget deficit is at least $85 million. The police department doesn’t have the money to safeguard Detroit’s vast, sparsely populated territory. The school system is a mess, and its emergency financial manager plans to shut nearly a quarter of the city’s public schools by summer. Bing plans to shrink Detroit’s government and shed thousands of jobs — an unpopular proposition in a city already boasting a 25% unemployment rate. Outside the theater, protesters waved signs that read, “FIRE THE MAYOR,” and “SAVE OUR CITY.” Inside, Bing spoke plainly: “We’ve been hit the hardest by what many call ‘the Great Recession.’ We simply cannot afford to continue down this road.” Days later, an independent report would suggest that Detroit’s actual budget deficit might be $400 million, and that the best route for survival is possibly bankruptcy.

[...]

There’s talk that Obama should develop a full-fledged “Detroit Project,” enlisting the Administration’s urban experts to use Motown as a laboratory for policies that could reinvent American cities. Detroit is a symbol of American failure, but also a platform of potential: The city’s population has been cut by more than half from a peak of nearly 2 million in the 1950s, when it produced thousands of cars each year and built a thriving American middle class. Now, it is the poorest major city in America, with a poverty rate of 34% — nearly triple the national rate.

via Fixing Detroit: A Laboratory for Saving America’s Cities? – TIME.

The new push, which the White House is scheduled to announce Friday, takes direct aim at the major cause of the current wave of foreclosures: the spike in unemployment. While the initial mortgage crisis that erupted three years ago resulted from millions of risky home loans that went bad, more-recent defaults reflect the country’s economic downturn and the inability of jobless borrowers to keep paying.

The administration’s new push also seeks to more aggressively help borrowers who owe more on their mortgages than their properties are worth, offering financial incentives for the first time to lenders to cut the loan balances of such distressed homeowners.

via Obama readies steps to fight foreclosures, particularly for unemployed – washingtonpost.com.

Imagine, for a moment, if Pentagon officials, supposedly toiling in our name, actually condescended to ask us for our thoughts. What do we think about global military strategy, garrisoning the planet, the ways in which our forces are structured, and how, where, and for what they should be deployed abroad?

Sound crazy? Here in the U.S.A. it most distinctly does, but not to the citizens of New Zealand. A Kiwi friend of mine recently sent me “Defence Review 2009,” a publication of New Zealand’s Ministry of Defence (MoD). And catch this: it includes a survey soliciting the advice of ordinary New Zealanders with respect to military affairs. It actually asks for the counsel of civilians on a “top ten” list of questions whose topics are remarkably comprehensive, including what the priorities of the country’s Defence Force should be, both now and in the future. Citizens can even present their views on military matters at a public hearing attended by MoD representatives, all in the name of public consultation. And the Defence Minister responds to the people in clear English sans the cobwebs of jargon that typically entangle our military pronouncements.

In case you haven’t noticed, here in the U.S.A., requests from the Pentagon for citizen feedback aren’t flooding our email boxes. So I thought — since no one in that five-sided fortress on the Potomac has asked a thing of me — the least I could do was ask a few questions on my own. Here, then, is my own top-five list of questions that we, the American people, should ask the Pentagon, even if none of its officials want to hear from us. Maybe they’re a tad more pointed than those in the Kiwi survey, but that shouldn’t be surprising. After all, they’ve been a long time in coming.

1. Our military is supposed to be a means to an end: national security. Due to its immense size and colossal budget, has our military not become an end as well as means?
2. In World War II, Americans could explain “Why We Fight” in part because the government provided a clear and compelling rationale for war. Why are the goals of today’s wars so opaque to most Americans?
3. If our military provides us with our way of “nation building” abroad, won’t countries and peoples be more likely to copy our military ways and weaponry than our democratic teachings?
4. America is facing painful budgetary belt tightening. Why is the military immune?
5. Why does “support our troops” seemingly end when they leave the service, leading us to tolerate such inequities as an unemployment rate of 21% for young veterans?

via t r u t h o u t | The Pentagon Church Militant and Us: The Top Five Questions We Should Ask the Pentagon.

And my answers…

1. Absolutely! It’s as if the military exists as a branch of a cartel of industries, whose bottom-line seems to dictate built-in obsolescence to ensure future defense contracts. For example, rather than fusing all armed forces under a single “defense force” each branch of the military has its own command, supply, weapons, and logistics operations infrastructure. This separateness of the branches of the military embeds redundancies that waste taxpayer funding. If the Army gets some new uniform item or equipment, it isn’t something that all other military branches have at their disposal, so that we have built in redundancies in procurement, contractor costs, waste, parts supplies, etc. Under a single “defense force” these redundancies would be eliminated and the budget savings would be extraordinary.

2. “Why We Fight” is not clear to most Americans because the reasons given to the public seem to be ever-changing based on political expediency and what any official at any given moment can get away with saying in public. Just look at the 3 ring circus surrounding justifications for the Iraq War: WMDs which did not exist (and then there’s Powell with his vial and the aluminum tubes and Niger yellowcake…), Freedom and Democracy (so why didn’t we attack Saudi Arabia?), Saddam + Al Qaeda (no actual link), Saddam kicked out inspectors (when he didn’t), etc.

Paul Wolfowitz: “The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason [for going to war].” [USA Today, 5/30/03]

Richard Perle: At a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee hearing in March, 2001, he said, “Does Saddam now have weapons of mass destruction? Sure he does. We know he has chemical weapons. We know he has biological weapons. . . . How far he’s gone on the nuclear-weapons side I don’t think we really know. My guess is it’s further than we think. It’s always further than we think, because we limit ourselves, as we think about this, to what we’re able to prove and demonstrate. . . . And, unless you believe that we have uncovered everything, you have to assume there is more than we’re able to report.”

During Bush’s first 100 days in office his officials were already looking at military options to remove Saddam from power, and this was long before 9/11/2001 — scroll all the way to the bottom of that linked page to the last memo, and note Tab C: Executive Summary: Political-Military Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq Crisis. Also note the date stamped at the top (January 31, 2001) as well as a reference to a 1 Feb 2001 meeting in that document.

And then there’s the Downing Street Memos of Summer 2002 which give us a clear look at what the real thinking was behind closed doors. In essence, they rejected any and all uncertainty from the intelligence community and “fixed” (as in “rigged”) the intelligence (cherry-picked) to suit their post-Saddam agenda. That also explains why they relied on Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, “Curveball”, phony Nigerian yellowcake document, etc. And then you’ve got Joe Wilson publicly refuting the official lie, and well, they outed his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, whose NOC CIA work entailed investigating and stopping the nuclear blackmarket cartel (which poses a real threat, not a ginned-up threat, to national security). You have to wonder about what these people’s priorities actually were… CYA (cover your ass) seems to have been priority #1, and “I’ve got mine” was priority #2.

So, why did we invade Iraq? The only answer that makes much sense is control of Iraq’s main resource: oil, but also the lucrative contracts that loomed in the future reconstruction of Iraq (and let’s not forget the construction of military bases and that huge embassy). And if that pesky entity known as the Internet and its open information sharing hadn’t gotten in the way, it’s likely the Bush Administration and its transnational corporate pals wouldn’t have been publicly exposed as the greedy warmongers that they are.

“Why We Fight” can be best summed up with a thorough reading of USMC Major General Smedley Darlington Butler’s “War Is A Racket“.

3. Options: copy our militarism, get us to fund their military, or send our military in instead. After all, the only excuse we seem to need to send our military anywhere is the possibility of lucrative corporate profit at Third World peoples’ expense (in terms of their national resources, their environment, their lives and livelihood, and their low wage laborers). Who do you think is footing the bill for much of Israel’s military and its weaponry? And if war is, as is often said, to “spread democracy”, then why didn’t we attack Saudi Arabia, one of the least democratic nations in the Middle East?

4. I ask the same question myself: Why is the military immune from budgetary cuts?

4a – I’d much rather see consolidation of military resources under one unified “defense force” than redundancies among the various branches of service (think: Star Trek infrastructure). Where are the proponents of the unified field theory of military spending, and why aren’t they more vocal?

4b – The United States accounts for 48 percent of the world’s total military spending. The United States spends more than the next 45 highest spending countries in the world combined. Why do we operate over 900 military bases in virtually all parts of the world, but would never allow another nation to build a military base within our own borders? Why are we responsible for paying for policing the entire world? Shouldn’t other nations shoulder their part of that burden if such spending is vital to all nations’ security and our “shared mutual interests”? Frankly, I think if we have to shoulder that burden ourselves, then we should also have 48 percent of the world’s jobs at a living wage (outsourcing accounts for only 3-4% of the U.S. job losses), and 48 percent of world industrial manufacturing should be occurring within our own borders, and 48 percent of world trade should also be with the United States (why is there a trade imbalance at all?). Are we that stupid that we can’t negotiate a much better deal for ourselves, or what?

4c – What about the Financial Terrorists? We’ve seen now how Wall Street and its casino-mentality bankers and brokers have posed a threat to our nation’s economic security. Why aren’t we sending in the military to neutralize THAT threat? Heh.

4d – On the other hand, any cuts to defense spending should not at all be allowed to affect our nation’s veterans and their compensation or benefits. Those military contracts should always be honored, but are all too often thrown under the bus in favor of some new lucrative defense contractor’s latest gizmo, program, or profit motive. Frankly, I’d like to see every disabled veteran given a job and a house… free and clear of debt or taxes. These veterans have, imho, earned at least that, no matter what their percentage of disability is rated at by the VA.

5. This ties in to my point at 4d. No veteran, particularly the disabled veterans, should be unemployed or homeless. There’s no excuse or justification for that.

Roughly one in three U.S. homeless adults is a veteran. Some 131,000 veterans, about 97 percent male, are estimated to be homeless on any given night. Life expectancy for homeless people is 30 years less than average.

This is according to the VA’s own research on homelessness. And yet, the amount of spending on shelter for homeless veterans is well below demand for housing, else there would be no homeless veterans today. At the same time, many of the “Rust Belt” cities (i.e. – Detroit) are emptying out and housing and many other buildings are being abandoned and even bulldozed. Why isn’t there a comprehensive plan in place to solve these two problems along with job creation? What percentage of the VA’s program budget to end veteran homelessness is actually spent on obtaining housing? About 1%, and from what I can see here, their 5 Year Plan will help only about 40,000 veterans… a drop in the bucket, and this year’s census will give us a more accurate up-to-date picture of what the numbers actually look like. So, should we believe Shinseki is serious about ending veteran homelessness?

