Unemployment Rate is 20% in October 2011

It's not 9.1% - - - it's more like 20%

Reminder: We only have 31% of the needed signatures on White House 99er Petition. Everyone should re-post this in their Facebook groups. (5,000 - 1,552 = 3,448 needed within the next 3 weeks.) THE LINK: http://wh.gov/gK1  

Thursday, October 06, 2011 - Americans continue to have mixed feelings about how the government should respond to the long-term unemployed. A new Rasmussen Poll reports national telephone survey of American adults finds that:

• 32% say government should do nothing at all.
• 25% say government should pay for their retraining.
• 21% say government should hire those long out of work.
• 10% say government should extend unemployment benefits indefinitely.< bless them ;)
  
  32% say do nothing but 56% say do something (the other 12% doesn't say, maybe they no longer have phones?)

USA Today reported that less than half of those who were out of work and were actively trying to find a new job were receiving unemployment benefits. Year-to-date the Department of Labor reported that 9 million people were collecting either state or federal extended benefits. In May of 2010 the New York Times reported almost 10 million.

So if the unemployment rate is still just over 9% (for almost 3 years straight) as people exhaust their unemployment benefits, then far more than just 8.5 million jobs were lost during the recession - so double the number of 10 million who were (and still are) unemployed. And that doesn't even count the "under-employed".

Today Dylan Ratigan MSNBC reports that the REAL unemployment rate is 20% - or 1 out of 5 people - as high as it was during some points of the Great Depression.

And by the end of the year, almost all of them will still be jobless with no income at all.

The New York Times reports today "...there is little indication that American employers will hire enough to put the millions of unemployed people back to work any time soon." (How many years have we've been hearing that?) And they say "...the total unemployment rate rose to 16.5 percent last month."

The president of the American Federation of Teachers, said that about 277,000 education jobs had been lost since 2008 and projected as many as 280,000 more job losses in the next year from state and local budget cuts.

So, are we only half-way through the layoffs?

Allen L. Sinai (the chief global economist at Decision Economics, a consulting firm) said, “C.E.O.’s are paid to grow shareholder value,” he said. “They are not paid to hire people if demand isn’t there and if they can substitute machines for people. That’s a no-brainer for the people who run companies.”

The economy is much worse off than we're being told or led to believe. That's why we have Occupy Wall Street and locally where I live, Occupy Las Vegas, and why it's spreading all across the country.

The Republicans keep telling us there are no jobs, but keep saying the unemployed are refusing jobs (and just prefer collecting unemployment benefits). But million have already exhausted all their benefits, and by January 2012, millions more will as well.