The unemployment rate has been slowly coming down, in fits and starts. In December, it hit 8.5%.

Unemployment rate for the last 12 months

Unfortunately, there is a long way to go.

Unemployment rate for the last 5 years

There is particularly a long way to go when you get past some of the nuanced definitions that go into the “unemployment rate” and consider how much of the population is employed now compared to how much was employed before the collapse. What this shows is that what little employment growth there has been, has barely kept up with population growth, if at all. It may also show that a whole, huge wave of baby-boomers have exited the workforce permanently, due to the recession. Whatever the detailed causes… this is one of the most horrifying tidbits of data you’ve never seen in the news.

More bad news on the unemployment front. The length of time people who lose their jobs remain unemployed, has continued to increase over the years since the recession. Which means job losses have not been temporary. They have, to a large degree, been permanent. This should be, basically, considered to be such a disaster as to push everything else off the front pages until it is fixed.

Average weeks the unemployed stay unemployed

What is terrifying about that graph isn’t so much the increase in average length of unemployment from about 17 weeks before the recession to 40 weeks now. What is terrifying is how it compares to anything we’ve ever experienced in our recorded history.

Unemployed people stay unemployed longer, by a catastrophic amount, than ever.

Not quite as catastrophic, but certainly not good, is that new unemployment claims have jumped in the last few weeks.

New unemployment claims

As you can see, this number bounces a lot, and it comes out weekly. To smooth it and take some of the noise out, we usually like to look at a four week “moving average.” The increase has been enough to raise that too. Despite the alarming increase, it is still at a lower rate than it has been all year. We’d like to think this is temporary.

New unemployment claims, 4 week moving average

Put in context of the last five years, new unemployment claims are still higher than they were before the collapse, but the overall trend is improving. Slowly.

New unemployment claims, last 5 years, 4 week moving average

An alarming possibility, however, is that this recent uptick in unemployment claims it a symptom of an unfortunate turn on the global scene. If you think it has been a while since you’ve heard blood curdling shrieks from the Ron Paul / inflation panic people, there’s a good reason. The dollar has been gaining strength since last summer.

Trade weighted dollar index, last 12 months

This is the main reason gas prices came down this Fall. Global oil markets have been trading based on the Euro for several years, so when the dollar falls against the Euro, gas prices go up. When the dollar strengthens, gas prices go down. Until we start poking Iran with a stick, anyway.

Gas prices, last 12 months

Since what matters is how the dollar and the Euro (and other major currencies) compare to each other, strengthening in one is indistinguishable from weakening in another. The strength in the dollar since last summer has more to do with the Euro collapsing because of Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, than any particular US economic improvement.

Anyway, while the inflation hawks like to see a strengthening dollar, it makes imports more attractive compared to our domestic production, and our exports less attractive to the rest of the world. We’d expect to see a stronger dollar result in a slowing of export growth and a widening trade deficit. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing.

Exports are weakening with the strengthening dollar.

As the dollar has gained strength, exports that had been growing nicely have levelled off and even pulled back a little. And the trade deficit, which had shown improvement for five months, reversed course and grew.

Trade deficit grew in November, more even than was forecast.

None of this bodes well for jobs in the near future.

Of course, if we’ve seen anything since the crash, it is that economic growth and American jobs are no longer as tied together as they used to be. Our gross domestic product [GDP] continues to be positive, although extremely slow, at well less than 2%.

GDP growth is positive, but very low

For what it’s worth, the leading indicators show more of the same. Slow economic growth, enough to hopefully keep us from sliding back into recession… but not enough to fix our devastating unemployment crisis.

Leading indicators show continued positive, but very sluggish, economic growth

The Senate confirmation process has irresponsibly been used as a political football for a long time, and by both parties. But Mitch McConnell has taken irresponsibility in this area to levels never imagined. He has completely abandoned any sense of the confirmation process being one of oversight and, instead, turned it into a blunt weapon to degrade the entire functioning of government. The conventional wisdom has been that this is one of McConnell’s key strategies toward his stated goal of making President Obama a one-term president.

I no longer buy that. I think it is more insidious than that. I think Mitch McConnell fully expects President Obama to be re-elected, he fully expects that he himself will be the Senate Majority Leader in 2013, and that he is paving the way for nothing less than a coup d’etat.

I believe that his intention all along has been to desensitize the public, and the rest of the Senate, both to the idea of using the Senate confirmation process as a blunt force political weapon, and the idea that brinksmanship that ends in vast damage to the government and the nation for political gain is “normal.” I believe his intention is to vastly escalate both of these practices starting in January 2013 and to have these escalations be viewed by the public as changes in degree rather than type.

Ultimately, I believe that Mitch McConnell intends to use the Senate confirmation process to launch a virtual coup d’etat in which he claims, essentially, veto power over the people’s decision to re-elect President Obama, if that is what comes to pass, and that he will refuse to confirm any presidential appointments from the cabinet level on down. This could include everything from President Obama’s appointments to critical positions like the Secretaries of State and Defense to the myriad of leadership positions throughout the executive and judicial branches which, if left vacant, prevent the government from functioning at all.