5a – Which brings me to this point: Why do so many federal agencies (where veterans could possibly be employed) have to be located in Washington DC, and wouldn’t national security be enhanced if those agencies were decentralized from an area that was attacked on 9/11/2001? We do have teleconferencing and telecommuting technologies. It’s not as if they all really need to be in DC. Decentralizing government agencies would also spur development of nation-wide high speed rail, which would also mean job creation.

5b – Solving the problem of homeless veterans would cut homelessness by one-third, at least among homeless adults. Does our nation not want to invest in those who’ve given their all in service to this country, or is that just a lie to help military recruitment? Yes, veteran healthcare is important, but it’s not the entirety of what problems veterans are facing today, especially in this Great Recession we’re mired in currently. We ought to be giving veterans a “bailout”, not rewarding corporate executives who did so much damage to our nation’s economic security. They don’t deserve bonuses. What does this say about our nation’s priorities?

5c – Support Our Troops? How many transnational corporations, including those who think Golden Parachutes and Executive Compensation and Bonuses for “Too Big To Fail” companies, have undertaken the sponsorship/stewardship of a homeless or unemployed veteran? They get tax credits for hiring, but where are the statistics on turnover and pay? And by sponsorship/stewardship I mean, a full-boat, helpful hand up: housing, a good paying job with security, healthcare supplementary insurance (dental, vision, preventive, etc.), transportation, etc. Many of these companies think nothing of supporting pro athletes with millions in sponsorship (not to mention the multi-million dollar Superbowl advertisers who should feel shame at this point, but don’t), so why not veterans who actually performed a valuable service for this country and who protect the nation’s corporations who profit from its citizens? What’s the matter, don’t they SUPPORT OUR TROOPS?

One day, Obama is saying he will sign no health care bill without a government-run “public option”; the next, he all but drops it. One day, he is bashing the “shameful” bonuses for “fat-cat bankers” at bailed-out firms, the next he is serving dinner to corporate titans at the White House and saying he does not “begrudge” the big payouts.

[...]

Adam Green, a founder of Progressive Change, told me that Emanuel’s reputation for being strong was overblown and that the chief of staff actually had “a loser mentality” because he refused to fight more vigorously — even for progressive ideas that had popular support. “Rahm Emanuel is very, very risk-averse and afraid of a fight,” Green says. “We see him, and many people see him, as a destructive influence inside the White House, urging President Obama to cave instead of fighting for real change.” The activists are expressing frustrations that are also felt by Congressional Democrats, even if they will not say so out loud. A Democratic congressman, who refused to be identified for fear of retribution, said Emanuel didn’t pressure recalcitrant lawmakers enough. “We need a little less ballerina and a little more L.B.J.,” he told me. “For all the reputation of being able to bust knee caps, we haven’t seen nos turned to yeses.”

via The Limits of Rahmism – NYTimes.com.

In the 2004 election cycle, this (in the first paragraph above) was known as “flip-flopping”, remember? And how soon we forget that Rahm Emanuel was the one responsible for pushing through NAFTA during the Clinton Administration. NAFTA is something that Obama was highly critical of during the run-up to the 2008 election, btw, and his “golden boy” Emanuel was instrumental in it’s passage. What we seem to have here is a schizophrenic administration borrowing triangulation techniques from the Clintons and their DLC pals (Carville, Emanuel, et al). These DLC Corporatists are all about caving to whatever the transnational corporations (read: conservative Corporatists, generally Republicans) want; they are not representative of the average working people who elected them. This is why many people are now turning against the Democratic Party, because they’ve caved in on too many things and stand on principle on too few things that really matter to the working class. We see Wall Street bailouts at taxpayer expense, and Main Street continues to suffer job losses, home foreclosures, poverty and a whole lot of misery. The working class feels like they got betrayed… again. And they’re right, they did.

(Xinhua) Updated: 2010-03-12 16:52

BEIJING – China’s Information Office of the State Council published a report titled “The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2009” here Friday.

Following is the full text:

The State Department of the United States released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2009 on March 11, 2010, posing as “the world judge of human rights” again. As in previous years, the reports are full of accusations of the human rights situation in more than 190 countries and regions including China, but turn a blind eye to, or dodge and even cover up rampant human rights abuses on its own territory. The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2009 is prepared to help people around the world understand the real situation of human rights in the United States.

I. On Life, Property and Personal Security

Widespread violent crimes in the United States posed threats to the lives, properties and personal security of its people.

In 2008, US residents experienced 4.9 million violent crimes, 16.3 million property crimes and 137,000 personal thefts, and the violent crime rate was 19.3 victimizations per 1,000 persons aged 12 or over, according to a report published by the US Department of Justice in September 2009 (Criminal Victimization 2008, US Department of Justice, http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov). In 2008, over 14 million arrests occurred for all offenses (except traffic violations) in the country, and the arrest rate for violent crime was 198.2 per 100,000 inhabitants (Crime in the United States, 2008, http://www.fbi.gov). In 2009, a total of 35 domestic homicides occurred in Philadelphia, a 67 percent increase from 2008 (The New York Times, December 30, 2009). In New York City, 461 murders were reported in 2009, and the crime rate was 1,151 cases per 100,000 people. San Antonio in Texas was deemed as the most dangerous among 25 US large cities with 2,538 crimes recorded per 100,000 people (The China Press, December 30, 2009). The murder rate rose 5.5 percent in towns with a population of 10,000 or fewer in 2008 (http://www.usatoday.com, June 1, 2009). Most of the United States’ 15,000 annual murders occur in cities where they are concentrated in poorer neighborhoods (http://www.reuters.com, October 7, 2009).

The United States ranks first in the world in terms of the number of privately-owned guns. According to the data from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), American gun owners, out of 309 million in total population, have more than 250 million guns, while a substantial proportion of US gun owners had more than one weapon. Americans usually buy 7 billion rounds of ammunition a year, but in 2008 the figure jumped to about 9 billion (The China Press, September 25, 2009). In the United States, airline passengers are allowed to take unloaded weapons after declaration.

In the United States, about 30,000 people die from gun-related incidents each year (The China Press, April 6, 2009). According to a FBI report, there had been 14,180 murder victims in 2008 (USA Today, September 15, 2009). Firearms were used in 66.9 percent of murders, 43.5 percent of robberies and 21.4 percent of aggravated assaults (http://www.thefreelibrary.com). USA Today reported that a man named Michael McLendon killed 10 people in two rural towns of Alabama before turning a gun on himself on March 11, 2009. On March 29, a man named Robert Stewart shot and killed eight people and injured three others in a nursing home in North Carolina (USA Today, March 11, 2009). On April 3, an immigrant called Jiverly Wong shot 13 people dead and wounded four others in an immigration services center in downtown Binghamton, New York (The New York Times, April 4, 2009). In the year 2009, a string of attacks on police shocked the country. On March 21, a 26-year-old jobless man shot and killed four police officers in Oakland, California, before he was killed by police gunfire (http://cbs5.com). On April 4, a man called Richard Poplawski shot three police officers to death in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. On November 29, an ex-convict named Maurice Clemmons shot four police officers to death inside a coffee shop in Parkland, Washington (The New York Times, December 1, 2 and 3, 2009).

Campuses became an area worst hit by violent crimes as shootings spread there and kept escalating. The US Heritage Foundation reported that 11.3 percent of high school students in Washington D.C. reported being “threatened or injured” with a weapon while on school property during the 2007-2008 school year. In the same period, police responded to more than 900 calls to 911 reporting violent incidents at the addresses of Washington D.C. public schools (A Report of The Heritage Center for Data Analysis, School Safety in Washington, D.C.: New Data for the 2007-2008 School Year, http://www.heritage.org). In New Jersey public schools, a total of 17,666 violent incidents were reported in 2007-2008 (Annual Report on Violence, Vandalism and Substance Abuse in New Jersey Public Schools by New Jersey Department of Education, October 2009, http://www.state.nj.us). In the City University of New York, a total of 107 major crimes occurred in five of its campuses during 2006 and 2007 (The New York Post, September 22, 2009).

II. On Civil and Political Rights

In the United States, civil and political rights of citizens are severely restricted and violated by the government.

The country’s police frequently impose violence on the people. Chicago Defender reported on July 8, 2009 that a total of 315 police officers in New York were subject to internal supervision due to unrestrained use of violence during law enforcement. The figure was only 210 in 2007. Over the past two years, the number of New York police officers under review for garnering too many complaints was up 50 percent (http://www.chicagodefender.com). According to a New York Police Department firearms discharge report released on Nov. 17, 2009, the city’ s police fired 588 bullets in 2007, killing 10 people, and 354 bullets in 2008, killing 13 people (http://gothamist.com, November 17, 2009). On September 3, 2009, a student of the San Jose State University was hit repeatedly by four San Jose police officers with batons and a Taser gun for more than ten times (http://www.mercurynews.com, October 27, 2009). On September 22, 2009, a Chinese student in Eugene, Oregon was beaten by a local police officer for no reason (The Oregonian, October 23, 2009, http://blog.oregonlive.com). According to the Amnesty International, in the first ten months of 2009, police officers in the US killed 45 people due to unrestrained use of Taser guns. The youngest of the victims was only 15. From 2001 to October, 2009, 389 people died of Taser guns used by police officers (http://theduckshoot.com).

Abuse of power is common among US law enforcers. In July 2009, the Federal Bureau of Investigation put four police officers in the Washington area under investigation for taking money to protect a gambling ring frequented by some of the region’s most powerful drug dealers over the past two years (The Washington Post, July, 19, 2009). In September 2009, an off-duty police officer in Chicago attacked a bus driver for “cutting him off in traffic” as he rode a bicycle (Chicago Tribune, September 2009, http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com). In the same month, four former police officers in Chicago were charged with extorting close to 500,000 US dollars from a Hispanic driving an expensive car with out-of-state plates and suspected drug dealers in the name of law enforcement, and offering bribes to their superiors (Chicago Tribune, September 19, 2009). In November 2009, a former police chief of the Prince George’s County’s town of Morningside was charged with selling a stolen gun to a civilian (The Washington Post, November 18, 2009). In major US cities, police stop, question and frisk more than a million people each year – a sharply higher number than just a few years ago (http://huffingtonpost.com, October 8, 2009).

Prisons in the United State are packed with inmates. According to a report released by the US Justice Department on Dec. 8, 2009, more than 7.3 million people were under the authority of the US corrections system at the end of 2008. The correctional system population increased by 0.5 percent in 2008 compared with the previous year (http://www.wsws.org). About 2.3 million were held in custody of prisons and jails, the equivalent of about one in every 198 persons in the country. From 2000 to 2008, the US prison population increased an average of 1.8 percent annually (http://mensnewsdaily.com, January 18, 2010). The California government even suggested sending tens of thousands of illegal immigrants held in the state to Mexico, in order to ease its overcrowded prison system (http://news.yahoo.com, January 26, 2010).

