Just because SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) & PIPA (Protect IP Act) have been derailed (for the moment) in the US doesn’t mean the fight is over. The giant media corps that are behind that endeavor are global in scope, and are pushing their same agenda in the European Union, under legislation known as ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement).

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which has already been signed by several countries, poses a dangerous threat to the inherent freedom and openess of the Internet. Under ACTA, ISP’s and websites will be given more power to track what we do online, while forcing them to turn over our information and reporting our activity to the authorities — all in the name of copyright protection! Excessive copyright protection is a great tool for information suppression. Once technology and blocking techniques are in place, virtually all information is liable to filtering and suppression due to “copyright violation.” ACTA’s ill-conceived provisions will have chilling effects on free speech everywhere.

Read more on this, and then Sign The Petition calling for ACTA’s removal.

This is a good overview on this legislation from The Atlantic, “SOPA Stopped for Now, Anti-Censorship Activists Turn to ACTA”

Now that the armchair activists are doing victory laps, celebrating the (temporary) death of anti-piracy laws SOPA and PIPA in Congress, the years-long protest against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is getting nasty. Led by Poland, who currently holds the European Union Presidency, several European nations became the latest to sign the secretive treaty in a ceremony that took place in Tokyo, Japan, on Thursday. The United States signed it last year.

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What the heck is ACTA anyways? And why is it so horrible?

Well, there are plenty of websites set up to explain the bill, not to mention plenty of explainers. The best we’ve read comes from the folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in San Francisco who’ve been waving a banner of protest against the agreement since it first appeared nearly six years ago. Their explainer is worth reading in full, but the section on why you should care about ACTA is worth quoting. It’s less about the measures proposed in ACTA, than it is about the secretive way the agreement was developed. Noting how “ACTA has several features that raise significant potential concerns for consumers, privacy and civil liberties for innovation and the free flow of information on the Internet” the EFF argues that “both civil society and developing countries are intentionally being excluded from these negotiations.” So if you’re still surprised that you’ve never heard of ACTA — even in the anti-SOPA pile-on protest that blacked out some of the world’s biggest websites last week — this is likely why.

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So if the most troubling element of ACTA is that it was largely developed behind closed doors, those doors are starting to swing open. Or rather the Internet is charging through them, and we’re sure that white-haired world leaders will have a hard time blocking them. Democracy is no longer something that happens at a ballot box, once a year. It’s a kinetic being, capable of mobilizing hundreds of thousands of citizens behind a cause and forcing decision-makers to rethink things. That’s one of those great things about the open Internet.

Read more Here

RT weighs in on this issue with its report: “ACTA, Secret Censor Tool Worse Than SOPA and PIPA”

As cyberspace turns its attention to the SOPA and PIPA bills in the US, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, has been quietly signed or ratified by most of the developed world and is arguably the biggest threat to Internet freedom yet.

Read and Watch the complete report Here

And in case you’re not sure what the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) bills involve, and why they are such a threat to existing
internet freedoms, Watch This.

An open letter signed by many organizations, including Consumers International, EDRi (27 European civil rights and privacy NGOs), the Free Software Foundation (FSF), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), ASIC (French trade association for web 2.0 companies), and the Free Knowledge Institute (FKI), states that “the current draft of ACTA would profoundly restrict the fundamental rights and freedoms of European citizens, most notably the freedom of expression and communication privacy.

Source: http://video.nixxon.net/~riesling/acta/?

It is about the new technology of “mass surveillance,” referred to as “strategic interception,” where corporations are helping to enable governments to record and store all phone transmissions, all internet communication from the entire population of a country. This is the militarization of cyberspace, which has been considered a form of civilian space, where a whole range of details of our lives flows to and fro through, and which are documented and stored upon.

This is staggering in its implications, and happening at a rate and to a degree which populations are not prepared for. It certainly challenges the fundamental basis of any notion of rights which are elaborated in the American Constitution, or any international covenants on human rights.

“Every civilian is now a target of military intelligence activity. Everyone.

“There is little left of democratic life that is not surveilled. But it is not being surveilled equally. It is not the public that is surveilling big corporations, secretive government agencies, and the rest of the public. Rather, there is a disproportionate flow of information from us, from the public, into organizations that are already very powerful. And that permits the elite - the surveillance elite, the national security state elite of any country - to lift off from its people. To disconnect from its people. To predict its people. That’s a dangerous situation.

