How many people in USA are sick of being told how good everything is & be happy with a positive attitude?

Question

Isn't this shear brainwash,propaganda & malipulation just to keep "the natives or the flock in step!" This is carried out by Media & Religous groups. If you do NOT confront the truth or Reality the ruling class will continue to walk all over you.

Answer 1

Forget Iran, Americans Should be Hysterical About This
Nuking the Economy

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics re-benchmarked the payroll jobs data back to 2000. Thanks to Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services, I have the adjusted data from January 2001 through January 2006. If you are worried about terrorists, you don’t know what worry is.

Job growth over the last five years is the weakest on record. The US economy came up more than 7 million jobs short of keeping up with population growth. That’s one good reason for controlling immigration. An economy that cannot keep up with population growth should not be boosting population with heavy rates of legal and illegal immigration.

Over the past five years the US economy experienced a net job loss in goods producing activities. The entire job growth was in service-providing activities--primarily credit intermediation, health care and social assistance, waiters, waitresses and bartenders, and state and local government.

US manufacturing lost 2.9 million jobs, almost 17% of the manufacturing work force. The wipeout is across the board. Not a single manufacturing payroll classification created a single new job.

The declines in some manufacturing sectors have more in common with a country undergoing saturation bombing during war than with a super-economy that is “the envy of the world.” Communications equipment lost 43% of its workforce. Semiconductors and electronic components lost 37% of its workforce. The workforce in computers and electronic products declined 30%. Electrical equipment and appliances lost 25% of its employees. The workforce in motor vehicles and parts declined 12%. Furniture and related products lost 17% of its jobs. Apparel manufacturers lost almost half of the work force. Employment in textile mills declined 43%. Paper and paper products lost one-fifth of its jobs. The work force in plastics and rubber products declined by 15%. Even manufacturers of beverages and tobacco products experienced a 7% shrinkage in jobs.

The knowledge jobs that were supposed to take the place of lost manufacturing jobs in the globalized “new economy” never appeared. The information sector lost 17% of its jobs, with the telecommunications work force declining by 25%. Even wholesale and retail trade lost jobs. Despite massive new accounting burdens imposed by Sarbanes-Oxley, accounting and bookkeeping employment shrank by 4%. Computer systems design and related lost 9% of its jobs. Today there are 209,000 fewer managerial and supervisory jobs than 5 years ago.
In five years the US economy only created 70,000 jobs in architecture and engineering, many of which are clerical. Little wonder engineering enrollments are shrinking. There are no jobs for graduates. The talk about engineering shortages is absolute ignorance. There are several hundred thousand American engineers who are unemployed and have been for years. No student wants a degree that is nothing but a ticket to a soup line. Many engineers have written to me that they cannot even get Wal-Mart jobs because their education makes them over-qualified.

Offshore outsourcing and offshore production have left the US awash with unemployment among the highly educated. The low measured rate of unemployment does not include discouraged workers. Labor arbitrage has made the unemployment rate less and less a meaningful indicator. In the past unemployment resulted mainly from turnover in the labor force and recession. Recoveries pulled people back into jobs.

Unemployment benefits were intended to help people over the down time in the cycle when workers were laid off. Today the unemployment is permanent as entire occupations and industries are wiped out by labor arbitrage as corporations replace their American employees with foreign ones.
Economists who look beyond political press releases estimate the US unemployment rate to be between 7% and 8.5%. There are now hundreds of thousands of Americans who will never recover their investment in their university education.
Unless the BLS is falsifying the data or businesses are reporting the opposite of the facts, the US is experiencing a job depression. Most economists refuse to acknowledge the facts, because they endorsed globalization. It was a win-win situation, they said.

They were wrong.

At a time when America desperately needs the voices of educated people as a counterweight to the disinformation that emanates from the Bush administration and its supporters, economists have discredited themselves. This is especially true for “free market economists” who foolishly assumed that international labor arbitrage was an example of free trade that was benefitting Americans. Where is the benefit when employment in US export industries and import-competitive industries is shrinking? After decades of struggle to regain credibility, free market economics is on the verge of another wipeout.

No sane economist can possibly maintain that a deplorable record of merely 1,054,000 net new private sector jobs over five years is an indication of a healthy economy. The total number of private sector jobs created over the five year period is 500,000 jobs less than one year’s legal and illegal immigration! (In a December 2005 Center for Immigration Studies report based on the Census Bureau’s March 2005 Current Population Survey, Steven Camarota writes that there were 7,9 million new immigrants between January 2000 and March 2005.)
The economics profession has failed America. It touts a meaningless number while joblessness soars. Lazy journalists at the New York Times simply rewrite the Bush administration’s press releases.

On February 10 the Commerce Department released a record US trade deficit in goods and services for 2005--$726 billion. The US deficit in Advanced Technology Products reached a new high. Offshore production for home markets and jobs outsourcing has made the US highly dependent on foreign provided goods and services, while simultaneously reducing the export capability of the US economy. It is possible that there might be no exchange rate at which the US can balance its trade.

Polls indicate that the Bush administration is succeeding in whipping up fear and hysteria about Iran. The secretary of defense is promising Americans decades-long war. Is death in battle Bush’s solution to the job depression? Will Asians finance a decades-long war for a bankrupt country?

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: [e-mail]

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts02112006.html

Answer 2

So you're saying it's better to take the other route and let people walk all over you and be miserable? Life's a *****, nothing you can do to change everything going on in this country. The only thing you can do is roll with the punches and do what's best for you. unless you want to retreat to the woods and live like a caveman.