The basic rights of prisoners in the United States are not well-protected. Raping cases of inmates by prison staff members are widely reported. According to the US Justice Department, reports of sexual misconduct by prison staff members with inmates in the country’s 93 federal prison sites doubled over the past eight years. Of the 90 staff members prosecuted for sexual abuse of inmates, nearly 40 percent were also convicted of other crimes (The Washington Post, September11, 2009). The New York Times reported on June 24, 2009 that according to a federal survey of more than 63,000 federal and state inmates, 4.5 percent reported being sexually abused at least once during the previous 12 months. It was estimated that there were at least 60,000 rapes of prisoners across the United States during the same period (The New York Times, June 24, 2009).

Chaotic management of prisons in the United State also led to wide spread of diseases among the inmates. According to a report from the US Justice Department, a total of 20,231 male inmates and 1,913 female inmates had been confirmed as HIV carriers in the US federal and state prisons at year end 2008. The percentage of male and female inmates with HIV/AIDS amounted to 1.5 and 1.9 percent respectively (http://www.news-medical.net, December 2, 2009). From 2007 to 2008, the number of HIV/AIDS cases in prisons in California, Missouri and Florida increased by 246, 169, and 166 respectively. More than 130 federal and state inmates in the US died of AIDS-related causes in 2007 (http://thecrimereport.org, December 2, 2009). A report by the Human Rights Watch released in March 2009 said although the New York State prison registered the highest number of prisoners living with HIV in the country, it did not provide the inmates with adequate access to treatment, and even locked the inmates up separately, refusing to provide them with treatment of any kind. (www.hrw.org, March 24, 2009).

While advocating “freedom of speech,” “freedom of the press” and “Internet freedom,” the US government unscrupulously monitors and restricts the citizens’ rights to freedom when it comes to its own interests and needs.

The US citizens’ freedom to access and distribute information is under strict supervision. According to media reports, the US National Security Agency (NSA) started installing specialized eavesdropping equipment around the country to wiretap calls, faxes, and emails and collect domestic communications as early as 2001. The wiretapping program was originally targeted at Arab-Americans, but soon grew to include other Americans. The NSA installed over 25 eavesdropping facilities in San Jose, San Diego, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Chicago among other cities. The NSA also announced recently it was building a huge one million square foot data warehouse at a cost of 1.5 billion US dollars at Camp Williams in Utah, as well as another massive data warehouse in San Antonio, as part of the NSA’s new Cyber Command responsibilities. The report said a man named Nacchio was convicted on 19 counts of insider trading and sentenced to six years in prison after he refused to participate in NSA’s surveillance program (http://www.onelinejournal.com, November 23, 2009).

After the September 11 attack, the US government, in the name of anti-terrorism, authorized its intelligence authorities to hack into its citizens’ mail communications, and to monitor and erase any information that might threaten the US national interests on the Internet through technical means. The country’s Patriot Act allowed law enforcement agencies to search telephone, email communications, medical, financial and other records, and broadened the discretion of law enforcement and immigration authorities in detaining and deporting foreign persons suspected of terrorism-related acts. The Act expanded the definition of terrorism, thus enlarging the number of activities to which law enforcement powers could be applied. On July 9, 2008, the US Senate passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act of 2008, granting legal immunity to telecommunication companies that take part in wiretapping programs and authorizing the government to wiretap international communications between the United States and people overseas for anti-terrorism purposes without court approval (The New York Times, July 10, 2008). Statistic showed that from 2002 to 2006, the FBI collected thousands of phones records of US citizens through mails, notes and phone calls. In September 2009, the country set up an Internet security supervision body, further worrying US citizens that the US government might use Internet security as an excuse to monitor and interfere with personal systems. A US government official told the New York Times in an interview in April 2009 that NSA had intercepted private email messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by US Congress the year before. In addition, the NSA was also eavesdropping on phones of foreign political figures, officials of international organizations and renowned journalists (The New York Times, April, 15, 2009). The US military also participated in the eavesdropping programs. According to CNN reports, a Virginia-based US military Internet risk evaluation organization was in charge of monitoring official and unofficial private blogs, official documents, personal contact information, photos of weapons, entrances of military camps, as well as other websites that “might threaten its national security.”

The so-called “freedom of the press” of the United States was in fact completely subordinate to its national interests, and was manipulated by the US government. According to media reports, the US government and the Pentagon had recruited a number of former military officers to become TV and radio news commentators to give “positive comments” and analysis as “military experts” for the US war in Iraq and Afghanistan, in order to guide public opinions, glorify the wars, and gain public support of its anti-terrorism ideology (The New York Times, April 20, 2009). At year end 2009, the US Congress passed a bill which imposed sanctions on several Arab satellite channels for broadcasting contents hostile to the US and instigating violence (http://blogs.rnw.nl). In September 2009, protesters using the social-networking site Twitter and text messages to coordinate demonstrations clashed with the police several times in Pittsburgh, where the Group of 20 summit was held. Elliot Madison, 41, was later charged with hindering apprehension of the protesters through the Internet. The police also searched his home (http://www.nytimes.com, October 5, 2009). Vic Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, said the same conduct in other countries would be called human rights violations whereas in the United States it was called necessary crime control.

III. On Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

Poverty, unemployment and the homeless are serious problems in the United States, where workers’ economic, social and cultural rights cannot be guaranteed.

Unemployment rate in the US in 2009 was the highest in 26 years. The number of bankrupt businesses and individuals kept rising due to the financial crisis. The Associated Press reported in April 2009 that nearly 1.2 million businesses and individuals filed for bankruptcy in the previous 12 months – about four in every 1,000 people, a rate twice as high as that in 2006 (http://www.floridabankruptcyblog.com). By December 4, 2009, a total of 130 US banks had been forced to close in the year due to the financial crisis (Chicago Tribune, December 4, 2009). Statistics released by the US Labor Department on Nov. 6, 2009 showed unemployment rate in October 2009 reached 10.2 percent, the highest since 1983 (The New York Times, November 7, 2009). Nearly 16 million people were jobless, with 5.6 million, or 35.6 percent of the unemployed, being out of work for more than half a year (The New York Times, November 13, 2009). In September, about 1.6 million young workers, or 25 percent of the total, were jobless, the highest since 1948 when records were kept (The Washington Post, September 7, 2009). In the week ending on March 7, 2009, the continuing jobless claims in the US were 5.47 million, higher than the previous week’s 5.29 million (http://247wallst.com, March 19, 2009).

The population in poverty was the largest in 11 years. The Washington Post reported on September 10, 2009, that altogether 39.8 million Americans were living in poverty by the end of 2008, an increase of 2.6 million from that in 2007. The poverty rate in 2008 was 13.2 percent, the highest since 1998. The number of people aged between 18 to 64 living in poverty in 2008 had risen to 22.1 million, 170,000 more than in 2007. Up to 8.1 million families were under poverty, accounting for 10.3 percent of the total families (The Washington Post, September 11, 2009). According to a report of the New York Times on Sept. 29, 2009, the poverty rate in New York City in 2008 was 18.2 percent and nearly 28 percent of the Bronx borough’s residents were living in poverty (The New York Times, September 29, 2009). From August 2008 to August 2009, more than 90,000 poor households in California suffered power and gas cuts. A 93-year-old man was frozen to death at his home (http://www.msnbc.msn.com). Poverty led to a sharp rise in the number of suicides in the United States. It is reported that there are roughly 32,000 suicides in the US every year, nearly double the cases of murder, which numbered 18,000 (http://www.time.com). The Los Angeles County coroner’s office said the poor economy was taking a toll even on the dead as more bodies in the county went unclaimed by families who could not afford funeral expenses. A total of 712 bodies in Los Angeles County were cremated with taxpayers’ money in 2008, an increase of 36 percent over the previous year (The Los Angeles Times, July 21, 2009).

The population in hunger was the highest in 14 years. The US Department of Agriculture reported on Nov. 16, 2009, that 49.1 million Americans living in 17 million households, or 14.6 percent of all American families, lacked consistent access to adequate food in 2008, up 31 percent from the 13 million households, or 11.1 percent of all American families, that lacked stable and adequate supply of food in 2007, which was the highest since the government began tracking “food insecurity” in 1995 (The New York Times, November 17, 2009; 14.6% of Americans Could Not Afford Enough Food in 2008, http://business.theatlantic.com). The number of people who lacked “food security,” rose from 4.7 million in 2007 to 6.7 million in 2008 (http://www.livescience.com, November 26, 2009). About 15 percent of families were still working for adequate food and clothing (The Associated Press, November 27, 2009). Statistics showed 36.5 million Americans, or about one eighth of the US total population, took part in the food stamp program in August 2009, up 7.1 million from that of 2008. However, only two thirds of those eligible for food stamps actually received them (http://www.associatedcontent.com).

Workers’ rights were seriously violated. The New York Times reported on Sept. 2, 2009 that 68 percent of the 4,387 low-wage workers in a survey said they had experienced reduction of wages. And 76 percent of those who had worked overtime were not paid accordingly, and 57 percent of those interviewed had not received pay documents to make sure pay was legal and accurate. Only eight percent of those who suffered serious injuries on the job filed for compensation. Up to 26 percent of those surveyed were paid less than the national minimum wage. Among those who complained about wages or treatment, 43 percent had experienced retaliation or dismissal (The New York Times, September 2, 2009). According to a report by the USA Today on July 20, 2009, a total of 5,657 people died at workplaces across the US in 2007, about 17 deaths each day. About 200,000 workers in New York State were injured or sickened at workplaces each year (USA Today, July 20, 2009).