“And what we’re dealing here is not merely the surveillance elite of one country operating alone, but rather an international surveillance elite; transnational companies selling these products all over the world, and then intelligence agencies swapping data that they collect with each other. That’s a worrying situation for western democracies.”

“That’s a worrying situation for western democracies.”

Understatement of the year.

And to think, the power establishment is working overtime to convince you that its this guy talking about this who is the threat to “freedom” and your rights to privacy and liberty..

Highly recommended, even essential viewing.

And while you’re at it, this is worth taking in, as well. Julian Assange Julian Assange speaking to The Cambridge Union Society, about freedom of information, freedom of discourse, the rise of the the modern technological national security state, and more.

[The internet is] a technology which can be used to set up a totalitarian spying regime, the likes of which we have never seen. Or, on the other hand, if taken by us, and taken by activists, and taken by all those who wish a different trajectory for a technological world, it can be something that we all hope for.

That battle between people wo want to use the internet as a tool of liberation, and those tremendous organizations that want to use the internet as a tool of control - mass control - is not over. It is only just beginning.

Watch The Video

Some of the most important points Copps makes in this discussion are in regards to the absolute essential need for having universal access to broadband internet technologies, and finding a way that these aren’t available only to some citizens, or to those who can ‘afford it.’ It is just as essential as rural electrification was to the country a century ago, in making the nation viable to compete and participate in the 21st Century world. His observations on the vital importance of real journalism in our society, and finding ways to make it work outside of the dying corporate business model for it, is also notable here. Copps was also an advocate and supporter of access television, and an ally in the work of the Alliance For Community Media.

Now the staunch supporter of an open internet and opponent of media consolidation has retired. In a wide-ranging discussion, he examines the FCC’s key accomplishments and failures of the past decade. Copps argues broadband is “the most opportunity-creating technology perhaps in the history of humankind,” and laments that the United States still lacks a national broadband infrastructure. Regarding the future of journalism, Copps calls on the FCC to make access to quality journalism a “national priority,” saying, “the future of our democracy hinges upon having an informed electorate.”

Copps: “[The internet] is the most opportunity-creating technology perhaps in the history of humankind. It is going to be something that helps us address every problem that is before the country. Every citizen has not only a right to this technology, but an urgent need to be able to obtain it. So, for eight years before the present administration, we were operating under the assumption that the market would get broadband out everywhere, even to those places where there was no reason for the market to go. This is the great infrastructure-building challenge of the early part of the 21st century. Just as throughout history we’ve had infrastructure challenges with roads and bridges and canals and railroads and highways and electricity and plain old telephone service, our challenge now is how to figure out how to get broadband to every American, no matter who they are, where they live, or the particular circumstances of the individual lives.”

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“We have to have a discussion in the United States of America if we’re going to move the town square of democracy to the internet and pave it with broadband bricks. How are we going to assure that it’s accessible to all, open to all, and not only can you type something and send it into the ether, but that you’re going to be heard, that you have some access to the conversation? That’s public interest. And there is public interest consideration on what the future of the internet is going to look like. There is a role, and we need to have a calm, cool, rational discussion about this very, very soon, or we’re going to lose the opportunity, really, to craft a media future that’s worthy of the country.

“And this goes back in history. The builders of this country have always been interested in creating information infrastructure. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison were presiding over this new experiment in democracy. And they knew that it hinged, this experiment, on an informed electorate. So they made sure, the writers of the First Amendment, they made sure that we had newspapers getting out to every American. They built post roads. The subsidized newspaper rates so that the news could get out. And that’s the kind of challenge we have to look at now. Our challenge in this century is the very same thing. The technologies change. Names change. The democratic - the small “d” democratic - challenge remains the same: make sure that electorate is informed, if you wish to sustain self-government.”

Watch The Video/Read The Transcript

Of particular importance and relevance is the history of the rise and dominance of state/corporate propaganda from World War I. This apparatus was originally employed against the Germans, but was then quickly turned against the labor movement. This is particularly relevant and telling history, which he begins to get into the meat of around the 12-minute mark in the video.

