September 23, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of young adults (16-29 years of age) who’re unemployed is 44.7%, the highest since the end of World War 2.
Also, the number of households living in poverty, where the parents are younger than 25, hit 37%!
September 22, Toys R Us announced they will not hire as many holiday employees as in the past.
“It looks to me like they are preparing for lowered spending and will be very cautious about hiring people until they really know they need them.”-John Challenger, analyst
Last end of year holiday season, Toys R Us hired about 45,000 temporary employees. This year Toys R Us will be hard pressed to hire 40,000.
21 September 2011, Typhoon Roke is moving up the Pacific coastline of Japan, after coming ashore south of Tokyo at Hamamatsu City, Shizuoka Prefecture.
Sustanted winds are 144 km (89.4 miles) per hour, with gusts up to 155 km (96 miles) per hour recorded at Hachioji City, near Tokyo.
During the past 24 hours, more than 400 millimeters (15.74 inches) of rain has fallen in Tokai region and Yamanashi Prefecture, and more than 200 mm (7.87 inches) of rain fell in northeastern Japan.
At least four people have died, three are missing. More evacuation orders have been given to at least a half million more people.
The damaged nuclear plant, Fukushima Daiichi, has escaped typhoon damage from previous storms, but Roke looks like it will make a direct hit.
Roke is moving fast and should be approaching the northeastern Honshu prefecture of Fukushima. Already 200 mm of rain has fallen in Fukushima since September 20. The nuclear plant is already flooding with rain water.
Work to stop the further spread of radiation, like the steel wall around the ocean intakes, and specially treated tarps over the exploded reactor buildings, has been halted. Tokyo Electric says their workers have tied down everything they could think of that might get blown away.
TEPCo says reactor 1 and 2 have rain water pouring in from the roofs, and Reactor 6 basement is totally flooded. TEPCo officials insist that none of the radioactive water will leak out. Yeah right, how many times now have they made such promises?
Nine months later, and the radiation just keeps pouring from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Now its Mother Earth who’s to blame.
Tokyo Electric Power Company admitted that the heavy rains from typhoons and tropical storms are flooding reactor buildings, greatly increasing the chance of massive flooding of highly contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean.
The nuclear plant is already flooding the ocean with radiation, but this would be on a massive scale.
Here’s why it’s so bad: TEPCo is already pumping 550 tons of water per day to cool three of its damaged reactors. About 80,000 tons of highly radioactive water has already accumulated in the buildings. Now add the flooding from the storms. TEPCo says it has found 200 to 500 tons of rainwater entering every day into the basements of reactor buildings.
“There’s a major divide between the rich and the poor in this country. One in 10 people are unemployed and my vote is nullified by corporate lobbyists.”-Alexander Holmes, from Oakland, California
People from main street U.S.A. are protesting on corporate America’s Wall Street. They started on September 17, and they’re still going!
New York Times reported at least six arrests by September 19. Two men and a woman were arrested for wearing ski masks. It is illegal in New York city for two or more people to wear masks in public, I wounder what’s gonna happen at Halloween?
Another man was arrested after he told police that he was having trouble walking. Another woman was arrested after she wrote something on the sidewalk with chalk.
The New York Times confirmed that people are coming from all over the U.S. such as Massachusetts, Michigan, Virginia, New Jersey and Washington State.
Protesters say they’ve been inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings, and they hope to continue protesting just as long as their Arab peers have.
“Wall Street is energized about its profits, and it makes its profits by arbitraging labor. So if you lay off an American worker who makes $20.00 an hour, and you hire a Chinese or Indian worker who earns $1.00 and hour, you can put $19.00 an hour in your profit pocket! And that is what has been going on for 15 years.” -Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of U.S. Treasury
Roberts says there is nothing that the President, or Congress can do to stop the fall of the United States, unless they can stop U.S. corporations from moving jobs overseas: “Interest rates are near zero. There are no home buyers because between 1/4th and 1/5th of the work force is unemployed! And millions of Americans have been dispossessed of their homes…And the Middle Class jobs, millions of Middle Class jobs have been moved, by the corporations, abroad.”
Roberts says Corporate America is actually screwing over the U.S. government in the long run: “As the jobs move off, what moves with it is the tax base, the consumer income that formerly supported the American consumer demand, and the Gross Domestic Product of the economy.”