The number of people without medical insurance has kept rising for eight consecutive years. Data released by the US Census Bureau on Sept. 10, 2009, showed 46.3 million people were without medical insurance in 2008, accounting for 15.4 percent of the total population, comparing 45.7 million people who were without medical insurance in 2007, which was a rise for the eighth year in a row. About 20.3 percent of Americans between 18 to 64 years old were not covered by medical insurance in 2008, higher than the 19.6 percent in 2007 (http://www.census.gov). A study released by the Commonwealth Fund showed health insurance coverage of adults aged 18 to 64 declined in 31 US states from 2007 to 2009 (Reuters, October 8, 2009). The number of states with extremely high number of adults who were not covered by medical insurance increased from two in 1999 to nine in 2009. More than one in every four people in Texas were uninsured, the highest percentage among all states (http://www.ncpa.org). Houston had 40.1 percent of its residents uninsured (http://www.msnbc.msn.com). In 2008, altogether 2,266 US veterans under the age of 65 died for lack of health insurance coverage or medical care, 14 times higher than the US military death toll in Afghanistan that year (AFP, November 11, 2009). A report by the Consumer International showed 34 percent of US families with annual income below 50,000 US dollars and 21 percent of homes with annual income exceeding 100,000 US dollars lost medical insurance or suffered reduction in medical insurance in 2009. In addition, two thirds of households with annual income below 50,000 US dollars and one third of homes earning more than 100,000 US dollars a year cut their medical expenses last year. About 28 percent Americans chose not to see a doctor when they fell ill; a quarter of them could not afford medical bills; 22 percent postponed medical treatment; a fifth of them did not buy medicine prescribed by doctors or undergo medical checkups; 15 percent took expired drugs or did not follow medical instructions to take medicine on time in order to save money (http://www.oregonlive.com). According to a report of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on December 8, 2009, average life expectancy of Americans was 78.1 years in 2007, ranking the fourth from bottom among all member states of OECD. The average life expectancy of OECD member states was 79.1 that year (http://www.msnbc.msn.com).

The number of homeless has been on the rise. Statistics show that by September 2008, an upward of 1.6 million homeless people in the US had been receiving shelter, and the number of those in families rose from 473,000 in 2007 to 517,000 in 2008 (USA Today, July 9, 2009). Since 2009, homeless enrollments in the six counties of Chicago area had climbed, with McHenry County seeing the biggest hike – an increase of 125 percent over the previous year (Chicago Tribune, November 28, 2009). These families could only live in shabby places such as wagons. In March 2009, a sprawling tent city was seen in Sacramento of California where hundreds of homeless gathered. Police in Santa Monica of southern California even regularly used force to drive the homeless out of the city (www.truthalyzer.com). In October, several thousand homeless in Detroit got into a fight, worrying they might not receive the government’s housing subsidies (USA Today, October 8, 2009). In December, there were 6,975 homeless single adults in shelters in New York City, not including military veterans, chronically homeless people, and the 30,698 people living in short-term housing for homeless families (The New York Times, December 10, 2009). The Houston Chronicle reported on March 16, 2009 that large numbers of houses in Galveston were destroyed by Hurricane Ike in September 2008, leaving thousands homeless. About 1,700 households did not receive any aid and most of them do not have fixed residences (Houston Chronicle, March 16, 2009).

IV. On Racial Discrimination

Racial discrimination is still a chronic problem of the United States.

Black people and other minorities are the most impoverished groups in the United States. According to a report issued by the US Bureau of Census, the real median income for American households in 2008 was 50,303 US dollars. That of the non-Hispanic white households was 55,530 US dollars, Hispanic households 37,913 US dollars, black households only 34,218 US dollars. The median incomes of Hispanic and black households were roughly 68 percent and 61.6 percent of that of the non-Hispanic white households. Median income of minority groups was about 60 to 80 percent of that of majority groups under the same conditions of education and skill background (The Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2009; USA Today, September 11, 2009). According to the US Bureau of Census, the poverty proportion of the non-Hispanic white was 8.6 percent in 2008, those of African-Americans and Hispanic were 24.7 percent and 23.2 percent respectively, almost three times of that of the white (The New York Times, September 29, 2009). About one quarter of American Indians lived below the poverty line. In 2008, 30.7 percent of Hispanic, 19.1 percent of African-Americans and 14.5 percent of non-Hispanic white lived without health insurance (Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2008, www.census.gov). According to a report issued by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, a record 10,552 fair housing discrimination complaints were filed in fiscal 2008, 35 percent of which were alleged race discrimination (The Washington Post, June 10, 2009). The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that while African-Americans make up 12 percent of the US population, they represent nearly half of new HIV infections and AIDS deaths every year (The Wall Street Journal, April 8, 2009; revised statistics released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).

Employment and occupational discrimination against minority groups is very serious. Minority groups bear the brunt of the US unemployment. According to news reports, the US unemployment rate in October 2009 was 10.2 percent. The jobless rate of the US African-Americans jumped to 15.7 percent, that of the Hispanic rose to 13.1 percent and that of the white was 9.5 percent (USA Today, November 6, 2009). Unemployment rate of the black aged between 16 and 24 saw a record high of 34.5 percent, more than three times the average rate. Unemployment rates for the black in cities such as Detroit and Milwaukee had reached 20 percent (The Washington Post, December 10, 2009). In some American Indians communities, unemployment rate was as high as 80 percent (The China Press, November 6, 2009). According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate for black male college graduates aged 25 and older in 2009 has been twice that of white male college graduates, 8.4 percent compared with 4.4 percent (The New York Times, December 1, 2009). In 2008, a record number of workers filed federal job discrimination complaints, with allegations of race discrimination making up the greatest portion at more than one-third of the 95,000 total claims (AP, April 27, 2009). According to an investigation by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a Houston-based oil and gas drilling company faced five complaints of racial harassment and discrimination (AP, November 18, 2009). According to a news report, by the end of May 2009, the black and Hispanic groups each accounted for roughly 27 percent of New York City’s population, but only 3 percent of the 11,529 firefighters were black, and about 6 percent were Hispanic since the city’s fire department unfairly excluded hundreds of qualified people of color from the opportunity to serve (The New York Times, July 23, 2009).

The US minority groups face discrimination in education. According to a report issued by the US Bureau of Census, 33 percent of the non-Hispanic white have college degrees, proportion of the black was only 20 percent and Hispanic was 13 percent (US Bureau of Census, April 27, 2009, www.census.gov). According to a report, from 2003 to 2008, 61 percent of black applicants and 46 percent of Mexican-American applicants were denied acceptance at all of the law schools to which they applied, compared with 34 percent of white applicants (The New York Times, January 7, 2010). African-American children accounted for only 17 percent of the US public school students, but accounted for 32 percent of the total number which were expelled from the schools. According to research by the University of North Carolina and Michigan State University, most of the black juveniles believed that they were victims of racial discrimination (Science Daily, April 29, 2009). According to another study conducted among 5,000 children in Birmingham, Ala., Houston and Los Angeles, prejudice was reported by 20 percent of blacks and 15 percent of Hispanics. The study showed that racial discrimination was an important cause of mental health problems for children of varied races. Hispanic children who reported racism were more than three times as likely as other children to have symptoms of depression, blacks were more than twice as likely (USA Today, May 5, 2009).

Racial discrimination in law enforcement and the judicial system is very distinct. According to the US Department of Justice, by the end of 2008, 3,161 men and 149 women per 100,000 persons in the US black population were under imprisonment (www.ojp.usdoj.gov). The number of life imprisonment without parole given to African-American young people was ten times of that given to white young people in 25 states. The figure in California was 18 times. In major US cities, there are more than one million people who were stopped and questioned by police in streets, nearly 90 percent of them were minority males. Among those questioned, 50 percent were African-Americans and 30 percent were Hispanics. Only 10 percent were white people (The China Press, October 9, 2009). A report released by New York City Police Department, of the people involved in police shootings whose ethnicity could be determined in 2008, 75 percent were black, 22 percent were Hispanic; and 3 percent were white (The New York Times, November 17, 2009). According to a report by Human Rights Watch, from 1980 to 2007, the ratio of the African-Americans being arrested for dealing drugs across the US was 2.8 to 5.5 times of that of the white (www.hrw.org, March 2, 2009).

Since the Sept. 11 event, discrimination against Muslims is increasing. Nearly 58 percent of Americans think Muslims are subject to “a lot” of discrimination, according to two combined surveys released by the Pew Research Center. About 73 percent of young people aged 18 to 29 are more likely to say Muslims are the most discriminated against (http://www.washingtontimes.com, September 10, 2009).

Immigrants live in misery. According to a report by the US branch of Amnesty International, more than 300,000 illegal immigrants were detained by US immigration authorities each year, and the illegal immigrants under custody exceeded 30,000 for each single day (World Journal, March 26, 2009). At the same time, hundreds of legal immigrants were put under arrest, denied entry or even sent back under escort every year (Sing Tao Daily, April 13, 2009). A report released by the Constitution Project and Human Rights Watch revealed that from 1999 to 2008, about 1.4 million detained immigrants were transferred. Tens of thousands of long-time residents of cities like Los Angeles and Philadelphia were sent, by force, to remote immigrant jails in Texas or Louisiana (The New York Times, November 2, 2009). The New York City Bar Association received a startling petition in October 2008 which was signed by 100 men, all locked up without criminal charges in the Varick Street Detention Facility in the middle of Manhattan. The letter described their cramped, filthy quarters where dire medical needs were ignored and hungry prisoners were put to work for 1 dollar a day (The New York Times, November 2, 2009). Some detained women who were still in lactation period were denied breast pumps in the facilities, resulting in fever, pain, mastitis, and the inability to continue breastfeeding upon release (www.hrw.org, March 16, 2009). A total of 104 people have died while in custody of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency since October, 2003 (The Wall Street Journal, August 18, 2009).

Ethnic hatred crimes are frequent. According to statistics released by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation on November 23, 2009, a total of 7,783 hate crimes occurred in 2008 in the United States, 51.3 percent of which were originated by racial discrimination and 19.5 percent were for religious bias and 11.5 percent were for national origins (www.fbi.gov). Among those hate crimes, more than 70 percent were against black people. In 2008, anti-black offenses accounted for 26 persons per 1,000 people, and anti-white crimes accounted for 18 persons per 1,000 people (victim characteristics, October 21, 2009, www.fbi.gov). On June 10, 2009, a white supremacist gunned down a black guard of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum with another two wounded (The Washington Post, June 11, 2009, The Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2009). According to a report issued by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an environment of racial intolerance and ethnic hatred, fostered by anti-immigrant groups and some public officials, has helped fuel dozens of attacks on Latinos in Suffolk County of New York State during the past decade (The New York Times, September 3, 2009).

V. On the Rights of Women and Children

The living conditions of women and children in the United States are deteriorating and their rights are not properly guaranteed.

Women do not enjoy equal social and political status as men. Women account for 51 percent of the US population, but only 92 women, or 17 percent of the seats, serve in the current 111th US Congress. Seventeen women serve in the Senate and 75 women serve in the House (Members of the 111th United States Congress, http://en.wikipedia.org). A study shows minorities and women are unlikely to hold top positions at big US charities and nonprofits. The study reveals that women make up 18.8 percent of nonprofit CEOs compared to just 3 percent at Fortune 500 companies. Among the 400 biggest charities in the US, no cultural organization, hospital, public affairs group, Jewish federation or other religious organization is headed by a woman (The Washington Times, September 20, 2009).