Hedges is one of the few people to openly and persistently discuss what I personally feel to be some of the most important and least talked about history in America; that of the ubiquitous but sublimated role of propaganda. Here, Hedges goes into some detail about the creation of the Committee on Public Information (The Creel Commission), and the employment of modern propaganda in America through the ideas of people like Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays. These are names known to very few Americans, but whose impact on our nation and our world is incalculable.

Tracking the private daily behavior of everyone in order to help catch a small number of child criminals is itself the noxious practice of police states. Said an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “The data retention mandate in this bill would treat every Internet user like a criminal and threaten the online privacy and free speech rights of every American.” Even more troubling is what the government would need to do in order to access this trove of private information: ask for it.

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In Communist countries, where the ruling class routinely dug up embarrassing information on citizens as a bulwark against dissent, the secret police never dreamed of an information trove as perfect for targeting innocent people as a full Internet history. Phrases I’ve Googled in the course of researching this item include “moral panic about child pornography” and “blackmailing enemies with Internet history.” For most people, it’s easy enough to recall terms you’ve searched that could be taken out of context, and of course there are lots of Americans who do things online that are perfectly legal, but would be embarrassing if made public even with context: medical problems and adult pornography are only the beginning. How clueless do you have to be to mandate the creation of a huge database that includes that sort of information, especially in the age of Anonymous and Wikileaks? How naive do you have to be to give government unfettered access to it? Have the bill’s 25 cosponsors never heard of J. Edgar Hoover?

Unfortunately, this original crappy legislation has been moved through Congress, but what Smith seems to be doing now is working to amend that legislation with a new effort giving many more sweeping powers of oversight and control of content on the web. All in the name of “protecting our children,” of course. There is nothing more pathetic in politics than when people use “our children” as a human shield to ram through some of the most pitiful and self-serving policies around. As if Smith or many of his cohorts give a s**t about America’s “children,” in a country setting new records in child poverty, and where public education, public health, and child care are being drained of any support in the name of maintaining our global military presence and an ever-bloated national security state.

This act was already pushed last year, but it seems Lamar Smith is trying to re-energize this in light of the failure of SOPA, due to the overwhelming opposition against it. This new effort is looking “To amend title 18, United States Code, with respect to child pornography and child exploitation offenses,” making child pornography “double illegal,” I guess, and most everything else we say and do on the internet liable to oversight and censorship. (Lamar is definitely one Mr. Smith who needs to go AWAY from Washington, and as soon as possible.

This whole legislative effort is quite the act of political engineering, in that Smith and his cohorts are framing this in a manner which makes it politically untenable to oppose it. After all, if you are against corporate control of content on the internet, then you must be for child porn! It was bad enough having to engage in arguments with people about the negative impacts of online piracy, as if one was a cheerleader for it, just because one doesn’t abide well with the idea of sweeping arbitrary powers of control over online content by large media corporations, working in cahoots with government. I figure if this tack doesn’t work, they’ll resort to that old chestnut of blaming al Qaeda for digital “threats,”, and start claiming that you must be “for the terrorists” if you don’t support SOPA and PIPA.

What’s really scary about this bill, though, isn’t just the fact that this gives such sweeping power over internet content, but that it requires ISP’s to keep all of that personal and financial information stored for such an extended length of time. Besides the crazy amount of storage space that requires these companies to invest in, it makes every single ISP and web server a honey pot target for financial and identity theft.

So let’s make this perfectly clear everyone. These legislative efforts have NOTHING to do with internet security, property rights, protecting people from child pornography, etc… This is about control, plain and simple. Control over information, and the means and the ability for people “to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers” (Article 19, Universal Declaration of Human Rights). In other words, this is about the very core of power itself, and about who wields preeminent power over society. Information is the fundamental ingredient of power, its primary source and enabler. This is more true than ever in today’s “Information Age.”

So don’t worry, your information will be “stored securely” so noone else can access it! But if they do access it, your ISP will give you “prompt notice” so you can change all your credit card numbers, hide your kids, hide your wife, and hide your husband. This bill has currently cleared its committee, this meaning that the next step is a full vote. This bill needs to be stopped, and if I might go one better, Lamar Smith needs to be stopped, for the good of the internet and YOUR privacy.

This legislation needs to be stopped. Now.

