Judicial success - at any cost?

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

US prosecutor at Guantanamo: 'I must deliver justice’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/9244120/US-prosecutor-at-Guantanamo-I-must-deliver-justice.html

The title of the article speaks a lot. The long expected trial against five suspects for the 9-11 attacks, including Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, is about to begin. Expectations are very high for a successful outcome. But will the principles of international law be respected, or they will be sacrificed for the sake of said success?

After so many years of preparations, the prosecutors are ready to press charges at long last. The five suspects for the terrorist attacks are going to face the death penalty if they are found guilty. The public opinion has decided a long time ago if this sentence is just. And that is understandable - after all, we are talking about monstrous atrocities with no parallel in modern history.

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Unemployment, Disability, and Labor Force Participation

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

I've traditionally been wary of using the discussion of people "dropping out" of the labor market to make points about the employment situation. Back when things were going really well in the mid-2000s, my perception of that as a constant drumbeat as to why unemployment was under 5% was established, and it was my belief that it was equally disingenuous to be playing that game now, especially when the economy is actually bad as opposed to the fantasy scenario from 7 years or so ago.

I do say was, however, because I'm no longer 100% sure I'm correct on this issue. So I'm sharing it with the group for a discussion.

As it stands, in terms of labor force discussion, we are significantly lower than we have been in some time, a 30 year low:



The "labor force," as it's defined, is people who are laid off and are actively searching for a job. In the most recent unemployment numbers, we added a net of 115k jobs in the US and saw the unemployment rate drop to 8.1%. The drop to 8.1%, however, was not facilitated by the jobs we added, but rather the 342k people who fell off of the labor force rolls. According to some estimates, if labor force participation was at its peak, unemployment would be approximately 11%.

So what's driving this? One theory has been old folks and boomers retiring earlier than they may have otherwise. The numbers do not bear that out, though:



The other theory I've heard is that we're seeing more people hop over to disability, but that trend does not seem to be accelerating with the bad economy, but rather part of a longer-term trend that was halted for a short time during the best years of the 2000s:



If anything, this seems to be driven a lot by jobless youths and, surprisingly to me, people falling off the official labor force rolls. Conventional wisdom doesn't seem to be the thing here, and I can't come up with any other credible reason to explain this one.

I'm wary to use this outright as a political bludgeon - as bad as Obama's been for the economy overall, I can't really point to anything specific that he's done to decrease labor force participation even if his policies are negatively impacting the actual job market. At the same time, though, we're seeing these numbers touted as evidence of a recovery and of the government policies working when, in reality, the employment numbers, had things remained stagnant on a participation level (never mind increased), are quite possibly worse than they were during the peak of this economic crisis.

So I'm not sure what to make of it. I definitely believe this is an underexplored piece that's not getting a lot of traction, especially in the wake of the continued celebration about the lowering unemployment rate, but I am wary of the play of this when there may be better explanations to go along with it.