The Great Jobs Depression Worsens, and the Choice Ahead Grows Starker

The Great Jobs Depression Worsens, and the Choice Ahead Grows Starker

Friday, September 3, 2010
The Great Jobs Depression continues to worsen.

The Labor Department reports this morning that companies created ony 67,000 new jobs in August. That’s down from the 107,000 they created in July. And because the government laid off temporary Census workers, the economy as a whole lost 54,000 jobs.

To put this into perspective, we need 125,000 net new jobs a month just to keep up with the growth of the population and the potential workforce


http://robertreich.org/post/1058622195/the-great-jobs-depression-worsens-and-the-choice-ahead


All told, about

22 million Americans are now jobless.

Add in those who are working part-time who’d rather be working full time, and we’re

up to 25 million

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Hello ??????????????

Anybody home at the White House except the DLC corporate wing????

Overturn the Trade Agreements --

STOP the wars which are bankrupting the Treasury --

Overturn Reagan and Bush tax cuts for the wealthy --

The unemployment rate was 10.8%

The U-6 is more accurate when comparing to 1982, and the present U-6 is 17%. Add in the long-term discouraged workers whom Clinton defined out of existence and we're at 22%.

Exactly right! We are just about at the Great Depression levels. In fact if we calculated unemployment exactly the same as they did in the Great Depression, we are probably at the same levels!

with pensions, benefits and good wages, we still had strong unions, no peak oil, no climate change, no massive trade imbalance with china, we were not coming out of decades of offshoring and wage stagnation and the gap between rich and poor was much, much lower.

7+ years of financing two wars and massive tax cuts to the wealthy.

A complete collapse of the housing industry which wiped out trillions in middle class wealth was not a factor in "82. Financial de-regulation was in it's infancy in '82 compared to today.

We do not have the political will to clean up the current criminal financial mess and build a solid foundation for recovery. Workers do not have the wealth or security to spend us out of one.

And pretty soon, just like clockwork and considering wall street is back to criminal business as usual, it will be time for another downturn.

That one will be a full blown depression.

It will lead to full blown revolution. There will be riots in the streets (worse than the '60's). We're in a depression now. Either we fix it now, or we suffer the consequences in less than 10 years.

The "official" numbers are misleading.

consider those who are underemployed -- i.e., those who have taken part time

jobs to replace full time jobs they lost!

research how the measuring criteria changed

Some will say that tarrifs and quotas are "bad" for our economy.

So what have our "free trade" policies done for us?

Look around.

Our manufacturing base has evaporated.

We import virually everything.

Things have to change.

Yup

I was laid off.

But it seems to me that this "recession" has much less capacity for rebounding than did the one in 1982. Because so many jobs have been lost overseas and so much of our manufacturing base has disappeared. Also, we have gone thru a computer revolution since 1982, which has replaced a lot of people in jobs.

this is the fastest recovery in 25 years...or something.

didn't you hear - we already RECOVERED! But now, we're in danger of......HAVING TO RECOVER AGAIN!!!

I don't really watch TV -- C-span, Jon Stewart, Olberman, Schultz, Maddow --

Hartman - Randi Rhodes -- when I can.