One of the many victims of politicizing by the George Dubya Administration was how the Employment Rate of the US is calculated and reported. The old U3 (Official Unemployment Rate) has been manipulated to show only the number of people who are currently receiving a weekly unemployment check and those who recently applied for Unemployment Benefits. It does not include those who have stopped receiving Unemployment Benefits even though they are still looking for work, those who have given up hope of finding work, those who have taken part-time jobs to survive, those who are under-employed and those who have taken temporary work to survive. The new rate reported today by the government of 6.5% (U3) is not comparable to the unemployment rates that have been reported in prior Recessions

To get comparable unemployment information one must go and look at the U6 Unemployment Report of the government. That is now at an Unemployment Rate of 11.3%. Now that is a really serious but accurate report of what is really going on in the US economy in terms of real unemployment.

U6 is the broadest measure of Unemployment: It includes those people counted by U3, plus marginally attached workers (not looking, but want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past), as well as Persons employed part time for economic reasons (they want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule).

When former Senator Phil Graham (Republican - Texas) recently pontificated that the unemployment rate was nothing more than a mental figment in the minds of the American public when the official rate was at 6.1% he was actually lying and knew he was lying because he holds a PhD in Economics and knows the difference between the U3 and the U6 reports and that the U6 report is the one that credentialed economists study and from which they draw their conclusions. Phil Graham is demonstrably a better politician than he is an honest economist.

Fred

The Great American Voting Machine

The one thing about American politics that my students
in Europe have a difficult time getting their heads
around is that the people of the United States of
America do not directly elect their President - That
is done by a bunch of "Electors" from each of the
States in a thing called the Electoral College - And
that has sometimes resulted where a candidate for
President gets a majority of the popular votes but
does not get a majority of the "Elector's" votes and
that it is the votes of the "Electors" are what
actually selects the President of the United States. I
have to always let them in on the secret that most
Americans are not aware that they do not directly
elect their President.

My students always wonder where the "so called"
greatest democracy of the world got the monarchic idea
of electing the "head of state" indirectly. They all
point out that was the way the Holy Roman Emperors of
the Holy Roman Empire (Germany of the Middle Ages)
were elected.

The cartoon I included today "The Great American
Voting Machine" I will be using as a visual in my
future classes in Europe. Actually, it's not a bad
illustration of the complex and overly complicated
system we use for electing our Presidents. Fred

fredscholl@sbcglobal.net

Obama Elected

My friends in Europe are ecstatic over Barack Obama
being elected to be our new President. Several of them
quoted Winston Churchill's famous statement about
Americans, "Americans always do the right thing - Once
they've tried every thing else." Fred

Thank You American Voters!!!

I am getting an avalanche of E-mails and Instant Messages from friends not only in Europe but also from throughout the rest of the world. The main message coming from all those friends is a great big Thank You to the voters of the US for bringing about the massive change in the government of the US that only they had the power to do. All of them say that they are personally thanking every American they meet in their work and run into on the streets for the bloodless revolution they brought about in the United States.

Another theme that is consistent in all those messages is that the prisoners at Guantanamo must be quickly given fair and impartial trials by qualified judges and to preserve the Guantanamo Prison compound for the housing of the War Criminals of the US government who will eventually be convicted for their crimes against Humanity by the World Court in the Hague. George Dubya, Dick Chaney, Don Rumsfeld and a big chunk of the Bush Administration's Department of Justice and other individuals of the George Dubya Administration are being named as defendants who must face responsibility and pay for their crimes against the people of the world.

Another observation coming out of those messages is that of discovering that this last US election demonstrated that Americans had not lost their humanity and their sense of justice and that they had taken responsibility to correct their errors made in the previous two presidential elections.

Fred