The Back Alley Archives

How long will you sit while both Democrat and Republican lie to you about how the "bailouts" and "handouts" will help the economy. Has all this grift helped? Did the "stimulus" keep unemployment from going higher as was promised? Did you really get help with your mortgage or were you offered a scam "forbearance" that amounts to the back-end loading of your balance, turning it into a balloon note or worse? Have you enjoyed watching JP Morgan and other big banks that got tens of billions of taxpayer dollars lease tankers and then bid up the price of oil - causing it to double - with your tax money? How about The Fed and Treasury funneling tens of billions in taxpayer money through AIG to a literal "who's who" of big banks so they could in turn pay billions in bonuses?

All of this obviously meets with your approval as demonstrated by your actions: You still sit back and pop a beer, you go about your daily routine, you refuse to rise from your chair and demand: STOP THE LOOTING AND START PROSECUTING, finally willing to back that up with your sacred honor - or more.
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Will we submit to the jackbooted foot of the scammers and frauds on our collective necks, both in business and in DC, until our children starve and our grandmothers, mothers and fathers are shoveled in the hole, dead and cold?

Does America still truly have the capacity, as a people, as a nation, to get angry? To demand redress of grievance? To call, support, and honor a general strike? To take up, keep and bear arms not to commit violence but to stand shoulder-to-shoulder as our Constitution recognizes as our God-given right to prevent violence against not only ourselves but our neighbors - any and all of them? To peacefully occupy The Capitol and shut it down - not to loot, pillage or destroy, but to force the cessation of all commerce in an unmistakable and singular statement: This far you have gone, and you shall take not one step further until each and every guilty man and woman is under indictment, the institutions and businesses responsible are closed, and the ill-gotten gains returned.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The real US unemployment rate is 16 percent if persons who have dropped out of the labor pool and those working less than they would like are counted, a Federal Reserve official said Wednesday.

"If one considers the people who would like a job but have stopped looking -- so-called discouraged workers -- and those who are working fewer hours than they want, the unemployment rate would move from the official 9.4 percent to 16 percent, said Atlanta Fed chief Dennis Lockhart.

He underscored that he was expressing his own views, which did "do not necessarily reflect those of my colleagues on the Federal Open Market Committee," the policy-setting body of the central bank.

Lockhart pointed out in a speech to a chamber of commerce in Chattanooga, Tennessee that those two categories of people are not taken into account in the Labor Department's monthly report on the unemployment rate. The official July jobless rate was 9.4 percent.

Lockhart, who heads the Atlanta, Georgia, division of the Fed, is the first central bank official to acknowledge the depth of unemployment amid the worst US recession since the Great Depression.