Unemployment Rate Hits 9.7 Percent As Economy Sheds 216,000 Jobs In August
The national unemployment rate rose to 9.7 percent -- the highest level since June 1983 -- as the U.S. economy shed 216,000 jobs in August, the government announced on Friday morning. That's up from 9.4 percent in July.
By a broader measure that includes forced part-timers and people who'd like to work but aren't looking, the national unemployment rate reached 16.8 percent -- up a staggering 6 percent from this time last year.
The total number of unemployed is 14.9 million, roughly double the number at the start of the recession in December 2007.
The number of long-term unemployed, those out of work 27 weeks or longer, edged up only slightly in August, from 4.96 million to 4.98 million. At the end of the year, nearly 1.5 million of those people will exhaust their extended unemployment insurance unless the government takes action to further extend their benefits.
And the picture isn't so great for people who are working, either. A report released this morning by the Economic Policy Institute concludes that many workers who have not lost their jobs during the recession have nevertheless taken a hit as a result of sluggish wage growth, reduced hours and involuntary furloughs. Private sector wages have grown at a rate of 1.3 percent over the last six months, less than half as fast as wage growth during 2007 and the first six months of 2008.
"It's an implosion of wage growth far beyond what you would expect" in an ordinary recession, said EPI's Larry Mishel, co-author of the report, in a conference call with reporters.
Other economic indicators this week brought better news. Retail sales fell 2 percent in August from a year earlier, the smallest drop since September 2008. And the Washington Post on Monday reported positive signs in the Men's Underwear Index, the metric reportedly favored by former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. (The MUI outlook was less positive in April.)
Asked for his thoughts on the MUI, Mishel scoffed. "If Alan Greenspan were so wise, we wouldn't be in this mess," he said.
It's easy to believe airliners were brought down by guys with box cutters.
For this nation's duly elected president and his progressive policies to be kneecapped by a minority of loud, angry, possibly psychotic right-wing zombots is a sure sign that democracy is nothing more than a gossamer ideal.
And by lazily allowing such ideological idiocy to spread unchecked we now have the cultural equivalent of cancer.
There is no more reason for anyone to grant Republicans any respect. They have abdicated their authority. Their intentions are clear, their leaders too in love with their own salaries, their brazen goal to become the Kamikaze party reaching critical mass. Their credibility is all but dead, reduced to a bitter, gaping, black hole.
And thanks to them, democracy seems poised to tumble in.
Politics may be politics but this has gone way beyond gamesmanship and into the realm of wanton, drunken destruction. So far, no sane Republican---if there is one---has been roused by any nascent patriotism to voice opposition to any of the mad utterances vomited forth from the party's leaders and their "grassroots" infantilized infantry.
They have demonstrated daily that, having lost the presidential election and control of congress they've lost their their cultural relevance and all sense of morality as well, and in a fatally childish tantrum, are executing a nuclear option. The leadership itself has allowed the dead-enders into the fold and purposefully impregnated those soft-boiled egg psyches with apocalyptic imagery. The rest of us were too stunned to think that it was actually happening, that the Republicans would kill everyone and everything to wrest control back from a citizenry which wanted nothing more of their Grand Old Party's grand guignol.
And in monumental self delusion, the daily news cycle spins and spins with a wink as brazen as Sarah Palin's, as if we are all in on it and that this sort of thing is "healthy in a democracy". If anything, that alone means we might really be closer than ever to a real societal calamity, something that makes this economic crisis look like a picnic.
Only if every salvo is met with equal ferocity, if every pseudo fact is countered by reality is there a chance. To lay back and let vitriol burn itself out is unrealistic in a time when such things are the bread and butter of the corporate controlled media, when despair and division is essential to their profit margins.
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