It was the very subject which he was talking about when making the comment which was much more shocking, actually. Treating insurance and medical care like its some kind of brand of DVD player one is out shopping for, or is similar to quality of service at a restaurant that one shops around for, pretty much demonstrates how flagrantly out to lunch Romney is when it comes to understanding the scope of reality that ‘market economics’ actually entails in the real lives of those who aren’t billionaires.

Aaron Carroll has an excellent analysis of Mitt Romney’s faux pas on firing people. No, Romney didn’t actually say that he enjoys firing people - but what he really did say, that competition works in health care because you can fire your insurance company, was actually worse. Carroll:

The real issue, unfortunately, is that very, very few people have the luxury that Gov. Romney is endorsing. Let’s say that you are self-employed, and lucky enough to have found a company to provide you with health insurance. Then, let’s say you develop cancer. You suddenly find out that your insurance company stinks. So you fire them, right?

Of course not. You’re screwed. Now you have a pre-existing condition. There’s not an insurance company out there that wants to cover you. So you don’t fire them. You scream, and curse, and cry, but you’re stuck. Only healthy people have the luxury of picking and choosing.

Let’s also not forget that most people don’t find out that they’re not getting “good service” until they’re sick. Healthy people don’t make much use of their insurance, so they don’t know how bad it is. They only find out after they’re ill, and then it’s too late. It’s only fun to fire the insurance company if you’re sure you can go to another company to get what you need. Almost no one can.

Why, it’s as if Romney doesn’t understand his own health reform, which was in large part about ensuring not that you can fire your insurance company, but rather about ensuring that your insurance company can’t fire YOU.

And this is a bit subjective, but isn’t it awesome how Romney’s lack of empathy shines through? He evidently has no sense of what it’s like NOT to be the very wealthy son of an already wealthy father; no idea how the fear of unemployment or medical bills afflicts ordinary Americans.

The lack of empathy expressed for the experience of the large majority of Americans by ultra-rich political figures like Willard Romney continues to amaze. “United We Stand,” indeed. Yeah, sure. These people should NEVER be trusted with political power.

Go to the original post Here.

Now, this date’s from the fall, and so much has transpired since then, one has to wonder if Mr. Whittle is still holding onto these original, rather limited perspectives. Whittle’s assumptions, which he so smugly delivers here, are misdirected to say the least, if warranted at all.

The fact that he defines this ever-growing body of protest as a bunch of “kids” who are simply part of the “self-esteem” generation, is demonstrably ill-informed (to say nothing of patronizing). Perhaps by now he has come to realize that the movement is made up of millions of people from just about every demographic of society, including war veterans, retirees, professionals, business owners, former police captains, airline pilots, etc.. on and on. The sense of entitlement Whittle begrudges in his screed, may be more accurately and effectively directed towards those who feel they can wield power with impunity, and whom the Occupation movement is challenging. People here are not protesting to get things free and easy. They are protesting the fact that the ability to achieve much of anything in the economic or civic sphere in this country is becoming increasingly impossible due to a system that is un-ignorably increasingly rigged and corrupt.

Plus, it does seem a bit strange for Whittle to proclaim that the movement is nothing but a bunch of kids who have lived soft and spoiled lives. He directly implies that they don’t know how to work for anything, that they just like cheap, modern conveniences, and are throwing a temper tantrum to have those things without having to earn them. However, how is it that these supposedly spoiled “kids” are expressing that desire for selfish comfort, thus displaying their supposedly soft, lazy, sacrifice-adverse character, by consciously living in difficult, improvised, and often physically uncomfortable conditions, eschewing most of those same spoiling comforts they are said to be whining for. This belies Whittle’s suggested solution for these “kids,” where he claims they should have to deal with the “reality” of living primeval lifestyles in order to better appreciate all the wonderful things that corporations are said to provide, while in actuality many of those manning the occupation camps are living lives much more spartan and voluntarily self-sacrificing in their creature comforts than most Americans (outside of the military). And on top of it all, many of them having the shit kicked out of them by hyper-militarized police forces, some of whom have clearly acted outside the realm of any law or code of decency. Not exactly what a self-absorbed, spoiled, rich, entitled kid normally does.

