Unemployment Rate Without Government Cuts: 7.1%

14 05 2012

The following article from the The Wall Street Journal suggest that  the unemployment rate would have been much lower without government cuts.

Unemployment Rate Without Government Cuts: 7.1%

By Justin Lahart

One reason the unemployment rate may have remained persistently high: The sharp cuts in state and local government spending in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and the layoffs those cuts wrought.

The Labor Department’s establishment survey of employers — the jobs count that it bases its payroll figures on — shows that the government has been steadily shedding workers since the crisis struck, with 586,000 fewer jobs than in December 2008. Friday’s employment report showed the cuts continued in April, with 15,000 government jobs lost.

But the survey of households that the unemployment rate is based on suggests the government job cuts have been much, much worse.

In April the household survey showed that that there were 442,000 fewer people working in government than in March. The household survey has a much smaller sample size than the establishment survey, and so is prone to volatility, but the magnitude of the drop is striking: It marks the largest decline on both an absolute and a percentage basis on record going back to 1948. Moreover, the household survey has consistently showed bigger drops in government employment than the establishment survey has.

The unemployment rate would be far lower if it hadn’t been for those cuts: If there were as many people working in government as there were in December 2008, the unemployment rate in April would have been 7.1%, not 8.1%.

Ceteris is rarely paribus, of course: If there were more government jobs now, for example, it’s likely that not as many people would have left the labor force, and so the actual unemployment rate would be north of 7.1%.

More important, even after making an adjustment for the volatility of the household survey, the starkly different message that it is offering up on the scope of job government losses is curious.

In the three months ended April, it shows that there were an average 20.3 million people engaged in government work, 1.2 million fewer than the average for the three months ended December 2008. That is more than double the job losses registered by the establishment survey.

One explanation is that the household survey is picking up government job losses that the establishment survey hasn’t — it can, generally speaking, be better at picking up shifts in the makeup of the job market.

Another explanation is that the household survey might be picking up jobs lost by people who worked at private companies that were reliant on government spending. A school bus driver, say, who was polled by the Labor Department for the household survey might say that he works for the government when he actually works for a bus company that’s contracted by the local school district. If the school district curtails spending and he loses his job, that would be counted as a government job loss in the household survey, even though it really isn’t.

 

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2012/05/08/unemployment-rate-without-government-cuts-7-1/

 




Who Occupies? A Pollster Surveys the Protesters

14 05 2012
Here is an article from The Wall Street Journal about Occupy Wall Street protests. 

Who Occupies? A Pollster Surveys the Protester

By Aaron Rutkoff

Reuters
Occupy Wall Street protesters inside Zuccotti Park on Oct. 13.

To judge by its most famous slogan, Occupy Wall Street sees itself as a movement made up of those in the bottom 99% of the income distribution. But what are the actual demographics of the committed protesters inside New York’s Zuccotti Park, the movement’s birthplace and most visible manifestation?

Douglas Schoen, a veteran Democratic Party pollster who has also worked for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, sent a researcher from his polling firm down to Zuccotti Park last week to conduct what appears to be the very first professional survey of the protesters in New York. The face-to-face interviews with 198 people informed an essay by Schoen in The Journal’s opinion pages.

Putting aside Schoen’s analysis — the subhead on his piece pegs the protesters as “leftists out of step with most American voters,” if you’re curious — let’s focus instead on the raw data, which he was kind enough to publish on his personal website. The findings are quite surprising.

The protesters as a group are young, but Zuccotti Park is not nearly the youth-only movement depicted in the media. While 49% of protesters are under 30, more than 28% are 40 or older. Only one-third of the crowd considers themselves Democrats — nearly the same portion who say they don’t identify with any party. (Zero respondents labeled themselves Republican.)

Schoen finds reason to be skeptical of the protesters’ professed motivation: the inequities of the U.S. economic system. “The vast majority of demonstrators are actually employed, and the proportion of protesters unemployed (15%) is within single digits of the national unemployment rate (9.1%),” he writes in his essay. But those numbers might not be the best way to assess the economic health of the protest group.

Schoen’s survey found that, in addition to the 15% of protesters who are jobless, another 18% consider themselves “part-time employed/underemployed” — for a combined total of 33% who are struggling in the labor market. That percentage is double the U.S. Labor Department’s broader measure of unemployment, which accounts for people who have stopped looking for work or who can’t find full-time jobs. As of September, this so-called “U-6″ measure rose to 16.5%, the highest rate this year.