Roberts sees no hope for the U.S. main street economy as long as Wall Street gets its way: “So as long as Wall Street and the corporations profit by moving American jobs to countries where labor costs are substantially lower, there can be no recovery of the American economy!”
Paul Craig Roberts is the second former U.S. Treasury official to come out and make such statements. Recently, former U.S. Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers, said the United States is “collapsing”.
September 19, gas prices in Idaho are about 70 cents above the national average. One local TV station tried to give the usual explanation by saying it’s a mix of regional demand and state taxes. FAIL!
I just checked on demand, and according to the latest numbers from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, demand for gasoline across the country is still below last year’s numbers. On August 26, 2011, the four week average demand for gasoline was at 9.169 million barrels per day. Compare that to the four week average of a year ago at 9.261 million barrels. So there is a slight decrease in demand.
Regarding fuel taxes; there has been no increase in Idaho fuel taxes since 1996!
What is happening is that production of fuels has been dropping. In other words, production is falling faster than demand, and that has the same effect as demand going up; prices go up (when there is less of something, in relation to demand, it becomes more valuable).
According to U.S. Energy Information Administration, PADD 4 gasoline production is down from last year. PADD 4 includes Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Utah and Wyoming. The four week average for “finished gas” production, for August 2011 was 0.273 million barrels per day. Compared to last year’s production of 0.296.
In other words, fuel producers are deliberately keeping production just under ‘demand’ in order to keep prices high.
September 19, a change of contractors with the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) resulted in a surprise announcement; 204 employees will be let go at the end of the month.
On September 30, the existing contract with AMWTP (Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project) ends. A new contract with Idaho Treatment Group begins on October 1. The new contractor says they can do the same job with 204 less employees.
The contract involves preparing transuranic nuclear weapons waste stored at the INL, for shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico.
“There are parts of Texas that are doing well. And there is a tremendous number of Texans, more than Perry has ever wanted to acknowledge, that are doing very, very poorly.”-Miguel Ferguson, University of Texas
Texas Governor Rick Perry likes to claim having created jobs for Texans, but he’s also to blame for increasing the poverty rate!
In the past two years Texas has created 40% of new U.S. jobs, but also has the fastest growing poverty rate in the whole country. That means most of those new jobs are not paying enough to cover the basic cost of living. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics about 550,000 workers last year were paid at, or even below, the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour!
According to the U.S. Census Bureau the national average poverty rate is 15.1%, and as of 2010 the poverty rate in Texas is 18.4%.
The main reason for the poverty; Perry’s so called job creation isn’t happening fast enough: “The middle class are losing their jobs and are not able to replace them fast enough. That’s driving them straight into poverty.”-Bradley Manning, Texas Neighborhood Services
To make matters worse, Texas has one of the worst social service programs in the country: “We don’t have the support system in place to provide economic support or economic opportunity to help families lift themselves out of poverty.” said Frances Deviney, Center for Public Policy Priorities
September 19, later this week the Group of 20 developed and developing economies will meet in Washington DC. The main issue, as always, the collapsing global economy.
Actually the main stream western media wants you to think the “global” economy is collapsing, in reality it’s just the ‘western/capitalist’ economies that are going down the toilet.
Demands from the European Union, United States and Japan are revealing how bad the situation is: “The consolidation plans to be undertaken in most EU countries, in the U.S. and in Japan need to be accompanied by appropriate policies in other regions of the world so as to avoid an undesired compression of global demand.”-European Union statement
What this means is that the economies that are going down the toilet need more help from the economies that are actually booming (the “other regions”). Basically the EU, U.S. and Japan have become beggar they neighbor nations; needing to borrow from the wealthier BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), just to survive.
In order to get the much needed cash, expect the EU, U.S. and Japan to make some huge concessions at this weeks G20 meeting. One thing China and Russia would like to see is a new currency to replace the U.S. dollar as the World’s reserve money. It’s unlikely the U.S. would support that, ’cause it could make the economic situation in the U.S. even worse.
However, the latest European Union statement indicates that if the EU, U.S. and Japan don’t get financial help from the BRICS, then it could be lights out for the ‘West’.