The Misery Index

Yes, there's mass unemployment, and our elected politicians in both parties will not do one goddamned thing about it. They won't do anything since most of them are slaves to the neoliberal ideology that says the United States must join the rest of the world in an economic race to the bottom.

These sobering statistics are enough to drive a teetotaler to drink:

* Officially, there are ten million unemployed people in the US, up from 6.8 million in 2007.

* Fully 3.6 million people have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more, according to the official jobless rolls. This figure is three times larger than it was in 2006, when there were 1.1 million long-term unemployed.

* Nearly 36 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for more than 27 weeks, three times higher than the average between 1948 and 2008. The mean duration of unemployment currently stands at 35.4 weeks, up from 16.9 weeks in 2006.

And, as the piece says, it doesn't begin to tell the whole story or even part of it. The extent of the problem is being sugarcoated for political reasons.

We can't have the peons rebel, can we?