The pollster has a curious reading of his data when describing Occupy Wall Street’s previous support for President Barack Obama. “An overwhelming majority of demonstrators supported Barack Obama in 2008,” Schoen writes.

But according to the survey data, just 56% of protesters voted in 2008, and of those 74% voted for Obama. Crunching the numbers, it would appear that only 42% of the Zuccotti Park crowd has ever cast a presidential ballot for Obama.

The president looks likely to improve his standing with the protesters in 2012. The survey found 48% would vote for his re-election, even though a slim 51% majority of the protesters disapprove of his job performance.

Finally, the poll sheds some light on the protesters’ underlying policy agenda. The polling falls short of consensus, but some clear themes emerge.

When asked whether the U.S. should increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans, more than three-fourths of the protesters said yes. More taxes on everyone? A smaller majority, 58%, said no.

And then there’s this interesting open-ended question from the poll: What would you like to see the Occupy Wall Street movement achieve? Here are the responses (emphasis added):

  • 35% Influence the Democratic Party the way the Tea Party has influenced the GOP
  • 4% Radical redistribution of wealth
  • 5% Overhaul of tax system: replace income tax with flat tax
  • 7% Direct Democracy
  • 9% Engage & mobilize Progressives
  • 9% Promote a national conversation
  • 11% Break the two-party duopoly
  • 4% Dissolution of our representative democracy/capitalist system
  • 4% Single payer health care
  • 4% Pull out of Afghanistan immediately
  • 8% Not sure

The two answers in bold seem sufficiently similar as to constitute a single answer — energizing populism on the left —  with 44% support.

So the survey tells us that the Zuccotti Park protesters are underemployed at twice the national rate, lukewarm to warm on Obama and broadly in favor of taxing the wealthy and encouraging a Tea Party-style populism on the left.

 

http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2011/10/19/who-is-occupying-wall-street-a-pollster-surveys-protester/




What Percent Are You?

8 05 2012

I found an interesting blog on Wall Street Journal where it has a calculator that tells you where in the population you stand in terms of the percentage. (“We are the 99%” is Occupy Wall Street’s slogan)

Click here to check out where you belong to!

 

The Occupy Wall Street movement seeks to speak for the bottom 99% of the population by income, which includes pretty much everyone who makes less than $500,000 a year.

According to the protesters’ unofficial website, “Occupy Wall Street” is a leaderless movement of people from many different backgrounds. “The one thing we all have in common is that we are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%,” the website says. A related site called We Are the 99% records stories from people around the country.

The calculator above shows where your income stands on the wide range of the 99%. An annual salary above $506,000 puts you in the top 1%, while you need to make less than $2,500 a year to be in the bottom 1%. Where do you stand?




Occupy Wall Street on May Day

6 05 2012

May Day Slideshow ↓(click photo)

For decades, workers in Europe, South America and China have been celebrated with an official holiday on May Day.

The United States, however, has not followed suit. (Britain and Canada have tried to wash out the holiday’s leftist hues.) Even though the day’s origins date to a riot in Chicago in 1886 known as the Haymarket massacre, labor is celebrated in the United States in early September.

Socialists and trade union movements have long used May Day as a protest day. And on May 1, the Occupy movement hoped to bring numerous cities to a standstill in commemoration of International Workers Day.

That did not happen. However, in New York the protests continued into the wee hours of the next day, with about 2,000 marchers gathering at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza on Water Street after dark and several hundred returning to Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street’s former home base, after midnight.

The police said that 34 people were arrested and another 52 issued desk appearance tickets for lesser offenses by the end of a day that also included pickets, marches and rallies in Midtown, Union Square, Washington Square Park and on the Lower East Side.

For more

 




Occupy Wall Street: From the Streets to the Archives

2 05 2012

This is a recent article from The New York Times about Occupy Wall Street.

Occupy Wall Street: From the Streets to the Archives

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

Earlier this week a Times article looked at social scientists who are trying tostudy Occupy Wall Street in real time. But a group of archivists are also hitting the streets, and the Internet, in an effort to preserve the movement’s traces for scholars of the future.

Within weeks of the occupation of Zuccotti Park last fall archivists from the New-York Historical Society and other institutions were out scooping up posters, flyers, pamphlets, signs and other ephemera. “For us, it’s an event in New York City,” said Jean Ashton, the society’s executive vice president and director of its library, which has so far amassed several hundred Occupy-related artifacts. “We want to make sure that people understand what happened here.”

