The 86 Million Invisible Unemployed

There are far more jobless people in the United States than you might think. While it's true that the unemployment rate is falling, that doesn't include the millions of nonworking adults who aren't even looking for a job anymore. And hiring isn't strong enough to keep up with population growth.

As a result, the labor force is now at its smallest size since the 1980s when compared to the broader working age population. A person is counted as part of the labor force if they have a job or have looked for one in the last four weeks. Only about 64% of Americans over the age of 16 currently fall into that category, according to the Labor Department. That's the lowest labor force participation rate since 1984.

It's a worrisome sign for the economy and partly explains why the unemployment rate has been falling recently. Only people looking for work are considered officially unemployed. Last year there were 86 million people who didn't have a job and weren't consistently looking for one, according to Labor Department data. More...

6 Ways Food is Being Used as a Weapon

Image via WikipediaHungry people will do anything for food, which means that those who have control over food can use it as leverage. In 1974, Henry Kissinger suggested using food as a weapon to induce targeted population reduction in a previously classified 200-page report, National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests. The primary tactic to be applied is that food aid would be withheld from developing nations until they submitted to birth control policies:

There is also some established precedent for taking account of family planning performance in appraisal of assistance requirements by AID [U.S. Agency for International Development] and consultative groups. Since population growth is a major determinant of increases in food demand, allocation of scarce PL 480 resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control as well as food production. In these sensitive relations, however, it is important in style as well as substance to avoid the appearance of coercion.

So, food was to be used as just another method of imperial colonization to force countries to conform their policies to those desired by the controllers. Notably, this tactic only works as a blunt weapon on territories enduring a severe economic collapse and with little resources for food production. Today, however, it appears that the entire globe is receiving an arsenal of food bombs as there appears to be a multifaceted attack on people's access to food. In other words, what has been an admitted tactic for nearly 40 years of controlling food aid for regional population reduction has now grown more complex and expansive. More...

US Needs To Generate 246,600 Jobs A Month To Get To Pre-Depression Employment By End Of Obama Second Term

The first time we did an analysis of how many jobs per month the US has to generate each month to get back to the same payroll number as of November 2007, right before the start of the Greater Depression, and when accounting for the 90K/month natural growth to the labor force, something the administration continues to blissfully ignore (with the labor participation rate plunging to a 26 year low) it was in the mid 220s. As of today, the number is almost quarter of a million, or 246,600. That is how many jobs the US has to generate every single month until November 2016, or the end of Obama's improbable second turn, for the unemployment rate to get back to where it was when accounting for population growth. Read More...