As for the argument that people are calling for an end to corporations, or implying that the message is “corporations are the evil of the world,” misinterprets and/or misunderstands the fundamental premise of the Occupy movement, and the nature and purpose of dissent amongst many Americans today. This is a point we at USTV Media have addressed before repeatedly. For those who are following the events and the discourses among people involved with this movement, this accusation is a corrosive distortion, one which is a dramatic oversimplification of the moral argument being forwarded. A distortion which I also suspect is often on purpose, at least on the part of certain factions who have a vested interest in discrediting the movement.

This brings to mind some of the critiques I’ve heard regarding those who support the occupation movement as being “hypocrites,” because many may claim an admiration for someone like Steve Jobs, yet are supposed to be “against corporations,” and “against the rich.” The OWS movement has nothing to do with people being against gaining wealth, becoming rich, doing well, being a successful entrepreneur, etc… It’s a protest against people getting rich and powerful through cheating and criminality, and succeeding through rigging the game, through corrupting the political and economic process in order to favor the few at the expense of the many. It is a political protest movement against a system becoming ever more inherently corrupted and illegitimate.

The claim being made by Occupy isn’t that “all corporations are bad,” which is a patently ridiculous cartoon characterization of not only the problem, but the fundamental point of the Occupation movement. The issue is injustice and corruption, and the inherent criminality which has now become ascendent in our system. It is the fact that our political system no longer even pretends to adhere to equal rights and equal justice under the law. Others have elaborated on this much more thoroughly and much more lucidly than I can here, particularly Glenn Greenwald, who goes into this in seering detail with his new book With Liberty and Justice for Some. Then there is Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the criminality of Wall Street, and how large financial corporations have become “too big to jail.”

The fact is that the corporate structure has metastasized into the primary medium for certain interests to wield inordinate and civically corrosive influence over government decision making today, turing the government into a tool to confer privilege on insiders. It has become the main instrument for placing the decision-making power of the nation into the hands of the few over the will of the many. And not in a “republican” way, but in a authoritarian, oligarchic way.

It is helpful to remember that the original American Revolutionaries were not against commerce, providing goods and services, etc… Hardly! What they were against was the use of the chartered corporation as a tool of the monarchy to suppress and even crush economic (and eventually political) competition against its reign of power, and against the protestations of its usurping the wealth of the inhabitants of the colonies for the benefit of the few who made up the elite class of royal privilege. The rebellion (including that of the Boston Tea Party, if one will recall), was an act of vandalism which destroyed the “private property” of a what was in some respects the Wal-Mart of their day; The East India Company, which was a corporation chartered by the crown, and used as a tool of imperial expropriation. It was because of such abuses by it and other similar chartered corporations of the Crown, that the original American government even debated whether to outright ban the existence of corporations within constitutional law. This was because of the abuse they had experienced under the monarchy, which had wielded them as an instrument of such oppression. I recommend Ted Nace’s excellent tract Gangs of America, if one is interested in the role of the corporation in American history.

Again, does this mean that the people involved with Occupy are against commerce, entrepreneurship, markets, etc… of course not. Does it mean that corporations should be “banned”? Are people calling for that? Whittle’s underlying assertion that modern life is somehow made possible only by the corporate state is way off the mark. He uses “cheap electricity” as an example to make a point, but forgets to mention that electricity used to be cheaper, at least for the people of California, back when the public utility ran it, and before corporations like Enron got into the game, exploiting it for the private gain of the few at the expense of the many. Again, we have the conflation of a protest against domination of government by the few for the benefit of the few, with somehow being a rant against entrepreneurial economic activity. Any actual critiques I’m familiar with from people who support the OWS movement about the role of corporations within society are no less radical than those first posited by the Jefferson, Paine, Franklin, and others of their time. Conflating the protestations against corrupt and unjust power, as somehow being a rant against invention, provisions of goods in a modern, mass technological society, provision of electricity and the like, simply misses the point entirely.

