Millions Of Unemployed Americans Now Live As Paupers Even as Foreigners buy up US Infrastructure

The Economic Collapse ^ | 10/26/2010 | Michael Snyder

[SeekAndFind]

Most Americans still do not understand just how bad the economic horror we are facing really is. Today, millions of Americans are living as paupers in the land that their foreathers built even as America's infrastructure is literally being sold out from under their feet by corrupt politicians. The "official" unemployment rate in the United States has been at nine and a half percent or above for 14 consecutive months, and today it takes the average unemployed American about 35 weeks to find a job. However, the "official" unemployment rate is misleading, because it does not include workers that have quit looking for work or that have had their hours cut back to part-time. According to 60 Minutes, when you add those "discouraged workers" and "underemployed workers" into the equation the actual rate is about 17 percent, and in the state of California the actual rate is about 22 percent. Meanwhile, foreign nations are using sovereign wealth funds to buy up staggering amounts of U.S. infrastructure. America is quite literally for sale in 2010. All across the United States, highways, ports, toll roads and even parking meters are being gobbled up by foreign powers. We have shipped massive amounts of wealth and jobs to other nations, and now those very same countries are turning around and buying huge amounts of U.S. infrastructure with the gigantic piles of dollars that they have accumulated.

Widespread long-term chronic unemployment was something that America was never supposed to see again. Our leaders promised us that the U.S. financial system was so strong that we would never have another "Great Depression" in our lifetimes. But then the financial crisis of 2008 happened. Unprecedented numbers of Americans started losing their jobs and the U.S. Congress did something that it had never done before. Congress decided to extend unemployment benefits all the way out to 99 weeks.

Doing that has cost U.S. taxpayers approximately $100 billion dollars to this point, but we were promised that it was a "temporary" fix and that it would give displaced U.S. workers a chance to find new jobs.

Surely any industrious American worker could get another job within 99 weeks, right?

Wrong.

Today, there are at least 1.5 milion "99ers" - those Americans that have completely exhausted all 99 weeks of unemployment benefits and that still do not have jobs.

Sadly, as bad as that number sounds, it is likely to keep growing. Today, over one-third of all unemployed Americans have already been unemployed for at least one year. If this trend continues, we are going to end up with millions of "99ers".

60 Minutes recently did a report on some of these "99ers". Many of them are very highly educated and very highly qualified. If you have not seen this 60 Minutes report yet, you have got to take few minutes to sit down and watch it. This video is so shocking that many of you will have your jaws on the floor by the time you finish watching it....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CwpdGyIY2fQ

So is there much reason for these "99ers" to be optimistic?

No, not really.

In fact, there are some indications that unemployment in America is actually getting worse. Gallup's measure of unemployment, which is not adjusted for "seasonal factors", exhibited a sharp increase in the month of September. According to Gallup, unemployment has increased from 8.9% in July to 9.3% in August and to 10.1% in September.

In addition, the seasonally-adjusted "Alternate Unemployment Rate" compiled by Shadow Government Statistics also indicates that unemployment in the U.S. is going up once again. The Alternate Unemployment Rate calculated by SGS reflects estimated "long-term discouraged workers", which the U.S. government stopped keeping track of back in 1994....

But it is not just the massive number of Americans that are completely unemployed that we need to be concerned about. The truth is that more Americans than at any other time in recent history are working part-time jobs because that is all they can find. The number of Americans working part-time jobs "for economic reasons" is now the highest it has been in at least five decades.

Meanwhile, sovereign wealth funds from nations such as Saudi Arabia, China, Kuwait, Libya, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates are buying up highways, ports, toll roads and even parking meters from coast to coast.

So exactly what is a sovereign wealth fund?

Well, just think of it as a huge mountain of state-owned money that roams about the countryside looking for assets to gobble up.

In a recent piece for Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi described some of the U.S. infrastructure assets that these sovereign wealth funds are buying up....

A toll highway in Indiana. The Chicago Skyway. A stretch of highway in Florida. Parking meters in Nashville, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and other cities. A port in Virginia. And a whole bevy of Californian public infrastructure projects, all either already leased or set to be leased for fifty or seventy-five years or more in exchange for one-off lump sum payments of a few billion bucks at best, usually just to help patch a hole or two in a single budget year.

It turns out that U.S. politicians have figured out that they can help solve their budget problems by selling off or leasing out pieces of infrastructure. Foreign nations with money to burn have been glad to come in and start buying a lot of this infrastructure up. Today, it is estimated that the rest of the world currently owns several trillion dollars more of America than America owns of the rest of the world. Later on in his article, Taibbi noted that the trend toward selling off pieces of infrastructure only seems to be accelerating....

At this writing Nashville and Pittsburgh are speeding ahead with their own parking meter deals, as is L.A. New York has considered it, and the city of Miami just announced its own plans for a leasing deal. There are now highways, airports, parking garages, toll roads — almost everything you can think of that isn't nailed down and some things that are — for sale, to bidders unknown, around the world.

Sadly, both the number and the value of major acquisitions made by sovereign wealth funds approximately doubled during the first half of 2010.

Instead of being the "land of the free", we are rapidly becoming the "land that has been leased out to foreign nations".

So where in the world did these sovereign wealth funds get all this money?

Well, they got it from us of course.

Every single month, the United States buys massive amounts of oil from the Middle East and massive amounts of cheap plastic crap from China. The rest of the world buys a bunch of stuff from us too, but not nearly as much as we buy from the rest of the world.

So every single month tens of billions of dollars that used to belong to the American people ends up in the hands of foreigners. Now some of that money is returning to this country and is being used to buy up our infrastructure.