Women have difficulties in finding a job and suffer from low income and poor financial situations. According to statistics from the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), workplace discrimination charge filings with the federal agency nationwide rose to 95,402 during Fiscal Year 2008, a 15 percent increase from the previous fiscal year. Charge of workplace discrimination because of a job applicant’s sex maintained a high proportion (www.eeoc.gov, November 3, 2009). According to statistics released by the US Census Bureau in September 2009, the median incomes of full-time female workers in 2008 were 35,745 US dollars, 77 percent of those of corresponding men whose median earnings were 46,367 US dollars, which is lower than the 78 percent in 2007 (The Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2009; www.census.gov, September 10, 2009). According to the Associated Press, a female pharmacist who had been working for Walmart for ten years was fired in 2004 for demanding the same income as her male counterparts (The Associated Press, October 5, 2009). By the end of 2008, 4.2 million, or 28.7 percent of families with a female householder where no husband is present were poor (www.census.gov, September 10, 2009). About 64 million, or 70 percent of working-age American women have no health insurance coverage, or have inadequate coverage, high medical bills or debt problems, or problems in accessing care because of cost (The China Press, May 12, 2009).

Women are frequent victims of violence and sexual assault. It is reported that the United States has the highest rape rate among countries which report such statistics. It is 13 times higher than that of England and 20 times higher than that of Japan (Occurrence of rape, http://www.sa.rochester.edu). In San Diego, a string of similar attacks happened to five women who have been sexually assaulted by a home invader in March 2009 (Sing Tao Daily, March 14, 2009). According to a report released by the Pentagon, more than 2,900 sexual assaults in the military were reported in 2008, up nearly 9 percent from the year before. And of those, only 292 cases resulted in a military trial. The report said the actual numbers of such cases could be five to ten times of the reported figure (CBS Evening News, March 17, 2009). Reuters reported that based on in-depth interviews of 40 servicewomen, 10 said they had been raped, five said they were sexually assaulted including attempted rape, and 13 reported sexual harassment (Reuters, April 16, 2009).

American children suffer from hunger and cold. A report from the US Department of Agriculture showed that 16.7 million children, or one fourth of the US total, had not enough food in 2008 (The Washington Post, USA Today, November 17, 2009). The food relief institution Feeding America said in a report that more than 3.5 million children under the age of five face hunger or malnutrition. This figure accounts for 17 percent of American children aged five and under. In 11 states, more than 20 percent of young children were at risk for hunger. Louisiana, with 24.2 percent, had the highest rate of child food insecurity (www.feedingamerica.org, May 7, 2009). Children at or below 18 account for more than one third of the US people in poverty.

Figures from the US Census Bureau showed that the number of children younger than 18 who live in poverty increased from 13.3 million in 2007 to 14.1 million in 2008 (http://www.census.gov, The Washington Post, September 11, 2009). According to statistics from the U.S-based National Center on Family Homelessness, from 2005 to 2006, more than 1.5 million children, or one in every 50 children, were homeless in the US every year. Among the homeless children, 42 percent were younger than 6 and the majority were African-Americans and Indians (CNN.com, MSNBUC.com, March 10, 2009). In 2008, nearly one tenth of the children in the United States were not covered by health insurance. It was reported that about 7.3 million children, or 9.9 percent of the American total, were without health insurance in 2008. In Nevada, 20.2 percent of the children were uncovered by insurance (http://www.census.gov, the Washington Post, September 21). On August 13, 2009, a state board voted that California will begin terminating health insurance for more than 60,000 children on October 1. The program could ultimately drop nearly 670,000 children by the end of June 2010 (The Los Angeles Times, The China Press, August 14, 2009). A research led by the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center showed that lack of health insurance might have led or contributed to nearly 17,000 deaths among hospitalized children in the US in the span of less than two decades (Journal of Public Health, October 30, 2009). The A/H1N1 flu has infected about 8 million children under 18 from April to October 2009, killing 540 of them, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the United States (USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, November 13, 2009).

Children are exposed to violence and living in fear. It is reported that 1,494 children younger than 18 nationwide were murdered in 2008 (USA Today, October 8, 2009). A report released by the Health Department of the New York City on June 16, 2009 showed that between 2001 and 2007, the national average rate of child deaths was 20 per 100,000 children aged 1 to 12 years. Homicide rates were 1.3 deaths per 100,000 among the group (http://www.nyc.gov). A survey conducted by the US Justice Department on 4,549 kids and adolescents aged 17 and younger between January and May of 2008 showed, more than 60 percent of children surveyed were exposed to violence within the past year, either directly or indirectly. Nearly half of all children surveyed were assaulted at least once in the past year, about 6 percent were victimized sexually, and 13 percent reported having been physically bullied in the past year (The Associated Press, October 7, 2009). There have been at least 1,227 children died from abuse or neglect in Texas since 2002 (The Houston Chronicle, October 22, 2009). According to research of US-based institution and public health media reports, in the US, one third of children who run away or were expelled from home performed sexual acts in exchange for food, drugs and a place to stay every year. The justice system no longer considers them as young victims, but as juvenile offenders (The China Press, October 28, 2009).

Child farmworkers are prevalent. An organization devoted to protecting children’s rights disclosed that as many as 400,000 children are estimated to work on US farms. Davis Strauss, executive director of the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs, noted that for decades, children, some as young as eight years old, have labored in the fields using sharp tools and toiling amongst dangerous pesticides. The association’s president Ernie Flores said children account for about 20 percent of all farm fatalities in the United States (Spain’s Uprising newspaper, October 14, 2009). A labor standards act permits a child beyond 13 to work in heat for long periods on a farm, but does not permit that child to work in an air-conditioned office and even forbids them working in a fast food restaurant.

The US is the only country in the world that does not apply a parole system to minors. Detentions of juveniles have increased 44 percent from 1985 to 2002. Many children only committed only minor crimes but could not get assistance from lawyers. Many procurators and judges turned a blind eye on abuse in juvenile prisons.

VI. On US Violations of Human Rights against Other Nations

The United States with its strong military power has pursued hegemony in the world, trampling upon the sovereignty of other countries and trespassing their human rights.

As the world’s biggest arms seller, its deals have greatly fueled instability across the world. The United States also expanded its military spending, already the largest in the world, by 10 percent in 2008 to 607 billion US dollars, accounting for 42 percent of the world total (The AP, June 9, 2009).

According to a report by the US Congress, the US foreign arms sales in 2008 soared to 37.8 billion US dollars from 25.4 billion a year earlier, up by nearly 50 percent, accounting for 68.4 percent of the global arms sales that were at its four-year low (Reuters, September 6, 2009). At the beginning of 2010, the US government announced a 6.4-billion-US dollar arms sales package to Taiwan despite strong protest from the Chinese government and people, which seriously damaged China’s national security interests and aroused strong indignation among the Chinese people.

The wars of Iraq and Afghanistan have placed a heavy burden on the American people and brought tremendous casualties and property losses to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. The war in Iraq has led to the death of more than 1 million Iraqi civilians, rendered an equal number of people homeless and incurred huge economic losses. In Afghanistan, incidents of the US army killing innocent people still keep occurring. Five Afghan farmers were killed in a US air strike when they were loading cucumbers into a van on August 5, 2009 (http://www.rawa.org). On June 8, the US Department of Defense admitted that the US raid on the Taliban on May 5 caused death of Afghan civilians as the military failed to abide by due procedures. The Afghan authorities have identified 147 civilian victims, including women and children, while a US officer put the death toll at under 30 (The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 9, 2009).

Prisoner abuse is one of the biggest human rights scandals of the United States. A report presented to the 10th meeting of the Human Rights Council of the United Nations in 2009 by its Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism showed that the United States has pursued a comprehensive set of practices including special deportation (rendition), long-term and secret detentions and acts violating the United Nations Convention against Torture. The rapporteur also said, in a report submitted to the 64th General Assembly of the United Nations, that the United States and its private contractors tortured male Muslims detained in Iraq and other places by stacking the naked prisoners in pyramid formation, coercing the homosexual sexual behaviors and stripping them in stark nakedness (The Washington Post, April 7, 2009). The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has begun interrogation by torture since 2002. The US government lawyers disclosed that since 2001, CIA has destroyed 92 videotapes relating to the interrogation to suspected terrorists, 12 of them including the use of torture (The Washington Post, March 3, 2009). The CIA interrogators used a handgun and an electric drill to frighten a captured al-Qaeda commander into giving up information (The Washington Post, August 22, 2009). The US Justice Department memos revealed the CIA kept prisoners shackled in a standing position for as long as 180 hours, more than a dozen of them deprived of sleep for at least 48 hours, three for more than 96 hours, and one for the nearly eight-day maximum. Another seemed to endorse sleep deprivation for 11 days, stated on one memo (http://www.chron.com). The CIA interrogators used waterboarding 183 times against the accused 9/11 major plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and 83 times against suspected Al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah (The New York Times, April 20, 2009). A freed Guantanamo prisoner said he experienced the “medieval” torture at Guantanamo Bay and in a secret CIA prison in Kabul (AFP, London, March 7, 2009). In June 2006, three Guantanamo Bay inmates could have been suffocated to death during interrogation on the same evening and their deaths passed off as suicides by hanging, revealed by a six-month joint investigation for Harpers Magazine and NBC News in 2009 (www.guardian.co.uk, January 18, 2010). A Somali named Mohamed Saleban Bare, jailed at Guantanamo Bay for eight years, told AFP the prison was “hell on earth” and some of his colleagues lost sight and limbs and others ended up mentally disturbed (AFP, Hargisa, Somali, December 21, 2009). A 31-year-old Yemeni detainee at Guantanamo Bay who had been on a long hunger strike apparently committed suicide in 2009 after four prior suicide deaths beginning at 2002 (The New York Times, June 3, 2009). The US government held more than 600 prisoners at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan. A United Nations report singled out the Bagram detention facility for criticism, saying some ex-detainees allege being subjected to severe torture, even sexual abuse, and some prisoners put under detention for as long as five years. It also reported that some were held in cages containing 15 to 20 men and that two detainees died in questionable circumstances while in custody (IPS, New York, February 25, 2009). An investigation by US Justice Department showed 2,000 Taliban surrendered combatants were suffocated to death by the US army-controlled Afghan armed forces (http://www.yourpolicicsusa.com, July 16, 2009).