With the power to do this, and get away with it, McConnell would be in a position to make virtually any demands he wanted of the President. He would essentially own the executive branch, and could insist on running it from his Senate office.

Further, I don’t think I’m the only paranoid nut case who thinks this.

The weak link in a McConnell strategy to deny the president any power to appoint officers of government, is the President’s constitutional authority to make recess appointments. There is more detail to this than meets the eye, and more than a little nuance, but basically McConnell has been causing the Senate to lie and say that it is in session when it is clearly in recess. He causes what is called a “pro-forma session” of the Senate, and then he immediately causes it to end. He is basically turning the “OPEN” sign on every few days, but the Senate is dark, there is nobody at work, and no Senate business can be conducted because, in reality, the Senate is closed. It is on recess.

There has been, apparently, talk swirling around the White House for weeks, about the possibility of the President using a trick of his own to get around the Senate trick. The presidential trick would involve making his appointments and sending out a flurry of e-mails in the few seconds between the time when one pro-forma session of Congress ends and another begins.

But the President opted against that. Instead, he waited until that window was clearly closed, and then he made his recess appointments. By doing this he directly challenged the legitimacy of the pro-forma Senate session. He called, what he hopes, is the Senate’s bluff. And he did it in a way that is likely to result in a legal challenge to the legitimacy of his appointments that could end up being decided by the Supreme Court, because the balance of power between the legislative and executive branches of government is, ultimately, what is in question.

McConnell isn’t the first Senator to force the Senate to use pro-forma Senate sessions specifically for the purpose of denying a president the ability to make recess appointments. Harry Reid (D-Nevada) did it to President George W. Bush toward the end of his term. But he is the first Senator to pair this tactic with a broad strategy of denying Senate confirmations altogether specifically to degrade the overall functioning of government and the viability of the President.

I believe President Obama sees, as I see, a coup being plotted by Mitch McConnell in the Senate. And this step which, understandably in this context, infuriated McConnell, is one of what may be several defensive moves he takes to protect nothing less than our Constitutional form of government.

A report released earlier this month on a two year assessment conducted by the American Bar Association [ABA] found that Kentucky’s death penalty system is so broken and unfair that the state should declare a moratorium on executions. A moratorium would be a good start, and if Kentucky voters have any say in the matter, one will be imposed sooner rather than later. A survey conducted right before the report was released showed that strong majorities of likely 2012 Kentucky voters support a death penalty moratorium, and these majorities go across party affiliation, gender, and even geography within the state.

Source: Lake Research Partners survey of 405 likely November 2012 Kentucky voters, Nov. 30–Dec. 4, 2011, margin of error (±4.9%)

But a moratorium doesn’t go far enough. The time has come to end the death penalty in Kentucky once and for all. (If you agree, sign this petition that will be delivered to Governor Beshear and members of the Kentucky House and Kentucky Senate.)

While the report credits Kentucky with taking some important steps to improve the quality and fairness of its death penalty process, the shortcomings are enormous. The ABA made dozens of recommendations that included passing new laws, funding facilities for preserving biological evidence, training of law enforcement officers and prosecutors, developing accountability and disciplinary measures for investigators, upgrades to the state’s crime laboratories, policies and disciplinary measures to prevent prosecutorial misconduct, an overhaul of the defense services provided to capital defendants… the list goes on for page after page after page. Numerous recommendations include the phrase “provide funding for…”

A sampling from the report of what Kentucky would need to fix:

