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Three stories illustrating the attack on the middle class.

In brief: The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ household survey shows unemployment at 8.6 percent, and the payroll survey shows 120,000 new jobs in November (140,000 from the private sector, and a loss of 20,000 in the public sector). BLS also revised upward its job numbers for September and October.

What does it mean? We’re not out of the woods but we might be seeing some daylight.

Maybe. Here’s what you need to worry about:

First, this rate of job growth is barely enough to keep up with the growth in the working-age population. So we’re not making progress on the backlog of more than 13 million jobless Americans, and another 11 million working part-time who’d rather have full-time jobs. (more…)

Employment was up 120,000 last month and the unemployment rate dropped significantly, to 8.6% in November down from 9% in October. Job growth in October and September was revised up by 72,000.

While the employment story has improved over the past few months, the decline in the November unemployment rate isn’t as good as it sounds. People who drop out of the labor force, like those who give up looking for work, are not counted in the jobless rate, and about half of the 0.4 percentage point decline was due to this factor. In fact, about 190,000 of the unemployed left the labor force last month.

Once again, the private sector added jobs — 140,000 last month — and the public sector cut them (down 20,000).

The report is consistent with slightly better economic performance over the past few months. It’s always useful to average over a few months to work out some of the monthly noise in the data and over the past three months, employment is up by an average of about 140,000 per month, compared to 84,000 over the prior three months. (more…)

Terry Maile’s supervisor called her into a conference room with all of her co-workers to hear the news: It was their last day of employment at Level 3 Communications in Pittsburgh.

That was it. The jobs were gone to India.

“I couldn’t stop crying,” said Maile, a divorced mother of one, who until that moment had spent her professional life as a telecommunications worker before being laid off first by Verizon and then by Level 3.

Even then, Maile said, she still believed in the American Dream.

You’ve got to work hard… work hard.

Maile owned her own home. Although she had been forced to liquidate her retirement after the Verizon layoff, she had begun to build it back up. Then came the Level 3 layoff. It shook her to her core. (more…)

OK. Thanksgiving’s behind us, the 91% of the workforce with jobs are back to work, and in DC at least, there’s a sense of “what happens next?” in the air.

Here’s one man’s answer:

Anatomy of a failure: It would be a pleasure to never hear the words “super” and “committee” in the same sentence again for a while but I’m afraid it’s actually important to review what happened. The “both sides are to blame” meme is irresistible but doesn’t hold up to even casual scrutiny. The Democrats on the committee went deep into Republican territory with spending cuts, putting hundreds of billions of cuts in Medicare and Medicaid on the table, and asked for less revenue in exchange than they should have. But the Republicans wouldn’t really budge on taxes and that queered the deal from the start. (Their latest retort: “you can’t raise taxes in a recession… even the president has admitted that”… is nonsense. This is a ten year deal, one that could easily have the tax increases phase in later.)

I’m really not sure how this story gets told and who’d even want to hear it. But it needs to get out there.

Where’s POTUS? The president should not, in my opinion, take any heat at all for not playing along in the deficit reduction follies going on in Congress. The Republicans have made it clear that if he’s for it, they’re agin’ it and I don’t see what’s gained for him getting burned again by them. If I thought his involvement would contribute to a more positive outcome, I’d argue differently, but I don’t. (more…)

Newt Gingrich, frontrunner for the GOP nomination for president, wants schools to fire their union janitors and hire youngsters to do the cleaning instead. Get rid of those pesky child labor laws that keep children out of the classrooms and in the labor pool, Gingrich says. While at the same time, increase adult unemployment, Gingrich advocates.

Hoo, boy, it’s tough in our economy. I know you worry about your own little world, Bucko – whether you’re going to have a job, your shrinking paycheck, no health care, rising prices on everything… stuff like that. But, hey Bucko, it’s not all about you.

Show a little concern for those who’re taking a real hard hit in this lean year. Like Wall Street bankers.

Did you know that top executives at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and so forth are facing up to 30 percent cuts in their bonus money? Some of them are looking at a bleak, Dickensian end-of-year holiday season with no more than maybe a $5 million dollar bonus stuffed in their stockings. I’ll pause here for a second so you can reach for a tissue to dry those tears. (more…)

I want to thank you, thank you
Thank you, thank you,
Thank you, thank you,
Thank you, thank you. ~ Natalie Merchant, “Kind and Generous”

This week’s holiday mandates giving thanks. For many Americans, that is complicated by the harsh years since 2008.