- Andy Valeri, USTV Media

Postscript: Whittle says we should be grateful and thankful for Monsanto and Shell. Really? His merging of the interests of a company like Monsanto with that of the independent, hard working, self-reliant American farmer, a vision of which he conjures up in his presentation, in order to establish some kind of emotional bond with the point he’s trying to drive home, is simply sick. Clearly, Mr. Whittle hasn’t bothered to talk with many, if any, of those American farmers he wants you to thank, has he? Monsanto’s record in destroying the livelihoods of countless independent American farmers (and millions others around the world, particularly in India), is simply criminal. Perhaps Mr. Whittle should go to Nigeria and ask some of the people there how grateful they should be for Shell, considering the devastating political and environment havoc that their presence there has caused so many in that nation. Or perhaps he can go to Alaska and find out how thankful the fisherman there are for Exxon. I really do encourage people do some research into the full scope of Monsanto’s activities. “Grateful” or “thankful” are not the first words that come to mind in regards to what a warranted response to their activities should be. A couple of good places to start might be with the documentary film The World According To Monsanto, or the excellent Vanity Fair expose’ on Monsanto, Harvest of Fear. And of course, Monsanto is the leader in the whole GMO endeavor (or ‘Frankenfoods,’ as the Europeans call it, having wisely banned them), with the corporation paying no head to the Very Real Danger of Genetically Modified Foods. And on top of all this, there are recent reports out of WikiLeaks exposing More Evidence of Monsanto’s Bullying and Influence-Buying. This behavior is unfortunately par for the course for this corporation.

And regarding some of this nation’s original history, particularly in regards to the role of the corporation, This piece touches on the topic of the original American corporation, and how the Founders first approached the issue. Short, but good for an introductory perspective.

It’s also interesting to speculate as to what Thomas Jefferson may have thought about the impetus of the Occupy movement. A few thoughts of his may give us a clue…

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.”   

“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”  

“Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry.”

“I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”

“A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the highest virtues of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.”

“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”

I dare say he likely would have had some words of approval for the general thrust of the OWS effort.

The Household survey was noticeably more upbeat than the establishment survey. pointing to a gain of 277,000 jobs. This is the third month in the row of sharp job gains according to the household survey. It has shown a total of 1.006 million jobs gained over the last three months. The Civilian Participation rate was unchanged at 64.2% for the month, but is down from 64.5% a year ago. This means that the drop in the unemployment rate for the month is real, not a statistical illusion. Unfortunately the same can not be said about the drop in the unemployment rate from a year ago, when it was 9.7%. More than half of that drop is a mere statistical artifact coming from a small percentage of the population actually being in the workforce. However the participation rate is up from the 27 year low it set in July of 64.0%. The percentage of people over the age of 16 who actually have jobs rose slightly to 58.4% from 58.3% (employment to population ratio, or the employment rate). That is the third month in a row it has increased. However, it too was coming off of a 27 year low in July. The employment rate was higher than the year ago level of 58.3%. This is the first year over year increase in the employment rate so far in this cycle

While this month’s employment gains from the establishment survey were slightly below expectations, that is more than made up for by very large upward revisions to the August and September numbers. In September, we “actually” gained 158,000 jobs, not the 103,000 reported last month. In August, we gained 104,000, not the 57,000 jobs we thought last month, well above the unchanged reading that was first reported. The upwards revisions were a very positive sign. The upward revisions came mostly from the private sector. The private sector revisions were for both months. In August, a total of 72,000, not 42,000 jobs estimated last month, were gained. In the first report, just 17,000 private sector jobs were estimated to have been gained in August. In September, 191,000 private sector jobs were added, not the 137,000 reported last month. The government lost 33,000 jobs, not 34,000 in September. In August, it added 32,000 jobs, not the 15,000 reported last month, or the original estimate of 17,000 government jobs lost. Thus, if one adds the revisions to the job gains for October, we have 182,000 more people working today than we thought we did yesterday. On the private sector side, the gain is 188,000.

The unemployment rate is derived from a separate (household) survey from the total number of jobs (establishment) survey. The household survey was much more upbeat than the establishment survey, as it has been for most of the year so far, with a gain of 277,000. In showed a gain of 398,000 jobs in September. In August, it showed a gain of 331,000 jobs. The household survey numbers do not get revised. However, generally the numbers from the household survey are considered less reliable than are the numbers from the establishment survey. That does not mean they should be disregarded entirely, and the divergences between the two series are often the biggest near turning points in the economy. The household survey does a much better job of picking up people who are self employed, and of very small start up businesses than does the establishment survey.

