In the current campaign, Hillary Clinton brags that Bill Clinton’s administration produced prosperity as an answer to the correct claim that Clinton helped spur on jailing – the 2.3 million currently incarcerated (Michelle Alexander) – and hurt the most vulnerable by cutting off welfare (the states did it even more than the Federal Government which “left it up to them”). The latter points are made by Bernie Sanders. Black unemployment is triple white and Clinton’s policies were a decisive move in this direction.
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Just how bad the falsifying of statistics by mass imprisonment currently is can be seen from a post at Black Lives Matter 5280 on a fine blog article from the Washington Post Wonkblog (not yet in the main paper…but that this article appears in the Post at all shows the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the sharp response in the Democratic campaign, particularly the usually suppressed – by the elite media – role of Sanders). I have a series of posts earlier this year on the despair of white people whose parents had an industrial jobs and they have not. This is shown by high meth addiction rates, suicides and early deaths. For as Angus Deaton and his wife have shown, death rates among white males 49-54 are rising – alone among all populations in the advanced industrial countries (in Europe, they are still in a depression and yet, in a larger welfare state, no comparable changes), and even compared to blacks and chicanos (higher death rates, death at an earlier age, but the overall death rate going down between ages 49-54). See here and here.
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As I have long emphasized, the “official” unemployment rate in which 5% unemployment is treated as “full” employment by the Bureau of Labor Statistics – these are some 10 million people these official exclude from counting as human beings…But the official rate also excludes those who do not report themselves to an agency as looking for work – i.e. all those who have been discouraged through long job searches or just don’t have the time or transportation to get to the agency – and those who are working part-time but would gladly take a full time job. So real unemployment is roughly double official unemployment.
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But Guo’s figures provide an entirely new way of looking – seeing the racism of the prison system (note: this also affects the chicano, native American and white unemployment and wage rates…) –
which makes clear that real unemployment is dramatically higher – “full” employment as “5%” jobless is really about 15% unemployment…
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America has locked
up
so
many black
people
it has
By Jeff Guo February 26