Three Reasons We Need an Economic Wake Up Call

By Robert Kuttner, Huffington Post
Posted on July 7, 2009, Printed on July 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141156/

The June Unemployment Numbers. The green-shoots school was expecting that the rising rate of unemployment would continue to slow, as it did in May. But instead the number spiked back up. A total of 467,000 jobs were lost. The unemployment rate rose to 9.5 percent, and OECD economists project that U.S. unemployment will still be in double digits as late as 2011.

The 9.5 percent official figure -- the worst since 1983 -- conceals even worse news. The number of long-term unemployed is at record levels. This is the only recession since the Great Depression in which the job loss wiped out all the job growth of the previous recovery. As our friends at the Economic Policy Institute report.