Answer 3

You don't even deserve to live for those words. You take for granted everything in your life and are revolted by your country. You deserve deportation and I assure you that someone such as yourself who believes that the life and freedom you get here in the USA will be delivered upon you somewhere else is a fool! Media in the USA is the fairest in the world, religion does not doctrine politics anymore (brain-dead), and if you knew anything about the truth you'd see you just $hit and fell back in it.

Answer 4

What the people in the USA are sick of is foreign trolls like you trying to prevent us from being happy with a possitive attitude. Why don't you post another question about your assinine theory of representative government. I thought your country claimed to have a decent eductaion system.

Answer 5

If you lived here you would know the media is protraying the US in a bad light.

The fact is that the US is in the middle of the best economy in the history of the US. Almost every single economic factor is on the plus side.

The media is too busy spreading their illogical and pathological hatred of Bush to say anything about his accomplishments, which far outweigh the failures. Things are very good here in the US, try to visit here sometime.

There is no ruling class here, your country is the one with the caste system.

Answer 6

sure, that is undesirable which you're happy that she's ill and undesirable for her simply by fact she probably would not understand which you're happy that she's ill and undesirable for you if she ever unearths out that that's the style you experience! LOL!

Answer 7

I have a happy life and I try to stay positive.Thats the key to overcoming crisis.You fight with everything you have and stay positive.I know,my son battled cancer..,wouldnt have been good for him if I had been doom and gloom would it?And yes he beat the cancer.The terrorists are the cancer of this country and others,and if we dont beat them and remain strong in the fight,they will beat us.

Answer 8

The media tells us how good things are? Now that's news to me.

Answer 9

Have you lived anywhere else? I have lived in both Europe and Africa and let me tell you, unquestionably, the USA is GREAT. We are free, happy, and comfortable. You sound like a whiny brat, in my opinion. It has nothing to do with the 'ruling class' or the religious...it's just pure fact. America is great.

Answer 10

Poverty and Unemployment in America
By John Peterson

“They’re sending $87bn to the second richest oil nation in the world but can’t
afford to feed their own here in the States.” - Dan Larkin, Unemployed

The crisis of unemployment and poverty in America continues to worsen. Despite a nominal increase in jobs in recent weeks, what is not reported is what kind of jobs are being created. Manufacturing jobs, the backbone of any economy, continued to be lost for the 37th month in a row in October. For the vast majority of Americans, the days of high quality jobs with decent wages, security, and full health and retirement benefits are a thing of the past. The effect this is having in terms of unemployment, homelessness, and even hunger right here in the US is a devastating indictment of a system which places profits before human need and suffering.

So although the unemployment figure dropped from 6.1 percent to 6.0 percent, the real situation is being concealed by the government's "revised" method of compiling the figures. According to a report on "Understanding The Severity Of The Current Labor Slump" by Lee Price with Yulia Fungard, a number of factors must be considered in order to understand the severity of the current labor slump:

•The record length of time that jobs have failed to recover - Prior to the current slump, jobs had never fallen over a two and a half year period since monthly job numbers began in 1939. As of October 2003, payroll jobs had fallen by 2.4 million below the level of March 2001.
•The growth in the working age population since the recession began in March 2001 - Even as jobs were shrinking by 1.8 percent, the working age population (i.e., the number of people of working age) was growing by 3.4 percent. Had job growth kept up with working age population growth over that period, 6.9 million more payroll jobs would have been filled in October 2003.
•The effect of the "missing" labor market on the unemployment rate - The unusually prolonged loss of jobs has caused an unprecedented number of people to refrain from actively looking for work, and therefore to be excluded from the unemployment measurement. Had the labor force grown more in line with the population - as it has in past labor slumps - another 2.3 million people would have been in the labor force in October 2003.
•This "missing" labor force is significant because the unemployment rate would have been 7.4 percent had the 2.3 million "missing" workers been considered as unemployed.2 The 7.4 percent unemployment figure provides a better measure of current slack in the labor market than the actual unemployment rate of 6.0 percent. The 1.4 percentage-point difference reflects the people pushed to the sidelines of the labor market who can be expected to seek work again once job prospects improve. As a result, the official unemployment rate should not be expected to fall very much when the employment picture actually begins to improve.
•The loss of wage and salary income - Although real hourly wages have grown since the start of the recession, those gains have been more than offset by declines in the number of jobs and the amount of hours paid per job.
•This slump saw the longest duration of job loss - 28 months.
•This slump is the first time in which there was not a full recovery of jobs 31 months after the recession began.
•This slump is the worst in terms of the rise of the unemployment rate (after adjustment for the "missing" labor force) 31 months after the recession began - up 3.2 percentage points.
•The current slump has also been the most severe in terms of the loss of aggregate real wage and salary income 30 months after the recession began - down 1.2 percent.
According to the authors of this study, because of the extended period of job loss, the current labor slump is the most severe on record by several important measures. And this is the very best this system has to offer!

In the year 2002, 1.7 million Americans slipped below the poverty line, bringing the total to 34.6 million. That’s an astonishing one in eight of the population. Over 13 million of them are children. In fact, the US has the worst child poverty rate and the worst life expectancy of all the world’s industrialized countries, and the plight of its poor is worsening. 31 million Americans were deemed to be “food insecure” (they literally did not know where their next meal was coming from). Of those, more than nine million were categorized by the US department of agriculture as experiencing real hunger, defined by the US department of agriculture as an “uneasy or painful sensation caused by lack of food due to lack of resources to obtain food.”

In 25 major cities the need for emergency food rose an average of 19 percent last year. The number of Americans on food stamps has risen from 17 million to 22 million since Bush took office. There are more Americans living in poverty now than there were in 1965 - what happened to “progress” and things getting better from generation to generation? What is Bush’s solution? “Faith-based” charities!


http://www.socialistappeal.org/usa/poverty_and_unemployment_in_amer.html