Jobless claims drop as 2 states upgrade computers

BLOOMBERG NEWS

   http://www.telegram.com/article/20130912/NEWS/309129874

My comment:

As reported in the T&G on Saturday, Massachusetts spent $46 million on a new Unemployment Claims computer system, which is just horrible. People are being denied money they are owed, or delayed for months. There's no one to talk to but some ignorant person in a phone bank, even if it should be clear to anyone who knows the unemployment laws that the computer has it wrong. 

Yesterday I talked with a man who hasn't seen a check in six weeks, can't get a straight answer, and is getting evicted today! 

Plus now the computer is spitting our blizzards of bills for overpayment in the past and garnishing people's benefit checks, often absurdly, and again there is no one to talk to! 

Now we're starting to see people who've given up in frustration and walked away from money they are apparently rightly owed and urgently need! 

I hate to jump to conclusions. I still talk about this as a problem of an incompetent, badly conceived and badly implemented new system. But if this is happening nationwide - and this article suggests it is - then maybe that's the design of the system: to drive people crazy and get them to give up and walk away! 

That would not only save the US and state governments (and employers) money, it would be one more way the Feds can make themselves look good by hiding the true extent of the unemployment problem! 

The Worcester Unemployment Action Group will be having a followup meeting tomorrow with representatives of Workforce Central, the city's Workforce Investment Board and a representative from Boston of the Division of Unemployment Assistance. We will be impressing on them the urgent need for putting DUA specialists back on the job at the Career Centers, and giving them the power to override the computer and fix a problem if the computer can't be made to fix it in a reasonable amount of time. 

This has gone on too long! We don't want to hear any more excuses! We want to know what they're going to do! 

The Truth Emergency and the Emperor's New Clothes moment.

Re: the latest AP story on the Bureau of Labor Statistics report, April 11 2014:

So unemployment claims "plummet", "reversing sharp gains the previous two weeks," but the "four week average, a less volatile measure, rose 3000," and "employers added only 80,000 jobs".

Somewhere in there is something that "could signal that more solid hiring could return in April."

"The unemployment rate fell to a four-year low of 7.6 percent last month, ... However, the rate fell only because more people stopped looking for work and were no longer counted as unemployed."  (At last a whiff of truth leaking in!)

It's like looking for signals in tea leaves or chicken entrails.

So now they regularly admit that there's a large pool of unemployed that their statistics leave out, why do they go on using them?

These official statistics are so deeply flawed they can't be used for serious economic modeling, which is why many corporations and economists turn to "shadowstats.com" instead. They can't be used for serious policy discussions.  How do we talk about the unemployment emergency when the statistics we use don't show it?

Yet these so-called "unemployment rate" statistics are built into the laws.  Because they're falling,  because job seekers are giving up, as of Sept. 1 Massachusetts unemployed will lose another "tier", another 10 weeks of Federal benefits!

These unemployment statistics are part of a larger "Truth Emergency". People with some control, some influence, money or security are living in one conversation about the world, one reality, while the rest of us, the 90% say, live in a different reality.  Out here no one much believes what we read in the newspapers or see on TV anymore, because it doesn't match the reality of our lives.

What's left is the illusion of "all those other stupid people out there" happily sitting on their couches playing video games who believe what they see and don't care.

With our unmet needs getting more and more urgent, we are rapidly approaching an "Emperor's New Clothes" moment when we shed that illusion.