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 Flickr / edEx
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The Labor Department announced Thursday that fewer Americans than anticipated have filed unemployment benefit claims this month, potentially pointing to a less substantial unemployment population and maybe, just maybe, better economic growth in 2010.
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 Flickr / alancleaver_2000
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Despite staggering unemployment and a poor economic climate, the nation’s crime rate fell 4.4 percent in the first six months of 2009. The national murder rate also fell 10 percent—a decline that is being called one of the more significant in decades.
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 wfxl.com
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In a sign that the U.S. economy’s two-year job-molting cycle might be coming to an end, the Labor Department reported Friday that just 11,000 American jobs were lost in November and that the unemployment rate had fallen back to 10 percent.
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President Obama laid out what he believes his administration has been doing to deal with the employment crisis in America thus far and hinted at forthcoming developments in his plan to create more jobs. During a press conference Thursday he tried to take some of the heat off his administration by stating, “Ultimately, true economic recovery is only going to come from the private sector.”
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 earthopennetwork.org
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More than one in every six U.S. workers are either unemployed or underemployed, a statistic arguably more significant than the 10.2 percent jobless rate posted in October, as it factors in those who have quit looking, as well as part-time workers desiring full-time gigs.
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Unemployment reaches 10.2 percent—do we need a bigger stimulus? What do the GOP victories in Virginia and New Jersey mean for both parties? Will the House’s historic health care bill pass, and, if so, why wait till 2013 to implement it?
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 Still image from the AP via the Orlando Sentinel
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On Friday, Jason Rodriguez, a 40-year-old engineer who had been fired from an Orlando, Fla., construction firm two years ago, went back to his former office and opened fire, killing at least one person and wounding at least five others before fleeing to his mother’s house, where he was tracked down and arrested.
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 connectedmichigan.com
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In news that President Barack Obama described as “sobering,” the U.S. unemployment rate in October broke into the double-digit range, with 10.2 percent of Americans without jobs, the highest rate since April 1983.
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 Flickr / I.Gouss
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Put down your pitchforks and pick up the champagne. Boom times are here. The Dow is over 10,000 for the first time in a year. What’s that? Real unemployment is at 17 percent, and they’re foreclosing your house? Stop being such a communist and party!
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 White House / Pete Souza
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By Joe Conason — If the president and Congress don’t come to the aid of workers, the political consequences will be severe, and deservedly so.
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 wfxl.com
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Economic news and pessimistic views: U.S. unemployment increased slightly to 9.8 percent and, moreover, this figure shows the crisis is far from over, experts say. Joblessness is at a 26-year high.
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 wordpress.com
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It’s a vicious circle: Millions of job cuts and shrinking household incomes combined to push more Americans below the poverty line last year. Nearly 40 million Americans now officially live in poverty.
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By Ellen Goodman — The spotlight of the Great Recession has been properly on the nearly 10 percent of workers who are unemployed. But there has been far less said about the collateral damage on the 90 percent who “still have a job” but are looking at the empty seats. Fearfully. Gratefully.
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 Flickr / billaday
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A report released by the Federal Reserve on Wednesday gave some indications that, for half of the districts tracked by the Fed and for certain markets, the American economy is slowly starting to revive from its near-death experience last fall.
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President Obama’s got a lot of work to do to convince “Left, Right & Center” regulars Arianna Huffington, Tony Blankley and Robert Scheer that he’s going to make good on his promise of “change” when it comes to bettering Americans’ health care options, the economy, the job market and that whole war thing he’s got going on in Afghanistan.
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 theinsanityreport.com
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Just as the Labor Day weekend arrives comes word that the U.S. economy shed another 216,000 jobs last month, pushing the unemployment rate up to a 26-year high of 9.7 percent.
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 wfxl.com
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Talk of an economic rejuvenation in recent weeks got a sobering smack in the face Friday as California’s jobless figures were released. The Golden State’s unemployment rolls reached 11.9 percent in July, a post-World War II high.
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 southwestga.com
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Woe is still the economy, but several numbers are indicating that the recession might, just might, be easing up. The pace of U.S. job losses has gradually slowed, and the unemployment rate actually dropped in July for the first time in over a year.
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 Flickr / ifindkarma
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In the midst of a recession with continuously rising unemployment, Vice President Joe Biden and Attorney General Eric Holder announced Tuesday that the government will hand out $1 billion in grants to law enforcement agencies across the country. The money will go toward hiring and rehiring police officers in all 50 states.
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 Collage: Flickr / david.nikonvscanon and Staples.com
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By Marie Cocco — The arithmetic of this recession still looks pretty dismal and the politics and psychology of it are starting to become disconnected from reality in a scary way.
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 AP / Josh Anderson
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Faced with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, Tennessee has taken matters into its own hands. In a work project inspired by the New Deal, the state is using money from the federal stimulus package to create hundreds of jobs ranging from working for the state Transportation Department to baking goodies at the local pie shop.
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 L.A. Times / Alana Semuels
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More bad news on the economy front. California reported Friday that its statewide unemployment rate increased in June, leaving 11.6 percent of Californians without work while shedding 66,500 jobs in only 30 days.
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 White House / Pete Souza
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At 14.1 percent, Michigan’s unemployment rate is the highest of any state. So it was a fitting setting for the president to announce his plan to spend $12 billion retraining the unemployed in community colleges. This plan would be a lot more exciting if its budget didn’t inevitably have to be compared with the trillions we’ve thrown at lousy banks.
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By Marie Cocco — There’s a lot of argument in Washington about the economy, but if anyone’s looking for some clear voices, there are 650,000 of them just waiting to be heard. That is roughly the number of long-term unemployed who will begin losing their jobless benefits in September.