Many of these highways and toll roads that are being sold off had already been completely paid for. Can you imagine the frustration of the taxpayers in many of these areas when they realize that a road that they have already completely paid for with their tax dollars has been sold out from underneath them?

Another place that all these U.S. dollars held by foreigners is going is into U.S. Treasuries. In fact, the federal government very much encourages this. After all, we have to finance our exploding debt somehow.

In essence, first we made some folks in the Middle East and in Asia incredibly wealthy, and now we are asking them to please lend that money back to us so that we can continue living far beyond our means.

Today, the national debt of the United States is rapidly approaching 14 trillion dollars. An increasing percentage of this debt is owned by foreigners.

The borrower is the servant of the lender, and we are rapidly becoming enslaved to the rest of the world.

This is national economic suicide, but our politicians have become so addicted to debt that there doesn't seem to be much hope that things can be turned around any time soon.

[ken21]

granted the liberal-progressives have controlled the media

for a century, decreased financial awareness,

and attacked capitalism in our schools,

but the republican party has done nothing to educate

the public about our economy.

[True Grit]

Winter is approaching. It will be difficult for a lot of folks to find money to heat their homes.

[FroggyTheGremlim]

What I fail to understand is:

Don’t Democrats have children and grandchildren too? Don’t they see what is happening to our society?

Don’t they care?

[ScottinVA]

Don’t Democrats have children and grandchildren too? Don’t they see what is happening to our society? Don’t they care?

No, they don't care. Liberals see America as an evil entity that needs to be brought to its knees, even at the expense of their children's and grandchildren's futures.

[lula]

Oh they do, but they are well taken care of. They have created a nest egg for themselves out of the Peoples treasure chest. Damn Elitists!

[WestwardHo]

January these major tax increases are going to kick in so we can send more money to foreign countries so they can buy more of our infrastructure because parking meters aren’t bringing in the tax revenue they use to collect because that pocket change is going to foreign countries so they can buy more of our infrastructure....Makes sense to me.

[LomanBill]

>>Don’t they care?

This has been their wet dream since circa 1969.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0343168/

[beaversmom]

I don't get it either. We know a lib couple with a teenage son. The only thing I can think of is that they have been so brainwashed that the truth, even when it's staring them in the face, doesn't faze them. It's also hard for some to admit they were completely wrong. Now the Dem politicians I believe are truly evil. They know what they are doing. They know the truth, but they will stop at nothing to gain power and achieve their goals.

"Exposure to true information does not matter any more. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures. Even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him concentration camps, he will refuse to believe it until he is going to receive a kick in his fat bottom."--Yuri Bezmenov 1984, regarding communist propaganda in the United States and how to brainwash a nation

[bgill]

today it takes the average unemployed American about 35 weeks to find a job

I don't believe that for a second. Either they are taking that long because they'd just as soon veg out on the sofa and collect unemployment or they think they're too good to accept a lower paying job. Whatever happened to taking any job to feed your family rather than sitting home whining you're too good for anything under $40 an hour?

[LomanBill]

"They came to this conclusion which is the conclusion that was come to by all the great killers, whether Hitler or Stalin or Mao, that they have a grand project for the transformation and purification of the world. And in the face of that project, ordinary life is dispensable. They joined that tradition...."

Read more: http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2008/05/weather-underground-and-1968.html#ixzz13TbUtO9w

[Boardwalk]

The Liberals think of the democrats as the good guys...they want to help everyone so its we we we, instead of those evil republicans who just want to spare the rich and are all about me me me. Liberalism is a mental illness.

[FroggyTheGremlim]

“They joined that tradition...”

Every one of them? Surely some of them, especially “journalists” would stop and ask “What are we doing? Where are we going with this?

[grey_whiskers]

What was supposed to have been Democrats' children are mostly dismembered pieces of flesh washed down the sewer or in the dumpster in the vicinity of abortion clinics.

[LomanBill]

>>Surely some of them, especially “journalists” would stop and ask...

 

"What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.
 
It's a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and is divided into four basic stages.
 
The first stage being "demoralization"....

 

[snip]

 

The answer is very simple.  Long before communists occupy the city, there was extensive network of informers; local Vietnamese citizens who knew absolutely everything about people who are instrumental in public opinion - including Barbers and Taxi Drivers.  Everyone who was sympathetic to United States was executed.  Same thing was done under the guidance of the Soviet Embassy in Hanoi, and same thing I was doing in New Delhi. To my horror, I discovered that in the files were people who were doomed to execution.  There were names of pro-Soviet Journalists, with whom I was personally friendly...."

 

--KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov

Soviet Subversion of the Free Press (Ideological subversion, Destabilization, CRISIS - and the KGB)

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2095202/posts

[TruthConquers]

Did you forget your sarcasm tag,..

or are you still thinking that the fraud of the banks, the fraud at the FED, the devaluation of our dollar, the fraud at the voting booth, can not have diastrous results?

[wally_bert]

Only about themselves.

[darth]

I have been swimming against this tide for years now.

After I retired from my aerospace engineering career, I bought a small manufacturing company.

We beat the Chicoms and other cheap producers in QUALITY, FAST TURNAROUND, AND CUSTOMER SERVICE. My employees get top dollar and they take pride in producing the best parts.

We produce very high quality parts used in aircraft, missiles, electronics, and petrochemical applications.

After all, would you risk your life flying on an airplane with fasteners produced in China? Boeing does not!

It’s not easy. Every morning I study tech references so that I can become the most knowledgeable in my industry. I train my employees. We strive for higher and higher quality levels.

The ecomomy is a summation of all of us, our skills, motivation, and productivity.

It would be nice if our government stopped trying to put us out of business.