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Jobless Rate Worsens to 5 Percent. Bush Economy Tanking Fast |
Unemployment worsened to 5 percent—sinking a whopping three-tenths of a percentage point, from 4.7 percent in November, the largest single jump since the slowdown following Sept. 11, 2001.
Not even one week into the New Year, the Bush administration has brought our nation the worst unemployment rate in two years, a stock market that lost more than 200 points on the first day of 2008 trading—its worst trading day since Sept. 11, 2001—and oil that reached the dreaded $100-per-barrel mark.
Heckuva job, Mr. President.
Shockingly, only 18,000 jobs were created in December, according to the monthly U.S. Department of Labor report released today—and the private-sector actually lost 13,000 jobs. Some 150,000 jobs need to be created a month just to accommodate new entrants into the labor force, and economists had predicted around 70,000 new jobs last month.
The U.S. mortgage crisis now is reverberating big time in construction jobs, with the Labor Department’s household survey finding a 49,000 drop in employment in construction. With home owners unable to tap into second mortgages and housing prices falling, consumer spending slowed this holiday season, and retailers cut 24,000 workers in the seasonally adjusted estimate. Manufacturing continues to struggle, losing 31,000 jobs last month.
As AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says about the jobs data:
It’s especially disheartening that good, middle-class supporting jobs in manufacturing and construction were cut last month, continuing a disturbing trend.
It is astonishing that President Bush and his advisers won’t take their heads out of the sand long enough to realize our economy faces serious threats that need immediate action.
This latest economic data is the more visible aspect of trends that have been occurring nearly unnoticed in recent years: the widening income gap and the increasingly besieged middle class. This growing economic imbalance slices many ways, one of which is illustrated by soaring CEO pay. In 1980, CEO pay was 42 times that of the average blue-collar workers’ pay. By 2006, CEO pay was 364 times the same workers’ pay—the largest gap in the world.
Mainstream economists have been dancing around the R word for months now. Maybe it’s time to spell it out: Recession.
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The jobs created were with lower pay. Too many jobs are being sent overseas so now the USA has to pay the piper.
Recession? I live in Southern California, where tent cities have sprung up in the L.A. suburbs—wages haven’t kept pace with the cost of living here in years! Part-time minimum wage jobs shouldn’t be counted. No one can keep a family of four alive with that kind of paycheck.
My monthly rent has gone up $200 over four years and is about to be raised again; my last raise was 20 cents per hour. That raise was the first one I had received in five years! Where is the money supposed to come from? All my utilities have doubled, the price of gas has tripled—but not my income.
Folks are struggling to get by. Everyone I know is one paycheck away from homelessness. This economy is looking more and more like the Great Depression of the ’30’s, and the chasm that has opened up between the “haves” and the “have-nots” is ever widening. Working Americans and their futures are hanging perilously by a thread.
remember when during a war, the nation would prosper, people were at work, and now it is the complete opposite. The great divide is exactly what the Republicans want Catbear; the rich with the “haves” and the poor with the “have nots”.
This election we have to get everyone out to vote!
The conservatives have something up their sleeve to deprive many from voting.
2000 was florida
2004 was ohio
2008 ??
get out of Iraq and Afganistan, re-build the American job structure. More money is spent their for them to re-build, yet nothing is getting done, only the conservative no-bid contractors have profited! There are no terrorists out there to stop the US from rebuilding what the dictator Bush destroyed.
Unions must rebuild and get stronger! We must protect our flailing salaries and protect our pensions! We need single payer health care, all this can be achieved if we get the conservatives out.
We struggled during the great depression, but came out of it prosperous. This time we can’t allow corporations to take over running the nation again!
The organized labor movement, with it’s daily contact and organizing with working people across the nation, knows millions examples that catbear955 speaks from personal experience. Every one of us has their own horror stories, trying to help support (in my case) my daughter, a single mother, with two children.
The economic situtation of the vast majority of working people today (mostly not unionized) is no longer “difficult”. It is becoming impossible.
The vast problems we face today are indicative of the fact that THE TIMES ARE PROFOUNDLY CHANGING. The U.S. is becoming a “third world” country with an ever smaller but increasingly extremely wealthy people and the rest of us becoming impoverished.
And what is the labor “leadership” doing about these changing times? There is simply a continuation of the same old responses that partially worked thirty or more years ago ago when U.S. capitalism was prosperous and could afford health care, living wage jobs, 40 hour work weeks, etc. Today the economy is profoundly different. Organized labor “leadership” must discard strategies that are simply enabling further defeat.
1. The organized labor movement must cease to think of itself as a “business partner” to corporate capitalism. Especially when U.S. corporate capitalism is (as far as working people are conderned) in rapid decline. Especially when corporate capitalism is doing everything possible to maximize profit by minimizing the wages and standard of livingt of working people.
2. This means that the labor movement must become ANTI-CAPITALIST and become PRO-SOCIALIST. What does this mean?? It means that we are for a government that is “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” (Lincoln’s Gettysburg address). The function of a democratic government is that it works to promote the essential economic interests of the majority of the people. That means in practical terms we are militant in our support of minimum wage and “living wages” for all working people. We must militantly support free quality education for all, free health insurance for all, militantly support Social Security and other economic programs implemented over the years to end extreme poverty. We must militantly oppose the increasing social inequality that is leaving more and more working people in extreme poverty.
3. The labor movement must support all working people living within the borders of the United States, regardless of race, religion, and now especially we must support the rights of undocumented working people. See the Universal Declaration of human rights.
4. IMMIGRATION. Impoverished people from Mexico and Central America were driven across the border for causes which the U.S. Corporate foreign policy is mainly responsible. NAFTA, CAFTA treaties, passed and implemented to the profit of wealthy ruling elites, have destroyed the livelihoods of peasant farmers and workers in Mexico. THE LABOR MOVEMENT MUST INSIST THAT THESE LAWS BE ENDED, SUBSIDIZED CORN DUMPING INTO MEXICO BE ENDED, THAT THE GOVERNMENT OF MEXICO MUST END EXPLOITING ITS PEOPLE. The living standard of Mexican people must be greatly improved to end the on-going flood of immigration in to the U.s. WE MUST OPPOSE THE RAIDS AGAINST MEXICAN WORKING PEOPLE, THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS, the destruction of families, the incarceration of children!!!
4. The labor movement should take the lead in forming a new political party that represents not just organized labor interests but the economic interests of all working people. A party that does that rejects all corporate funding and corporate agendas. (The Democratic Party does not represent labor interest as it is awash in corporate money- Obama and Clinton do not support ending the war (a big money manker for the military-industrial complex and the oil companies). A party opposed to war and militarism that does not seve the interest of the american people.
5. The labor movement must create a new mass media to communicate this new direction. Most people are totally atomized, brain-washed into anti-labor, anti-socialist thinking. Most people think today that their dire conditions are a “personal problem” that can only be solved through becoming a wage-slave or winning the lottery or some other “individualistic endeavor” , even praying to God for help. This mind-set is constantly re-enforced by corporate controlled mass media. The first step to mental liberation might be to turn off the television to minimize the mental assault!
The labor leadership has vast resources to work with if it would only move away from it’s conservative pro-corporate agenda that is destroying the hope of working people.