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 Flickr / aflcio2008
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Unemployment rose to 9.5 percent last month, the highest level in 26 years. Meanwhile, Wall Street payouts are not dropping. Goldman Sachs will be shelling out a whopping $20 billion to its employees this year. As we enter the 20th month of this recession, unemployment is becoming a way of life for many, and the very same people who created this mess are still reaping the profits.
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 americanculturalcrisis.com
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The number of people claiming welfare has gone up in 23 of the 30 largest states since last year. The biggest increases can be found in states with the highest unemployment rates. The new figures are troublesome considering how difficult it is to qualify for welfare, which caters only to the very poor. In a time of recession and few jobs, many others may be slipping through the cracks because they don’t qualify for help.
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The International Labor Organization opened a summit in Geneva on Monday on the worsening global unemployment crisis. World leaders, including France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Brazil’s Lula da Silva, will meet to discuss what they believe will be some 239 million unemployed worldwide by the end of this year.
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 tribunahispanausa.com
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You know things are bad when 345,000 Americans lose their jobs and that is seen as a positive sign. According to The New York Times, the fact that the toll on employment in May was not as profound as expected amplifies hopes of recovery.
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 AP photo / Yves Logghe
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Well, it’s official: The European economy is in gloomier territory than previously believed. EU Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Joaquin Almunia announced Monday that member economies will shrink by 4% this year, likely taking a further plunge of 0.1% in 2010.
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 White House / Pete Souza
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By Chris Hedges — The president had a fleeting moment to challenge the casino capitalism and financial recklessness of our economic and political elite. He could have orchestrated a state socialism that would have provided a safety net for tens of millions of Americans faced with dislocation and misery.
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 connectedmichigan.com
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The Bureau of Labor Statistics has put March’s unemployment rate at 8.5 percent, the highest in a quarter-century. After 15 consecutive months of job loss, more than one in 12 people (who are looking for work) are unemployed.
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Matt Miller, a host of KCRW’s “Left, Right & Center,” has written a book full of necessary honesty and courage—a welcome effort to rid us of the nostrums and shopworn notions that cloud our thinking and constrain our politics.
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 Flickr / billjacobus1
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Black and Latino communities have long suffered significantly higher unemployment rates than those of whites, but the economic collapse is taking labor inequity to new and alarming places. Jobs data shows that blacks and Latinos aren’t just more unemployed overall, but they’re losing jobs faster than their white colleagues.
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 Wikimedia Commons/Prolineserver
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The American economy is certainly a cause for concern at the moment, but Paul Krugman is more troubled by issues abroad, declaring in his New York Times column on Monday that “the situation in Europe worries me even more than the situation in America.” Uh-oh.
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In a rare interview with Ben Bernanke broadcast Sunday on “60 Minutes,” the Federal Reserve chairman allowed himself to sound slightly more optimistic, although ever so cautiously so, about the possibility that the American economy will pull out of recession soon—perhaps, he said, by the end of this year.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The House this week is expected to vote to expand civilian service, and the Senate will soon take up a similar bill. This issue holds the promise of producing that much prized but elusive Washington commodity: a large bipartisan majority.
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By Joe Conason — Things are bad, and very likely to get worse—but the Republicans seem determined to plunge us into a real depression, gambling that catastrophe would return them to power.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — While conservatives cry socialism, the president is trying to steer a moderate course. Moderation, however, may be the wrong recipe. There is something deeply disturbing about the drip, drip, drip of billions into the banking system with no apparent impact.
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 kukuchew.com
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Not since Ronald Reagan’s reckless free marketeering have we seen unemployment this high: The U.S. jobless rate hit 8.1 percent in February, with 651,000 jobs cut during the month.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Obama’s message was plain: The era of bashing government is over. So, too, is the folklore of a marketplace capable of producing abundance without regulation, oversight or public intervention.
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By David Sirota — It’s fitting that Barack Obama went to Denver to sign the stimulus bill. We’re just now starting to climb the challenging “Rocky Mountains” of this economic odyssey.
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 AP photo / Frank Franklin II
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The employment market and the stock market both took major hits Thursday, with new jobless claims registering as high as 627,000 and market indicators like the Dow Jones industrial average and the Nasdaq composite index dipping alarmingly low.
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 Flickr / jphilipg
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ProPublica did some digging into the infrastructure spending bundled into the stimulus package—the $100 billion that promises have the biggest impact in terms of job creation—and found that Wyoming is getting more than $20,100 per unemployed worker while Michigan, a state on the verge of a labor apocalypse, is expected to have to make do with just $2,434.37.
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Gas may be cheap again, but the bursting of the petro bubble has sent unemployment soaring to 40 percent among Middle Easterners 15 to 24 years old, stirring unrest. Dubai’s airport parking lots are littered with abandoned cars as foreign nationals flee. Egypt, with half a million newly unemployed headed home from abroad, could see a repeat of last year’s bloody economic riots.
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By Ellen Goodman — What wasn’t predicted was that women might finally reach the goal of equality less because they scaled the heights than because men slipped downward. But here we are.
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 radaronline.com
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A survey of stimulus coverage by Media Matters has found that watching TV news may actually shrink your brain. Well, that’s not fair, but it certainly won’t teach you much about stimulating the economy. That’s because the personalities that populate the airwaves—and not just Fox News—are given license to repeat untruths over and over again.
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 nytimes.com
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With little surprise but incredible effect, the U.S. unemployment rate rose to 7.6 percent in January, hitting its highest level since 1992. President Obama used the report to prod Congress to pass his economic stimulus package.
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