The United States has been building its military bases around the world, and cases of violation of local people’s human rights are often seen. The United States is now maintaining 900 bases worldwide, with more than 190,000 military personnel and 115,000 relevant staff stationed. These bases are bringing serious damage and environmental contamination to the localities. Toxic substances caused by bomb explosions are taking their tolls on the local children. It has been reported that toward the end of the US military bases’ presence in Subic and Clark, as many as 3,000 cases of raping the local women had been filed against the US servicemen, but all were dismissed (http://www.lexisnexis.com, May 17, 2009).

The United States has been maintaining its economic, commercial and financial embargo against Cuba for almost 50 years. The blockade has caused an accumulated direct economic loss of more than 93 billion US dollars to Cuba. On October 28, 2009, the 64th session of the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution on the “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba,” with a recorded vote of 187 in favor to three against, and two abstentions. This marked the 18th consecutive year the assembly had overwhelmingly called on the United States to lift the blockade without delay (Overwhelming International Rejection of US Blockade of Cuba at UN, www.cubanews.ain.cu).

The United States is pushing its hegemony under the pretence of “Internet freedom.” The United States monopolizes the strategic resources of the global Internet, and has been retaining a tight grip over the Internet ever since its first appearance. There are currently 13 root servers of Internet worldwide, and the United States is the place where the only main root server and nine out of the remaining 12 root servers are located. All the root servers are managed by the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), which is, by the authority of the US government, responsible for the management of the global root server system, the domain name system and the Internet Protocol address. The United States has declined all the requests from other countries as well as international organizations including the United Nations to break the US monopoly over the root servers and to decentralize its management power over the Internet. The United States has been intervening in other countries’ domestic affairs in various ways taking advantage of its control over Internet resources. The United States has a special troop of hackers, which is made up of hacker proficients recruited from all over the world. When post-election unrest broke out in Iran in the summer of 2009, the defeated reformist camp and its advocators used Internet tools such as Twitter to spread their messages. The US State Department asked the operator of Twitter to delay its scheduled maintenance to assist with the opposition in creating a favorable momentum of public opinion. In May 2009, one web company, prompted by the US authorities, blocked its Messenger instant messaging service in five countries including Cuba.

The United States is using a global interception system named “ECHELON” to eavesdrop on communications worldwide. A report of the European Parliament pointed out that the “ECHELON” system is a network controlled by the United States for intelligence gathering and analyzing. The system is able to intercept and monitor the content of telephone calls, fax, e-mail and other digital information transmitted via public telephone networks, satellites and microwave links. The European Parliament has criticized the United States for using its “ECHELON” system to commit crimes such as civilian’s privacy infringement or state-conducted industrial espionage, among which was the most striking case of Saudi Arabia’s 6-billion-dollar aircraft contract (see Wikipedia). Telephone calls of British Princess Diana had been intercepted and eavesdropped because her global campaign against land-mines was in conflict with the US policies. The Washington Post once reported that such spying activities conducted by the US authorities were reminiscent of the Vietnam War when the United States imposed wiretapping and surveillance upon domestic anti-war activists.

The United States ignores international human rights conventions, and takes a passive attitude toward international human rights obligations. It signed the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 32 years ago and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women 29 years ago, but has ratified neither of them yet. It has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities either. On Sept. 13, 2007, the 61st UN General Assembly voted to adopt the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which has been the UN’s most authoritative and comprehensive document to protect the rights of indigenous peoples. The United States also refused to recognize the declaration.

The above-mentioned facts show that the United States not only has a bad domestic human rights record, but also is a major source of many human rights disasters around the world. For a long time, it has placed itself above other countries, considered itself “world human rights police” and ignored its own serious human rights problems. It releases Country Reports on Human Rights Practices year after year to accuse other countries and takes human rights as a political instrument to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs, defame other nations’ image and seek its own strategic interests. This fully exposes its double standards on the human rights issue, and has inevitably drawn resolute opposition and strong denouncement from world people. At a time when the world is suffering a serious human rights disaster caused by the US subprime crisis-induced global financial crisis, the US government still ignores its own serious human rights problems but revels in accusing other countries. It is really a pity.

We hereby advise the US government to draw lessons from the history, put itself in a correct position, strive to improve its own human rights conditions and rectify its acts in the human rights field.

“You know,” DeLay said, “there is an argument to be made that these extensions of these unemployment benefits keeps people from going and finding jobs.” When CNN’s Candy Crowley described his argument as “a hard sell” to the public, DeLay replied, “It’s the truth.”

Crowley followed up, asking, “People are unemployed because they want to be?” DeLay again said, “Well, it is the truth.”

When it comes to Republicans condemning the unemployed, there seems to be something of a trend of late.

via The Washington Monthly.

This Republican tendency to “blame the victims” has gone too far. DeLay, you moron, the economy didn’t shed 8 million jobs since the start of the recession because unemployment benefits were too generous. Robert Frank had an interesting column in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago breaking down the unemployment statistics by class background.

According to a study from Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Studies, unemployment for those in the top income decile — individuals earning more than $150,000 a year — was 3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009. That compares with unemployment of 31 percent for the bottom 10 percent of income, and unemployment of 9 percent for the middle decile.

Thirty-one percent! The poor are getting absolutely destroyed by the economic downturn, while the rich skate by. This is the same myth about how great it is to be on welfare. Shyeah-right. Do they seriously believe unemployment benefits pay better than good jobs do and that people CHOOSE to remain unemployed while they can’t make ends meet? How fucking out of touch with reality are these assholes?

The worst part of unemployment is the terror of not knowing IF there will be any job for you… ever… at any wage. That’s a terror these assholes sadly will never know. But, God, I wish they’d know it so personally.

Who do you think the critics of unemployment benefits are pitching their message to? It sure as hell isn’t to the majority of the electorate.

The truth is, unemployment benefits are not just a safety net for the unemployed and their families, they keep the economy from totally collapsing. And instead of 10% unemployed and looking for work, we’d have double or triple that.

The conservative Republican creed seems to be: “Helping those in need is bad, unless it’s a huge corporation. Fuck the working class people.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Obama must now prime the pump to get us out of a multi-pronged mess left over from the Bush crowd and seven years of Republican control. Republicans chose to look the other way and ignore the financial chicanery going on right in front of them, while the income gap between the very wealthy and average workers grew to unprecedented levels — while productivity was the highest it has EVER been. Their only prescription for every ill: take two tax-cuts for those already wealthy, and call me in the morning. 255 years ago their rallying cry would have been “Let them eat cake.”

The income gap is one trend that the corporations, and their conservative CEOs and friends, see no problem with. They tell workers to work harder, knowing that wages have been stagnant for decades even while productivity has been at record levels. However, without an economically viable, employed middle class spending money like the good little consumers  they are, there can be no economic recovery. Job cuts mean less consumer spending and more business failures.

Let’s hear from the moron who introduced the legislation that de-regulated the financial industry in the first place… John “S&L” McCain – Remember this?… “The fundamentals of the economy are strong…” This falsehood was flouted first by the Bush Administration, and then by Republicans, and conservative pundits throughout the news media, while we were actually headed over the abyss (and I even called it a good nine months to a year before it happened). Even the tough talking, war mongering, corporation loving conservatives don’t have the right stuff to call it like it is… a world-wide financial markets meltdown brought on by mainly Republican policies and regulatory neglect. So did they truly not know, or were they lying? I believe they were lying and McCain was truly ignorant (McCain had no clue when he said the “fundamentals” were workers, heck, he couldn’t even remember how many homes he owned). And that isn’t the only lie that circulated in the media. Remember…

“We don’t torture” and “We’re not spying on Americans without a warrant” and “We didn’t betray any CIA agents” and “Brownie did a heckuva job” and “We didn’t lie to Pat Tillman’s mother” and “We’re making great progress in Iraq” and “There are WMDs in Iraq” and “Saddam has ties to Al Qaeda” and “We’ll be greeted as liberators” and “Iraqi oil will pay for the war” and “John McCain is not like Bush”. STOP LYING STOP LYING STOP LYING STOP LYING… JUST FUCKING STOP!

The actual fundamentals of the US economy are deficit numbers, inflation numbers, import/export numbers, employment numbers, wages/earnings numbers and other “metrics” that can be measured over time. A fundamental is a measurable metric. And type of employment is also a factor — contrary to GWB, I would NEVER assert that flipping burgers is part of the manufacturing sector, it’s part of the service industry, and there is no way anyone can afford to support themselves or buy a home on those wages, even if a shyster banker is willing to write a bad loan.

The surest way to insure our nation plunges into the worst depression we have ever seen is to keep listening to the propaganda-spewing conservative cranks — the very folks that drove the bus off this cliff. It was the ultra “free market” ideologues — along with the casino-mentality bankers and stock brokers on Wall Street trading derivatives — that got us into this mess, and most of them are still on the payroll.

Obviously we must put regulations back in place since deregulation was one of the primary factors in the economy’s demise. There were reasons for those regulations, but conservatives from both parties got in the way of reason and now we all must pay for their blundering and plundering, but with no jobs, we can’t pay. I think throwing out all the Golden Parachutes is the first step.  If a CEO and “top” management took a company into the ditch, the last thing they deserve are bonuses and special treatment.  They ought to be standing at the back of the unemployment line, behind all the employees and customers their actions have financially ruined. Republicans have forgotten why Teddy Roosevelt pushed anti-trust laws in the first place, or why FDR pushed banking regulations — to promote trust in the system ruined by the Great Depression.

Also, obviously, we must provide a safety net to workers and their families that are currently losing their homes, their health insurance, and their livelihoods, until they can secure long-term employment. Deficits suck, but not spending to help those truly in need sucks worse. Without a working middle class, we are going to slam so hard when we hit bottom, it will make the Great Depression look like a mild recession in comparison. And remember, we don’t have small family farms or the skilled labor to bootstrap families when we do finally hit bottom. We also don’t have the manufacturing base to provide good jobs, generate tax revenue and products for export. Outsourcing, though deplorable, only accounts for maybe 2-4% of all job losses, so don’t blame the Third World for stealing our jobs. This is not their fault. Greed drove the transnational big corporations to use more technology to do the jobs our workers used to have at a much lower cost. These corporate free marketeers did not give a flying fuck about the workers they left behind in their wake, despite all their MBA talk about “team members” and corporate loyalty. They certainly displayed none of that loyalty when they cut jobs and busted labor unions, did they?