Other archivists are collecting some of the explosion of digital materials by and about Occupy. New York University’s Tamiment Library has been recording the meetings of the movement’s Think Tank group and archiving the Web page of the New York group’s general assembly. The Internet Archive, a nonprofit Web site, and the Occupy Archive, a project at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for the History of New Media, has been collecting material from Occupy sites beyond New York.

So far OccupyArchive has some 3,200 items relating to hundreds of occupations around the country, mostly gathered by volunteers who have scoured the Web for scans of meeting minutes, posters, Flicker photos and other material. “Many local occupations were quite good about keeping minute notes, agendas and that kind of thing,” Sharon Leon, the Rosenzweig’s director of public programs, said. “That will eventually be a rich archive for historians doing work on social movements and post-recession reaction on the left.”

But despite the profusion of material online some archivists say that the historical record of the future may have some gaping holes. While Twitter, Facebook and other social media have been crucial to the movement, the terms of use of most social media sites prevent anyone from publishing material harvested from them. “Look back at the Arab Spring,” said Howard Besser, an archivist at N.Y.U. and founder of Activist Archivists, a group created last fall to coordinate the collection of digital media relating to Occupy. “We actually have precious little that scholars can use to look at how things spread.”

Archiving efforts have also met some initial skepticism from the Occupy movement itself, though Mr. Besser said most people had overcome their wariness about collaborating with traditional institutions. “There are lots of people who don’t get the idea of archiving, but that’s true everywhere,” he said. “Most people, when it’s explained, are very quick to understand.”

Activist Archivists has worked with Occupy Wall Street’s archives working group to create a “Why Archive” postcard to distribute at future demonstrations. (The first of five bullet points: “Accountability. Archives collect evidence that can hold those in power accountable.”) The group has also worked to counter fears that material gathered by archivists could end up being used in legal actions against protesters. Mr. Besser said they were looking into training activists to use ObscuraCam, a technology developed by human rights groups that automatically obscures faces in photographs and videos.

“The archivist part of us says we want to grab everything of enduring value and keep it,” Mr. Besser said. “But the activist part says that we may not want to save certain things, or may not want the police to have access to certain things.”

In the meantime Occupy is also storing its own archive of hundreds of signs, posters, flyers and one-of-a-kind objects recovered after the eviction from Zuccotti Park, like banners for the camp’s kitchen and other facilities made out of orange plastic netting used by the police.

Anna Perricci, a member of the archives working group who is coordinating digital preservation efforts, said that it was important for Occupy to have an active part in curating its own history.

“There are a lot of other people recording the movement and telling its story,” she said. “But I also want to empower occupiers to help preserve what is being made while their story is unfolding.”

 




Apples Tax Strategy Cheats the US

28 04 2012




Occupy Wall Street to target shareholder meetings

23 04 2012

Phoenix Business Journal by Kent Hoover, Washington Bureau Chief

Date: Monday, April 23, 2012, 6:59am MST

 

Corporate America, get ready: The folks who brought you Occupy Wall Street last year may confront you at your next shareholder meeting.

Activists with The 99% Spring coalition already have disrupted shareholder meetings this year at EQT Corp. (EQT), Carnival Cruise Lines (CCL) and BNY Mellon (BK). Now they’ve announced a full schedule of “non-violent direct action” at shareholder meetings, starting next week with Wells Fargo and General Electric.

The coalition, which is composed of groups ranging from MoveOn.org to the Service Employees International Union, plans to block entry to the Wells Fargo (WFC) annual shareholder meeting in San Francisco April 24. What’s their beef with Wells Fargo? They want the bank to stop foreclosing on homeowners and pay more taxes — the bank’s effective tax rate has been low in recent years because of losses at its Wachovia acquisition.

Leni Juca, owner of Oxium Copy and Print in New York City, will travel to San Francisco to protest Wells Fargo’s investments in the GEO Group Inc., a private-sector company that operates the Queens Private Correctional Facility in New York.

“When I learned how Wells Fargo received $43 billion of taxpayer money in the bank bailout a few years ago and then invested in for-profit immigrant detention centers infamous across the country for substandard conditions and the pain they cause our families, I had to take action,” Juca said.

His message to Wells Fargo: “Stop investing in private prisons; start investing in small businesses.”

Maybe Juca isn’t aware that Wells Fargo takes pride in being the nation’s top lender to small businesses.