There’s the bitterness of lost jobs, foreclosed homes and diminished opportunity.  There’s the resentment over bailing out Wall Street, then watching banksters grant themselves sensational bonuses while denying Main Street loans to save businesses.  There’s the fear generated by county club conservatives demanding draconian cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

It’s hard to muster gratitude while suffering, to feel appreciative while dreading a meaner future.

The past two months, though, produced glimmers of hope — the occupation, the election and the mid-November demonstrations. These events suggest empowerment of the 99 percent and emergence of change. They’re reason for thanks giving, especially by those formerly in the middle class who will for the first time experience this holiday without the traditional feast.

Change began in September with the launch of Occupy Wall Street. Previously, the disaffected had rallied and protested. The newly-homeless had held signs. The jobless had marched on Wall Street, the epicenter of the economy’s crash. But this was different. These rabble-rousers didn’t protest and go home. They dug in. They offered no end date for their cries for justice. Like the sit-down strikers who inhabited the General Motors plant in Flint, Mich. for 44 days in 1936 and 1937, these protesters are determined to stay as long as necessary.

The New York occupiers’ gumption and message – “we are the 99 percent” — inspired a movement worldwide. Activists encamped in more than a 1,000 cities. And when police tried to rout them, the occupiers defied the official oppression, just as the sit-down strikers did. Emblematic is the 84-year-old Oakland, Calif. protester who said after police pepper sprayed her in the face that the experience energized her.

Before this movement began, country club conservatives had confined political discussion and concern to government deficits. No one acknowledged the unemployed, the impoverished or the foreclosed on – except to condemn them. The occupations changed this. Suddenly, the media talked of the problem of sharply higher income inequality and wrote about highly profitable corporations dodging taxes. Abruptly, politicians recalled the agony of joblessness and homelessness. Amazingly, there was new emphasis on polls showing massive majorities opposing austerity for the 99 percent and supporting higher taxes on the 1 percent.

For those of us in warm homes, Natalie Merchant’s words send a perfect message to those encamped:

“For your kindness, I’m in debt to you,
And I could never have gone this far without you,
For everything you’ve done,
You know I’m bound – I’m bound to thank you for it.”

On Election Day, the majority put the 1 percent and their purchased politicians on notice. The problem for the 1 percent in a one-person-one-vote democracy is that they’re outnumbered. In referendums on Nov. 8, the majority rebuffed attempts to restrict the ability of citizens to vote and to collectively bargain.

Mainers reversed a Republican attempt to limit balloting. The majority there restored Election Day voter registration – a right they’d exercised without problem for 38 years before the state’s GOP-dominated legislature and GOP governor passed a law eliminating it. The 60 percent vote for reinstatement served as public censure to Republican lawmakers nationwide who have worked to suppress voting.

In Ohio, citizens reversed a Republican attempt to sharply constrict the right of public employees to collectively bargain for better wages, benefits and working conditions.  Ohio citizens affirmed their belief in unionization as a way to move workers into the middle class. The vote was 61 percent in favor of union rights, a margin that chastened country club conservatives, including Ohio’s GOP Gov. John Kasich, who said afterwards that he would “pause” to reflect because: “The people have spoken clearly. You don’t ignore the public.” (more…)

On planet Washington, where reducing the federal budget deficit continues to be more important than creating jobs, everyone is talking about “triggers” that automatically go into effect if certain other things don’t happen.

Yet no one is talking about the most obvious trigger of all — no budget cuts until the official level of unemployment falls to 5 percent, its level before the Great Recession.

The biggest trigger on the minds of Washington insiders is $1.2 trillion across-the-board cuts that will automatically occur if Congress’s supercommittee doesn’t come up with at least $1.2 trillion of cuts on its own that Congress agrees to by December 23.

That automatic trigger seems likelier by the day because at this point the odds of an agreement are roughly zero. (more…)

Why, you may be wondering, do politicians refuse to take the necessary fiscal steps to dislodge the unemployment rate from its elevated perch of 9.1%? Why, to the contrary, do they seem if anything intent on austerity measure that will push it in the wrong direction?

I can think of three reasons:

1) They want the president to fail;

2) They don’t believe fiscal measures will work;

3) They irrationally fear a higher budget deficit, even temporarily.

Re 1, what can anyone say? If you’re willilling to throw the economy under the bus to gain political advantage, you — not the millions hurt by your actions — should be the one who loses his job.

Re 2, I’ve got more sympathy for you. Folks have a hard time accepting counterfactuals — the idea that things would have been worse absent the Recovery Act. But the evidence is at this point pretty plain to see: here, where the economy improved while the Recovery Act was in place and stumbled as fiscal stimulus come off too soon, in the UK, where austerity is clearly stifling growth, and in southern Europe as well. (more…)