Indeed, surveys of industrial activity have been remarkably firm, but maybe it’s because these company executives are merely reporting what they’ve seen in their share price. What is happening on the expenditure side is a different story. - david-rosenberg

Sure, Washington rejoiced on Friday, announcing that the official unemployment rate ticked down to 8.8 percent. But that narrowly focused number overlooks three shocking realities:

If you include discouraged workers who have given up looking and part-time workers who want a full-time job, the Labor Department’s “all-inclusive” unemployment rate in the U.S. (dubbed “U6″) is 15.7 percent.

But that 15.7 percent figure still excludes folks who have given up looking for more than a year. Economist John Williams of www.shadowstats.com estimates that if you include them as well (as the government used to years ago), the true all-inclusive jobless rate in America is 22 percent!

In March, only 64.2 percent of the adult population was participating in the labor force. That’s an all-important measure of the dire state of affairs. And it’s now stuck at lowest rate in over a quarter century (see chart).



But you go on calling me a politically motivated liar. Just keep looking at that chart and the mirror alternately.

According to one poll in 1969, more than one million students considered themselves revolutionaries and socialists of some kind. The debates of the Old Left--reform versus revolution, the working class and the need for a revolutionary party--now took on new significance. In the fall of 1968, more that 350,000 said that they strongly agreed with the statement that some form of "mass revolutionary party" was needed in America.27 SDS reached a peak of 100,000 members; and then it collapsed almost as quickly as it had risen. At its national convention in 1969, SDS split into two rival factions, one dominated by the Maoist-turned-Stalinist Progressive Labor Party (PL) and the other called the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), which promptly split into two rival factions itself.

Some form of split was probably inevitable. SDS had existed for most of 1968 in an uneasy balance--something between a mass student radical organization and one that increasingly identified itself as revolutionary Marxist. Those two models, a broad, radical student group and a tighter, more ideologically homogenous Marxist organization were at odds with one another. But to explain why so little of lasting significance came out of the break-up of SDS, it is necessary to look to the politics of the various factions and try to understand why they were unable to provide a way out of the impasse in which SDS found itself in 1969.

Shortly after the November 2008 election, Mark Rudd wrote a column in The Rag Blog, to re-assure leftists alarmed at some of Obama's appointments.

:If you're anything like me, your inbox fills up daily with the cries and complaints of lefties. Just the mere mention of the names Hillary Clinton and Lawrence Summers alone conjure up a litany of horrendous right-wingers appointed to top level positions.

:Betrayal is the name of the game.

:But wait a second. Let's talk about a few things:

:Obama is a very strategic thinker. He knew precisely what it would take to get elected and didn't blow it...But he also knew that what he said had to basically play to the center to not be run over by the press, the Republicans, scare centrist and cross-over voters away. He made it.

:Obama plays basketball. I'm not much of an athlete, barely know the game, but one thing I do know is that you have to be able to look like you're doing one thing but do another. That's why all these conservative appointments are important: the strategy is feint to the right, move left. Any other strategy invites sure defeat. It would be stupid to do otherwise in this environment.

:Look to the second level appointments. There's a whole govt. in waiting that Podesta has at the Center for American Progress. They're mostly progressives, I'm told (except in military and foreign policy). Cheney was extremely effective at controlling policy by putting his people in at second-level positions....

“Confidence among U.S. homebuilders slumped in June to the lowest level in nine months as executives turned more pessimistic on the outlook for sales, a sign that any pickup will take time to develop. The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo sentiment index unexpectedly fell to 13 from 16 in May, the biggest drop in a year, data from the Washington-based group showed today.”