For Wells Fargo and other companies targeted by anti-corporate activists, the demonstrations will be a hassle and a public relations challenge. But they also will be an opportunity to tell their story, and explain their business practices.

For The 99% Spring, the demonstrations will be an opportunity to, in its words, “confront CEOs and other members of the 1% over their economic concerns.”

On May 1, protesters will hit three shareholder meetings: the Hershey Co. (HSY) in Hershey, Pa.; Great Plains Energy (GXY) in Kansas City; and Peabody Coal (BTU) in St. Louis.

The Bank of America (BAC), Wellpoint (WLP), Pepco (POM), Amazon (AMXN), NextEra Energy (NEE), Comcast (CMCSA) and Walmart (WMT) also are on their hit list.

One of their gripes against Wellpoint has to do with money that health insurers gave to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for use in opposing health care reform in 2010. The chamber also spent a lot of money on political races that year, mostly supporting Republicans. Its refusal to reveal its donors sparked an uproar — even PresidentBarack Obama weighed in, calling the chamber’s political activity “a threat to democracy.”

Today, the chamber was the scene of yet another protest. Union members and relatives of workers who died from job-related injuries or illnesses marched in front of the chamber. Why pick on the chamber? Because it’s spearheading the anti-regulatory movement in Washington, which has kept the Occupational Safety and Health Administration from protecting workers like it should, said Walter Jones, who chairs the American Public Health Association’s occupational safety and health section.

Fewer workers would be killed, maimed or sickened “if the chamber would lighten up a bit,” Jones said.

The chamber denies that it’s anti-regulation. It just wants agencies like OSHA to consider the costs, as well as the benefits, of its regulations, and adopt rules that are reasonable. It doesn’t apologize for being the business community’s most powerful advocate in Washington, and seems to take price when it’s singled out for protests.

 

 

http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/morning_call/2012/04/occupy-wall-street-to-target.html

 




Zimmerman Case

20 04 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/13/us/george-zimmerman-to-appear-in-court.html
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/george-zimmerman-apologizes-trayvon-martin-family-could-released-152857774.html

There are new evidence to the case that suggests that the shooting may have been done in self-defense. It was said that a photo was released that shows injury to the back of Zimmerman’s head. There are concerns that this trial will cause conflict between the black and the white community. Already, there are several protests across the country that demand for the conviction of Zimmerman. Celebrities, priests, and other influential peple such as Obama have had their input on this case. In addition, there might be an issue with the media coverage of the case. It seems as if the media was set to condemn Zimmerman from the start, from their use of words and photos in their reports.




Protesters Hold ‘Spring Training’ at Zuccotti Park

15 04 2012

About 100 people were gathered inside Zuccotti Park on Friday as Zak Solomon stood on a granite bench and offered instruction on protest tactics with names like “Melt,” “Wall,” and “The People’s Gong.”

While demonstrating the last, Mr. Solomon, an Occupy Wall Street organizer, was joined by Jason Shelton, 28, from Greenpoint, who contrasted the People’s Gong with the bell that closes the New York Stock Exchange.

The bell, Mr. Shelton declared, symbolizes “the validation of greed over mutual aid,” whereas the gong is a “call to fight against this injustice.”

With that, the crowd raised their voices in an approximation of the sort of deep, reverberating tone that a large gong might produce when struck by a mallet.

Last fall, Occupy Wall Street protesters exceeded their most ambitious aims, establishing an encampment in Zuccotti Park that became a model for more than 100 others across the country and making financial inequity part of the national dialogue. The group has been mainly quiet during the winter and their movement has faded from the headlines, but organizers are planning a springtime resurgence that they hope will be launched by marches and other actions scheduled for May 1.

To prepare, organizers have held weekly practice sessions, called “spring training,” inside Zuccotti Park, where participants learn about the gong and other tactics, some of them adapted from a British activist group called the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army.

Over the course of an hour on Friday, protesters practiced several tactics, including “hup,” which involves a knot of people jumping up and down (and can be used to coalesce a scattered group) and “melt,” in which protesters drift to the ground (used for a ”die-in” or to de-escalate a confrontation).

One tactic, known as “wall,” involved ranks of protesters locking elbows and trotting forward in close formation, and could be used, organizers said, to move quickly while making it difficult for the police to physically break up the group.

Organizers said the sessions, which have been followed by short marches to the stock exchange for the closing bell, are meant to teach participants to work together and instill a sense of camaraderie.

