Bad News From America’s Top Spy
By Chris Hedges
Feb 16, 2009 - Hints of our brave new world seeped out Thursday when Washington’s new director of national intelligence, retired Adm. Dennis Blair, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He warned that the deepening economic crisis posed perhaps our gravest threat to stability and national security. It could trigger, he said, a return to the “violent extremism” of the 1920s and 1930s.
The United Nations’ International Labor Organization estimates that some 50 million workers will lose their jobs worldwide this year. The collapse has already seen 3.6 million lost jobs in the United States. The International Monetary Fund’s prediction for global economic growth in 2009 is 0.5 percent—the worst since World War II. There are 2.3 million properties in the United States that received a default notice or were repossessed last year. And this number is set to rise in 2009, especially as vacant commercial real estate begins to be foreclosed. About 20,000 major global banks collapsed, were sold or were nationalized in 2008. There are an estimated 62,000 U.S. companies expected to shut down this year. Unemployment, when you add people no longer looking for jobs and part-time workers who cannot find full-time employment, is close to 14 percent. (see complete article here)
By Think Progress
Sunday, Feb 7, 2009 - The current recession that the United States economy finds itself in is, by far, dramatically worse than the recessions of 1990-91 and 2001. How much worse? The economy has lost 3.6 million jobs in the last 13 months. The Gavel compares these numbers to the two most recent recessions:
What 3.6 Million Jobs Lost Over 13 Months Looks Like!
This chart compares the job loss so far in this recession to job losses in the 1990-1991 recession and the 2001 recession – showing how dramatic and unprecedented the job loss over the last 13 months has been. Over the last 13 months, our economy has lost a total of 3.6 million jobs – and continuing job losses in the next few months are predicted.
By comparison, we lost a total of 1.6 million jobs in the 1990-1991 recession, before the economy began turning around and jobs began increasing; and we lost a total of 2.7 million jobs in the 2001 recession, before the economy began turning around and jobs began increasing.
The Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 598,000 jobs were lost last month, “far worse than the 525,000 economists expected.” The unemployment rate rose to 7.6 percent. The Wall Street Journal notes that the U.S. economy has lost 3.6 million jobs since the recession officially began in Dec. 2007:
Half of those losses occurred in the last three months alone, and the stepped-up pace of layoffs in recent months suggests no end in sight to the economic downturn.
The report, which included another sharp rise in the unemployment rate to a 16-year high, will likely up the heat on U.S. lawmakers to enact a large fiscal stimulus package.
January was a brutal month for layoffs, “as major companies ranging from Microsoft, Boeing and Caterpillar to Home Depot and Starbucks all announced substantial job cuts.”
