U.S. Unemployment Worsens to 9.8 Percent, More Jobs Lost Than Expected
U.S. job loss worsened in September, with 263,000 lost, moving the official unemployment rate from 9.7 percent to 9.8 percent and underlining how the nation’s economic crisis is a jobs crisis. The new data out today by the U.S. Department of Labor means some 15.1 million workers have lost their jobs since the recession began in December 2007.
The official 9.8 percent unemployment rate is bad enough, but a more realistic—and horrible—picture of what’s really going on in this nation is the unemployment data that includes those not counted in the official figure, such as those who have given up looking for work: That’s a stunning 17 percent unemployment rate—some 26 million workers who need jobs or full-time work but cannot find it.
A Quick Tour of the Bush Legacy
* In the Laugh-if-it-Didn’t-Hurt-So-Much category:
In an interview with The Associated Press, Vice President Dick Cheney also said that President George W. Bush has no need to apologize for not foreseeing the economic crisis.
“I don’t think he needs to apologize. I think what he needed to do is take bold, aggressive action and he has,” Cheney said.
* Laugh and Hurt, Part II: Bush took such “aggressive action” on the economy, he must have worried a lot about it. NOT. In fact, when asked by People magazine about which moments from the past eight years he revisited most often, Bush talked passionately about the pitch he threw out at the World Series in 2001:
“I never felt that anxious any other time during my presidency, curiously enough.”
Unemployed in America
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The unemployment figures were so bad Friday—half a million U.S. jobs lost in one month—some in the corporate media actually sounded a bit alarmed. Still, the overriding impulse of mainstream journalists is to look on the bright side.
Like NPR, for instance, which offers a handy chart showing how unemployment was worse in the early 1980s than it is now. The chart’s cutsy title: “In Case It Makes You Feel Better,” begs an answer, such as: You gotta be kidding?
Such “things could always be worse” journalism—like yeah, a plague of locusts could be in my backyard—is pretty tiresome, but imagine how it must sound to those who really are suffering from job loss?