As the protesters hone their tactics, the police officers who watch them and who follow the weekly marches appear to be absorbing lessons and engaging in their own preparation.

For instance, Mr. Solomon said, one week four marches had simultaneously left the park from different points. The next week, the police had posted scooters at each corner of the park.

On Friday, the protesters divided one march into three segments, two of which broke off in different directions soon after leaving the park. The remaining segment, which included about 30 people, sometimes slowed to a near crawl and other times began jogging, as officers followed. At several points, the group executed an abrupt about face and marched in an unexpected direction.

At Broadway, the police blocked access to Wall Street, but many of the marchers made it to a spot near the stock exchange, some employing a tactic called “civilian,” in which a block dissolves into individuals who then try to blend in with nonprotesters. There, the protesters executed a performance of the People’s Gong, but word soon spread that one of the march segments had been stopped blocks from the exchange.

As the training participants streamed back into Zuccotti Park for a post-march meeting, an organizer, Sandra Nurse, said that the practices provided a sort of laboratory to see what tactics worked best in different situations.

“What feels good and what works well is something that continues to be used,” she said. “And things that we feel like are less effective we end up dropping.”

 




Evicted From Park, Occupy Protesters Take to Sidewalks

15 04 2012

 

By 

The protesters arrived on Wall Street on Wednesday night carrying bedrolls, quilts and blankets. They spread pieces of cardboard on the sidewalks. Then, as several police officers stood nearby, the protesters made signs with anticorporate slogans.

“It’s really exciting to see people actually occupying Wall Street,” said Embi Weitzel, 25, a nanny from Colorado, who came with earplugs, apples, a flashlight, a bottle of water and an orange sleeping bag. “Finally, here we are, in the belly of the beast.”

For the third consecutive night, Occupy Wall Street protesters used a tactic that many of them hope will emerge as a replacement for their encampment at Zuccotti Park, which was disbanded by the police in November.

Norman Siegel, a prominent civil-rights lawyer who visited the protesters on Wednesday night, said a decision by a federal court in Manhattan arising from a lawsuit in 2000 allowed the protesters to sleep on sidewalks as a form of political expression so long as they did not block doorways and took up no more than half the sidewalk.

The protesters first cited that ruling last week while sleeping outside bank branches near Union Square, but said this week that they wanted so-called sleep-outs to occur nightly around the New York Stock Exchange.

An organizer, Austin Guest, said protesters had scheduled such events for Friday night at four other spots, each related to the Occupy Wall Street message that the financial system benefits the rich and corporations at the expense of ordinary citizens.

The protesters’ presence on and near Wall Street has drawn the attention of the police, but officers have not dislodged them.

Dozens of Occupy encampments around the country were forcibly cleared months ago by police forces, and organizers in New York have acknowledged that it would be difficult to mount a new occupation of a park or plaza. Instead, many of them said, they would rather establish these sleeping spots.

“It takes a tremendous amount of resources to maintain a camp,” Mr. Guest said Wednesday night. “But sidewalks are everywhere.”

Another organizer, Jo Robin, said that by moving to Wall Street, the protesters hoped to address a new audience that would most likely not support the movement’s message. She added that over the past week, protesters in Boston, Philadelphia and Washington had begun sleeping near financial institutions.

About 75 protesters gathered on Wednesday night in Lower Manhattan. About 15 slept on Wall Street. Most of them stretched out on Nassau Street, just north of Wall Street. Others unrolled their sleeping bags on Broad Street, across from the illuminated colonnade of the stock exchange.

“The conversations that were happening in Zuccotti Park are happening again,” said Ray Leone, 26, from the Lower East Side. “We were separated for so long.”

Around 2 a.m. on Thursday, several protesters kicked a soccer ball across the cobblestones of Nassau Street. A large dump truck lifted a metal container with a clang and emptied its contents.

A couple of hours later, most protesters were asleep, curled under blankets, some wearing hats and scarves.

Nearby, in Zuccotti Park, empty except for a security guard, there was the hiss of sprinklers watering tulips.

By 5:30 a.m., the sound of stainless-steel coffee carts clattering over cobblestones could be heard. Workers began hosing the sidewalk across the street from Federal Hall. By 6 a.m., protesters were waking up.

As the sky brightened, workers in suits or high heels began walking down Wall Street, and a young protester offered them pamphlets.

Many ignored the literature. Some accepted, leafing through the pamphlet as they walked or shoving it into their pockets as they hurried to their jobs.