The unemployment rate fell to 9.0%, after three months in a row of being stuck at 9.1%. A year ago the unemployment rate was 9.7%. The civilian participation rate, or the percentage of people in the labor force, both employed and unemployed was unchanged at 64.2%. It hit its lowest level since May1983 in July at 63.9%. We were also coming out of a nasty recession in May 1983, and women were still far less involved in the workforce than they are today. The participation is down from 64.5% a year ago. The employment to population ratio, or the employment rate, rose for the third month in a row, rising to 58.4% from 58.3% in September. The July level of 59.0% number was the lowest since July 1983. It was at 58.3% a year ago. A rise in the participation rate makes it harder for the unemployment rate to fall, but is still good news. However, it is also true that the drop in the unemployment rate from 9.7% a year ago to the current 9.0% is in large part an illusion caused by the fall in the participation rate from 64.5% to the current 64.2%. A fall in the unemployment rate from a falling participation rate is not really such great news.

For all employees, the length of the average work week was unchanged at 34.3 hours. A year ago it was also at 34.3 hours. For production and non-supervisory employees, the length of the average workweek ticked up to 33.7 hours from 33.6 hours in September. It is up slightly from 33.5 hours a year ago. While a rise of an average of 6 minutes per week might not sound like a big deal, multiply it by the 131.516 million workers in the economy (establishment survey), and yes it is a big deal (to the extent it was really a six minute increase, and not smaller due to rounding). The very flat trend in average hours over the last year or so is extremely strong evidence that the overall anemic job growth is not due to excessive regulatory fears by businesses from things like the Health Care reform act. If the reluctance to higher were due to fears of higher costs that will be imposed starting in 2014 due to the act for hiring an marginal employee, but that there were still profitable business opportunities available, then the obvious thing for a business to do would be to have its existing workforce work longer hours. With the average work week still very low by any historic standard (although up from a very low 33.0 hours for production workers at the bottom of the recession) it is clear that the problem is that there are not enough customers, not that businesses are afraid of Obamacare.

Average hourly earnings for all employees rose to $23.19 from $23.14 and are up 1.84% from $22.77 a year ago. Average hourly earnings for production employees rose $0.03 to $19.53 for the month, and is up 1.56% from $19.23 a year ago. The year over year changes are well below the rate of headline inflation over the last year, so in real terms, wages are moving backwards. Income growth in the middle and lower half of the income distribution has been sorely lacking, not just recently, but for over a decade. Well, actually, it has been pretty bad for the bottom 90% of people, but particularly anemic for the lower half of the income distribution. Higher incomes for those who are working means higher sales and more quickly repaired household balance sheets. Slow growth or actual declines mean lower sales and less progress on balance sheet repair. The anemic growth in average hourly earnings is not a good thing for the economy, although it is good news for corporate profits, and hence the stock market, at least in the short term. It also means that it will be tough for a generalized increase in overall prices (a.k.a. inflation) to occur, as opposed to increases of relative prices of highly visible prices such as food and gasoline.

The other significant positive aspect of this report is significant progress on the duration of unemployment problem. Half of all the unemployed have now been out of work for 20.8 week, an awful level, but much better than the 22.2 week figure of last month, and below the 21.3 week level of a year ago. For perspective though, prior to the great recession the highest the median duration of unemployment had ever reached was 12.3 weeks near the bottom of the Reagan Recession of 1982-83. Since the definition has changed, the comparisons based on the average duration of unemployment over the long term are less meaningful, but it dropped to 39.4 weeks from 40.5 weeks in September. A year ago, under a definition that maximized the length of unemployment at two years rather than the five years now “allowed” the average duration of unemployment was 33.9 weeks.

While the unemployment rate is better a year ago, but part of that is a mirage due to falling participation rates. Still, significant progress has been made over the last year, with a net gain of 1.824 million private sector jobs gained. Unfortunately when one factors in the continual bleeding of public service jobs, the total employment gains over the last year fall to 1.522 million total jobs gained. If we were in normal times, rather than trying to dig out of a deep hole, that would be an impressive performance. Unfortunately we are not in normal times.

- Posted by Dirk van Dijk, Chief Equity Strategist at Zacks Investment Research of Chicago. Follow Dirk on Twitter @DirkHvanDijk