• Kentucky laws and procedures do not sufficiently protect the innocent, convict the guilty, and ensure the fair and efficient enforcement of criminal law in death penalty cases
• Evidence in criminal cases, including capital cases, is not required to be retained for as long as the defendant remains incarcerated, despite the possibility of wrongful conviction. Kentucky law and practice also permits destruction of evidence in a variety of instances, including, in some cases, when the perpetrator remains at large
• While the Commonwealth’s post-conviction DNA testing statute permits post-trial testing of biological evidence prior to execution under some circumstances, the problem of lost evidence significantly diminishes the utility of the statute
• …some of the Commonwealth’s largest law enforcement agencies have no policies that are consistent with the ABA Best Practices on eyewitness identifications and interrogations. In those agencies that have adopted policies, the policies are not uniformly enforced.
• Kentucky does not require the accreditation of its forensic laboratories (and only three of its six have voluntarily obtained accreditation), MEO, or any of the 120 county coroner offices. Other KSP Laboratory branches or smaller law enforcement agencies conducting limited forensics are not accredited by any national accrediting body. Kentucky also funds its medical examiner and county coroner systems at levels far below the national average. Testing backlogs persist at KSP Laboratory causing delays in all criminal cases
• …there is no mechanism in place to guide prosecutors in their charging decisions to support the even-handed, non-discriminatory application of the death penalty across the Commonwealth
• All Kentucky public defenders handling capital cases retain caseloads that far exceed national averages and recommended maximum caseloads. In some cases, Kentucky public defenders provide capital representation while carrying caseloads of over 400 non-capital cases each year. Support staff members, including investigators and mitigation specialists, are routinely overworked and underpaid, carrying caseloads ranging from twelve to twenty-five capital cases at any given time. A 2011 study found that Kentucky public defenders who handle death penalty cases make 31% less than similarly-experienced attorneys in surrounding states constituting the lowest average salaries of examined jurisdictions. Furthermore, the hourly rates and maximum caps on compensation available for contract counsel in death penalty cases are inadequate to ensure high quality legal representation and are far below the rates available to attorneys performing contractual work for the Commonwealth on civil matters
• At least ten of the seventy-eight people sentenced to death since 1976 were represented by defense counsel who were subsequently disbarred. While Kentucky’s public defender agencies seek to enforce internal standards governing the proper provision of counsel in all death penalty cases assigned to their agencies, Kentucky has not adopted any statewide standards governing the qualifications and training of attorneys appointed to handle capital cases at trial, on appeal, and during post-conviction proceedings
• When an execution date is set prior to the expiration of the three-year statute of limitations imposed for filing a post-conviction petition, it has the effect of significantly curtailing the time that a death row inmate has to prepare and file his/her petition
  for post-conviction relief. Inmates not under a death sentence do not face a similar time constraint. Kentucky also does not authorize discovery in state post-conviction proceedings and prohibits inmates from using the Kentucky Open Records Act to obtain materials possessed by law enforcement that may be essential for establishing a death row inmate’s constitutional claims. The lack of discovery during post-conviction review makes it all the more likely that death row inmates will be unable to develop viable claims of constitutional error in light of the truncated time period in which they must prepare their petitions. Furthermore, Kentucky post-conviction courts typically do not authorize any funding for mental health experts to assist potentially mentally retarded death row inmates to accurately determine and prove their mental capacities
• A disturbingly high percentage of Kentucky capital jurors who were interviewed by the Capital Jury Project failed to understand the guidelines for considering aggravating and mitigating evidence. For example, 45.9% of jurors failed to understand that they could consider mitigating evidence at sentencing, 61.8% failed to understand that they need not find mitigation “beyond reasonable doubt,” and 83.5% of jurors did not understand that they need not have been unanimous on findings of mitigation
• The Kentucky Supreme Court cannot engage in meaningful proportionality review to determine if a death sentence is proportionate in comparison to similar cases and offenders. It does not appear that the relevant data on capital charging practices has been maintained to permit the Court to undertake a searching proportionality review
• Without a statewide entity that collects data on all death-eligible cases in the Commonwealth, Kentucky cannot determine the extent of racial or geographic bias in its capital system

Use of the death penalty is plummeting

Richard Dieter, Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center and author of The Death Penalty in 2011: Year End Report, notes that the nation as a whole is backing away from the death penalty.

This year, the use of the death penalty continued to decline by almost every measure… Executions, death sentences, public support, the number of states with the death penalty all dropped from previous years. Whether it’s concerns about unfairness, executing the innocent, the high costs of the death penalty, or the general feeling that the government just can’t get it right, Americans moved further away from capital punishment in 2011.

The death penalty isn’t for victim’s families, either

Ben Griffith recently wrote a letter-to-the-editor that was published by the Frankfort State-Journal. In it he said this.

To make the leap that murder victim families are united in wanting a death penalty continues the critical oversimplification of “paying a price commensurate with their crimes” and the pathetic use of a grieving family at a parole hearing to justify another murder. I belong to two different organizations of murder victim families (thousands of us) that feel victim survivors are victimized yet again when murderers are given the gallows. My brother was murdered in 1986 and his murderer was poisoned to death in 1997 by the state of Missouri. That is why I work as a board member of the Kentucky Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. Don’t lay the need to continue executions down at victims’ feet. (You don’t know the voices of all of us.)

What’s Next

Legislation that would ban the execution of people with severe mental illnesses, as well as legislation to abolish the death penalty in Kentucky completely, is expected to come before the Kentucky General Assembly within a few weeks.

There is a petition demanding an end to the death penalty in Kentucky. It will be delivered to Governor Beshear and all members of the Kentucky legislature, with results being broken out by district for representatives in the Kentucky House and Senate. You can sign it and then share it on Facebook, Twitter, by e-mail, etc.

You can also find your state senator and representative, along with their e-mail address and phone number, at Project VoteSmart.

http://www.louisville.com/content/what-mcconnell-wont-tell-you-about-unemployment-part-3-government-does-create-jobs-arena

http://www.louisville.com/content/what-mcconnell-wont-tell-you-about-unemployment-part-2-whos-unemployed-arena

A little over a month ago, this nation began a long overdue discussion about jobs and the crisis of unemployment for the first time in over two years. But since we have to have this discussion with people with no aversion to just making stuff up, we would be wise to bone up. Some stuff has changed in the last two and a half years.

http://www.louisville.com/content/what-mcconnell-wont-tell-you-about-unemployment-part-1-numbers-arena

Rand Paul’s inner liberal steps out for tougher pipeline safety regs. [The Arena].