Worried about deficits? Who the fuck isn’t?! But how will we ever pay down debt in America, if we can’t get our spiralling economy healthy again? Nothing says misery and suffering and poverty like NO JOBS, and no hope. Milton Friedman’s ideas about laissez-faire capitalism sound great, if you can trust the capitalists… and we trusted them, and this is where it got us. The free trade fundamentalist irrational devotion to laissez-faire has been leading to this moment since Reagan. And I don’t want to hear anyone mention “Trickle Down” theory… we all know that doesn’t work, never has and never will. It’s a big lie designed to placate the masses and inspire consumer confidence while further enriching the already wealthy.

America, wake up, pull the wool from your eyes and realize that we are reaching a point of no return. Wait. Did you hear that? Yes that was the sound of another American company hitting the pavement like a grand piano hurtling from the 110th floor going a hundred miles an hour.

For people who cannot afford rent, a car is the last rung of dignity and sanity above the despair of the streets. A home on wheels is a classic American affair, from the wagon train to the RV. Now, for some formerly upwardly mobile Americans, the economic storm has turned the backseat or the rear of the van into the bedroom. “We found six people sleeping in their cars on an overnight police ride-along in December,” says John Edmund, chief of staff to Long Beach councilman Dee Andrews. “One was a widow living in a four-door sedan. She and her husband had been Air Force veterans. She did not know about the agencies that could help her. I had tears in my eyes afterwards.”

via More Homeless Americans Living in Cars and Campers – TIME.

They’re the “lucky” ones. Some don’t even have a car… or a tent (or a place to pitch it). And even when they tell their relatives, what help do they really get? Let’s face it, unless there are young children in the picture, there’s so little help available for anyone… thanks to Bill Clinton and George W Bush.

• The Fed’s Homeless Prevention Program – Unfortunately, there’s no link to this program at this article, and even when you find it with Google, there’s no clear navigational pathway for people actually seeking assistance. Try finding help for someone in Ontonagon County, Michigan… it looks to me like the nearest office is in Lansing, hundreds of miles away, with no clear indication of what, if any, local agencies have federal funding for this program. So I have to wonder how many people are actually finding help.

Despite pleas from nearly two dozen people to ax or postpone action on an ordinance to prohibit camping on public property, the Colorado Springs City Council voted 8-1 Tuesday to approve it.

“Doing nothing is not an option,” Councilwoman Jan Martin said after listening to more than four hours of comments from a parade of homeless advocates, homeless campers, Colorado College students, businessmen and everyday citizens.

Councilman Tom Gallagher, who was once homeless, cast the lone opposing vote.

“This is a personal issue for me,” he said. “Jesus Christ came into the world homeless; he left homeless.”

via City Council votes to ban camping on public property | council, public, camping – Breaking News – Colorado Springs Gazette, CO.

Matthew 8:20 :- Jesus replied, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

Matthew 19:21 :- Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

Matthew 25:34-35 :- “Then the King will say to those at His right, ‘Come, my Father’s blessed ones, receive your inheritance of the Kingdom which has been divinely intended for you ever since the creation of the world. For when I was hungry, you gave me food; when I was thirsty, you gave me drink; when I was homeless, you gave me a welcome.’”

Mark 25:44-45 :- “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?” Then he will answer them, saying, “Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”

Proverbs 14:31 :- He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.

Proverbs 21:13 :- If a man shuts his ears to the cry of the poor, he too will cry out and not be answered.

Proverbs 28:27 :- He who gives to the poor will lack nothing, but he who closes his eyes to them receives many curses.

. . .

Hopefully, all the fine Christian organizations who have gotten tax breaks will step in and help these 300-500 poor folks. If Focus on the Family can afford a few million for a Super Bowl advertisement, surely they can give a little back to our financially strapped city. Right? Seems like something Jesus would do.

via a comment from mrmacgregor on the original news article

So why isn’t this called The Great Depression II?

The data, which are for the fourth quarter, come from a new study (.pdf) by Andrew Sum, Ishwar Khatiwada and Sheila Palma at Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies. The researchers conclude that “what has been missing from the public debate over the labor market crisis is an honest and detailed analysis of which American workers have been most adversely affected by the deep deterioration in labor markets.”

via People in lower income brackets are seeing higher rates of unemployment – The Curious Capitalist – TIME.com.

When it comes to employment, there are roughly three broad categories in the United States. The folks in the upper-income group are not suffering much, if at all, from the profound reversals in employment brought about by the Great Recession. Those in the middle have been hit hard. The job losses there have been severe and long-lasting. But for those in the lower-income groups, the scale of the employment crisis has been mind-boggling.

What you’re not hearing from the politicians and the talking heads is that the joblessness and underemployment in America’s low-income households rival their heights in the Great Depression of the 1930s — and in some instances are worse. The same holds true for some categories of blue-collar workers. Anyone who thinks this devastating problem is going away soon, or that the economy can be put back on track without addressing it, is deluded.

There has been talk about income inequality over the past several years, but what is happening now is catastrophic. The Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston divided American households into 10 groups based on annual household income. Then it analyzed labor conditions in each of the groups during the fourth quarter of 2009.

The highest group, with household incomes of $150,000 or more, had an unemployment rate during that quarter of 3.2 percent. The next highest, with incomes of $100,000 to 149,999, had an unemployment rate of 4 percent.

Contrast those figures with the unemployment rate of the lowest group, which had annual household incomes of $12,499 or less. The unemployment rate of that group during the fourth quarter of last year was a staggering 30.8 percent. That’s more than five points higher than the overall jobless rate at the height of the Depression.

The next lowest group, with incomes of $12,500 to $20,000, had an unemployment rate of 19.1 percent.

via Op-Ed Columnist – The Worst of the Pain – NYTimes.com.

From the BLS:

The unemployment rate fell from 10.0 to 9.7 percent in January, and nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged (-20,000), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment fell in construction and in transportation and warehousing, while temporary help services and retail trade added jobs.

Percent Job Losses - Jan 2010 (click to enlarge)

Image via Calculated Risk

This graph shows the job losses from the start of the employment recession, in percentage terms (as opposed to the number of jobs lost).

Meanwhile, the President’s fireside chat today went something like this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Legalize both Hemp and Marijuana, you’ll see small businesses “sprout” faster than you’ve ever dreamed possible.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Let me be clear: Our world has changed, utterly. The old Michigan economy is gone.

Anyone who believed that Michigan would just naturally rebound without making deep and lasting change had a rendezvous with reality in 2009. The year that just ended was a dividing line — the finale of what Time magazine has called the “Decade from Hell”.

GM, Chrysler and over 50 suppliers declared bankruptcy. A million Michigan jobs lost over the last decade. Record foreclosures. The worst national economic downturn since the Great Depression. And Michigan was at the epicenter of it all.

via Full text of Granholm’s State of the State speech | freep.com | Detroit Free Press.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Washington Post‘s Steven Pearlstein tells me on MSNBC that the American people shouldn’t expect Washington to be able to do anything about jobs because it’s the result of “imbalances” that have to be “worked out” and it’s going to take time and people just need to be patient and take their medicine. (Mrs. Alan Greenspan agreed and added this hysteria over jobs in Congress is all just politics in the wake of Massachusetts.)

Those are excellent observations from successful political celebrities who have jobs and are among the wealthiest Americans who can afford to “ride out” the slump. For most people, who aren’t any of those things, not so much.

I assume that Pearlstein’s fellow WaPo writer Harold Meyerson wrote about the dismally inadequate job proposals on the table before today’s jobs numbers were released, which makes his criticism of the government for failing to directly create jobs all the more poignant. As he says, it’s not as if the government hasn’t directly created jobs before:

In the winter of 1933-34, with unemployment close to 25 percent, FDR aide Harry Hopkins put an astonishing 3 million people on the federal payroll in just 90 days, repairing airports, military bases and schools. This in a nation of just 130 million people — the equivalent today would be around 7.5 million. Hopkins and Roosevelt faced the same criticisms — over the size of the deficit and the growth of the federal government — that Obama and the Democrats face. But the New Dealers persisted throughout the 1930s, reducing unemployment; building roads, airports and bases; and securing the allegiance of voters for decades to come.

Today’s Democrats seem to lack the urgency, compassion and spine of their ’30s forebears. Obama’s proposals fail to challenge the conservative narrative that government can’t engender worthwhile economic activity, so all we can do is cut taxes on business and hope for the best. No narrative is more in need of challenging, but Obama has demurred at the very moment he must make the affirmative case for government. With the private sector economically unable to produce jobs, and the public sector politically blocked from doing so, we are condemned to a long, dismal decade.

They could do it. But they don’t want to upset their corporate benefactors (who have shown they are more than willing to sacrifice the country if anyone tries to dictate to them) and simply pray that the magic voodoo of the markets somehow brings everything around so they can go back to their comfortable political sideshows and stimulating war porn.

I suspect this is less a lack of spine than it is an unwillingness to challenge market orthodoxy and right-wing political cant, which they have internalized even more than the average American (who has benefited far less). And those who do have the imagination to see another way are powerless in the face of a political system that is at the mercy of an unprecedentedly disciplined political opposition and a Senate that no longer even tries to hide its constitutional function as the protector of the wealthy. It’s a problem.

via Unemployment – Salon.com.

RICHARD TRUMKA: Well, I’ll give you an example. Nancy Pelosi in the House said, “We will put a 5.6 percent tax surcharge on any income over $1 million. Just money over $1 million.” And that would have produced $400 billion. Enough to pay for four million jobs.

BILL MOYERS: Your message is very clear. Tax the rich.

RICHARD TRUMKA: Of course. They’ve had a ten year free ride.

BILL MOYERS: WALL STREET JOURNAL is going to come out next week and say Trumka says that class war is on again. And I’m serious about that.

RICHARD TRUMKA: Well, the class war’s been on, except my class has been losing.

via Bill Moyers and Richard Trumka: Americans Need Jobs — Does Obama Finally Get It? | | AlterNet.

New unemployment figures are out and unfortunately it shows a significant increase for Upper Michigan.

In December, the U.P. unemployment rate was 14.5 percent; that’s up from 12.9 percent in November.

All 15 Upper Michigan counties posted jobless rate increases.  Most of the increases were seasonal with job losses in tourism and construction.  But Ontonagon County increased more than 6 percent to 23.6 percent due to layoffs in manufacturing.

The state jobless rate in December was 14.3 percent.

Read the full county by county report here (.pdf).

via U.P. unemployment increases : News : WLUC TV6.

The key number, per the Wall Street Journal: “In all of 2009, GDP fell 2.4 percent, the biggest drop for an entire year since 10.9 percent in 1946.”

At the close of the worst year for the U.S. economy in more than six decades, Americans are cautious and scared. Without an improvement in the labor situation, they are unlikely to start spending at a rate that can sustain real growth. Congress needs to look inside these GDP numbers, realize how weak they are, and get a jobs bill to the president’s desk, immediately.

via How the World Works – Salon.com.

With the power elite consumed with its incessant, discordant fiddling over health care, the economic plight of ordinary Americans, from the middle class to the very poor, got pathetically short shrift. And there is no evidence, even now, that leaders of either party fully grasp the depth of the crisis, which began long before the official start of the Great Recession in December 2007.

A new study from the Brookings Institution tells us that the largest and fastest-growing population of poor people in the U.S. is in the suburbs. You don’t hear about this from the politicians who are always so anxious to tell you, in between fund-raisers and photo-ops, what a great job they’re doing. From 2000 to 2008, the number of poor people in the U.S. grew by 5.2 million, reaching nearly 40 million. That represented an increase of 15.4 percent in the poor population, which was more than twice the increase in the population as a whole during that period.

The study does not include data from 2009, when so many millions of families were just hammered by the recession. So the reality is worse than the Brookings figures would indicate.

[...]

Democrats in search of clues as to why voters are unhappy may want to take a look at the report. In 2008, a startling 91.6 million people — more than 30 percent of the entire U.S. population — fell below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, which is a meager $21,834 for a family of four.

via Op-Ed Columnist – They Still Don’t Get It – NYTimes.com.

The risk that deteriorating government finances could push economies into full-fledged debt crises tops a list of threats facing the world in 2010, according to a report by the World Economic Forum.

Major world economies have responded to the financial crisis with stimulus packages and by underwriting private debt obligations, causing deficits to balloon. This may have helped keep a worse recession at bay, but high debt has become a growing concern for financial markets.

The risk is particularly high for developed nations, as many emerging economies, not least in Latin America, have already been forced by previous shocks to put their fiscal houses in order, the WEF think tank said in its annual Global Risks report ahead of its meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

“Governments, in trying to stimulate their economies, in fighting the recession, are (building) unprecedented levels of debt and therefore there is a rising risk of sovereign defaults,” said John Drzik, Chief Executive of management consultancy Oliver Wyman, which was one of the contributors to the WEF report.

He said higher unemployment levels could follow, with associated social and political risks.

The report placed unsustainable debt levels and the looming shadow of the financial crisis among the top three risks, alongside underinvestment in infrastructure — one of the fastest rising risks — and chronic diseases such as Alzheimer’s and diabetes driving up health costs and reducing growth.

Other looming threats including the risk of asset price collapse, risks connected to Afghanistan and a potential slowdown in Chinese growth which could hit employment, fuel social unrest and hurt exports through the region and beyond.

via Sovereign defaults top 2010 risk hitlist | Reuters.

For the first time since the Great Depression, the United States experienced zero job growth in a decade. Zero. And zero is actually worse than it sounds since none of the preceding six decades registered job growth of less than 20 percent.

By comparison, the 1970s, which are often bemoaned as a time of economic stagflation and political malaise, registered a 27 percent increase in jobs. Yet, in part because of that relatively slow rise in jobs – down from 31 percent in the 1960s – American voters turned to Ronald Reagan and his radical economic theories of tax cuts, global “free markets” and deregulation.

Reagan sold Americans on his core vision: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Through his personal magnetism, Reagan turned taxes into a third rail of American politics. He convinced many voters that the government’s only important role was funding the military.

Yet, instead of guiding the country to a bright new day of economic vitality, Reagan’s approach accelerated a de-industrialization of the United States and a slump in the growth of American jobs, down to 20 percent during the 1980s. The percentage job increase for the 1990s stayed at 20 percent, although job growth did pick up later in the decade under Democrat Bill Clinton, who raised taxes and moderated some of Reagan’s approaches while still pushing “free trade” agreements and deregulation.

Hard-line Reaganomics returned with a vengeance under George W. Bush – more tax cuts, more faith in “free trade,” more deregulation – and the Great American Job Engine finally started grinding to a halt. Zero percent increase.

via t r u t h o u t | Robert Parry | Lessons from America’s Lost Decade.

What’s the return on investment here? The White House reported Wednesday that the $5 billion in stimulus funds spent to promote clean energy has created 51,700 jobs nationwide.

Clearly most of the $90 billion in the stimulus package for clean energy has yet to be spent, according to the second quarterly report to Congress on the Recovery Act’s impact by the Council on Economic Advisers (.pdf). It says another $26B has been obligated but not yet doled out.

via Is this good bang for the buck? White House says stimulus created 51,700 clean energy jobs – Green House – USATODAY.com.

According to the report:

As of the fourth quarter of 2009, the CEA estimates that the ARRA has raised employment relative to the baseline by between 1½ and 2 million. The CEA estimates for both the effects on GDP and employment are similar to those of respected private forecasters and government agencies.

FDR said it and it holds 66 years later: There are benefits and opportunities every American should expect to enjoy.

Let’s contrast ideal versions of the two approaches. In the ideal America of economic citizenship, there would be a single, universal, integrated, lifelong system of economic security including single-payer healthcare, Social Security, unemployment payments and family leave paid for by a single contributory payroll tax (which could be made progressive in various ways or reduced by combination with other revenue streams). Funding for all programs would be entirely nationalized, although states could play a role in administration. There would still be supplementary private markets in health and retirement products and services for the affluent, but most middle-class Americans would continue to rely primarily on the simple, user-friendly public system of economic security. As Steven Attewell points out, the Social Security Act of 1935 was intended not merely to provide public pensions for the elderly but to establish a framework for a comprehensive system of social insurance corresponding to President Roosevelt’s “right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.” Attewell writes: “We need to go back to the original drawing board — the Social Security Act of 1935 — to finish the job it began and create a truly universal and comprehensive social welfare state.”

In the utopia of welfare corporatism, today’s public benefits — Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance and, in a few states, public family leave programs — would be abolished and replaced by harebrained schemes dreamed up by libertarian ideologues at corporate-funded think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Tax subsidies would be funneled to insurance companies, brokers and banks. Social Security would be replaced by a bewildering miscellany of tax-favored personal savings accounts. Medicare would be replaced by a dog’s breakfast of tax subsidies for purchasing health insurance and personal medical savings accounts. Unemployment insurance would give way to yet another Rube Goldberg scheme of tax-favored unemployment insurance accounts. As for family leave — well, if you’re not wealthy enough to pay out of pocket for a nanny for your child or a nurse for your parent, you’re out of luck.

via U.S. Economy – Salon.com.

During President-Elect Barack Obama’s transition, the Center for American Progress proposed a 10-point clean-energy agenda for the president and Congress that would speed the economic transformation to a clean energy economy. A review of these items today finds that all were adopted or are working their way through the process. This is a startling achievement amidst the worst economy in 70 years, two wars, and an opposition party disinterested in cooperation. President Obama did much of what he promised, and he can do more in 2010 by cajoling Congress to do its part.

These achievements will have real world impact. By 2011, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, P.L. 111-5, will double the generation of renewable electricity from the wind, sun, and earth (.pdf). ARRA will also lead to energy efficiency retrofits in 1 million homes by 2012. And President Obama’s new fuel economy standards would save 1.8 billion barrels of oil. Additional benefits will accrue as the president and Congress finish some 2009 clean-energy initiatives and additional efforts are launched in 2010.

Here’s a review of progress made by the president and Congress over the past year…

via Obama seizes the energy opportunity | Grist.

“Tens of thousands of clean-energy jobs” are a good thing, but what America needs are MILLIONS of jobs, and we need those jobs NOW, not wait another 2-3 years. Families are losing their homes, their savings, their health, and their businesses… they can’t afford to wait, and those in Congress who dawdle and obstruct are HURTING AMERICA.

Finally, we all need to understand that government cannot create jobs, but it can create policies – for example government backed loans – that take the pressure off banks and encourage small business to keep workers and add more. We must learn to support entrepreneurs by creating an environment that rewards risk and innovation.

It will be a challenge, no doubt.  But we really don’t know what we can do until we stand up and try.

via It’s Work Creating Jobs, But It’s Worth It | The White House.

That was Dwight Evans, D-PA. The government certainly created his job. Maybe we should give his job to someone with better ideas about creating jobs than just roaming the country, holding mini-summits, and talking about it. But even all this talking… is anyone from the White House staff even taking any notes? They weren’t the last time I watched one of their videos.

The time for talk has long since passed.

P.S. – What kind of environmentally-aware president roams the country attending mini-summits when he could accomplish the same thing through teleconferencing? And how’s that carbon footprint coming along?

Over all, an estimated 3.6 million out-of-work people have been uncounted since the recession began in December 2007. They include people who had not recently looked for work and those who would have entered the work force in normal times, like recent high school and college graduates, but remained on the sidelines as jobs disappeared.

Here’s the rub: As soon as the economy shows more signs of life, those missing workers are likely to start looking for work. That would add to the ranks of the officially unemployed, causing the jobless rate to rise, perhaps dramatically — unless jobs are being created to absorb the labor glut.

The private sector alone is unlikely to create enough new jobs, even as the economy recovers. Employers are more likely to add hours to the truncated workweeks of existing employees than to hire new workers. They may also prefer to make temporary workers permanent rather than add new staff.

And even if hiring were unexpectedly strong, it could not repair the severely damaged job market anytime soon. The economy lost another 85,000 jobs in December, bringing the official total job loss over the past two years to 7.2 million jobs. But with the population growing — and with revisions to earlier data expected to show larger losses than previously reported — the economy is probably coming up short by 10 million to 11 million jobs. The job growth that would be needed to recoup losses of that magnitude in the next three years — some 400,000 jobs a month — is simply not in the cards.

via Editorial – Jobs and Politics – NYTimes.com.

Obama announced the awarding of $2.3 billion in tax credits to companies that manufacture wind turbines, solar panels, cutting edge batteries and other green technologies. The money will come from last year’s $787 billion stimulus program.

He also renewed a call by Vice President Al Gore for Congress to approve an additional $5 billion to help create more such jobs.

Obama said the tax credits would create some 17,000 green jobs.

Trying to paint the White House as fighting to rebuild the economy, officials said the poor jobs report underscores the challenges the president faces.

“Building a robust clean energy sector is how we will create the jobs of the future,” Obama said in a brief late-afternoon statement. “The Recovery Act awards I am announcing today will help close the clean energy gap that has grown between America and other nations while creating good jobs, reducing our carbon emissions and increasing our energy security.”

via Obama pushes for cash for green jobs – Stocks & economy- msnbc.com.

17,000 jobs when millions are out of work? My gods, tell me they aren’t this clueless.