As we head into the 4th of July with the economic debacle causing many towns and cities to curtail expenditures on fireworks, the depressing jobless figures are some of the terrible consequences of the slash and burn, laissez faire, government of, by, and for the wealthy few and corporations policies of the criminal Bush regime and its GOP supporters and cheerleaders.

Those jobless numbers are not just statistics but stand for regular people who struggle to find non-existent work, keep a roof over their heads and food on the table, for themselves and their families, while the top 2%, like the crooks in the financial system are being rewarded for their crimes with hundreds of billions in taxpayers' and borrowed money.

More than 70 years ago, the Great Depression, caused by an unregulated, greedy Wall Street, saw terrible unemployment too.
However, during the past decade plus, Clintonites and Bushites repealed and/or ignored the regulations that the New Deal put in place to prevent that Great Depression from occurring again.  They were aided and abetted by Repugs and Republican lite Democrats, some currently serving in the Obama administration.

Kirsten Downey, author of "The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience" wrote that in selecting his cabinet in 1933, FDR wanted Perkins to be his Labor Secretary, the first female Cabinet member, but "she had decided she wouldn't accept it unless he allowed her to do it her own way." 

"She ticked off the items: a forty hour workweek, a minimum wage, worker's compensation, unemployment compensation, a federal law banning child labor, direct federal aid for unemployment relief, Social Security, a revitalized public employment service, and health insurance.

"Nothing like this has ever been done in the United States before," she said. "you know that, don't you?"

"He said he would back her."

Unfortunately, we have a Congress where it is difficult to differentiate between the multi-millionaire Democrats and the multi-millionaire Republicans and a White House that is corporate Clintonite and filled with Wall Streeters and their ilk with not a 21st New Deal Frances Perkins or FDR among them.

Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) explains the bad job news.

"This morning’s employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics marked a year and a half of job loss and showed that the economy shed another 467,000 jobs in June.  Since the start of the recession, the labor market has lost a total of 6.5 million jobs, down from 138.2 million in December 2007 to 131.7 million in June.  As the chart below shows, the peak number of jobs after the expansion of the 1990s was 132.5 million jobs in February 2001.  We are currently 838,000 jobs below that figure.  In fact, the entire growth in jobs over the last nine years has now been wiped out —  the economy currently has fewer jobs than it had in May 2000 (when there were 131.9 million jobs).  And importantly, this decline was not occurring because the jobs weren’t needed — the labor force has expanded by 12.5 million workers since then, as the population continued to grow.  This is the only recession¹ since the Great Depression to wipe out all jobs growth from the previous business cycle, a testament both to the enormity of the current crisis and to the extreme weakness of jobs growth over the business cycle from 2000 to 2007.

"Furthermore, the loss of 6.5 million jobs over the 18 months of this recession dramatically understates the hole in the current labor market.  To keep up with population growth, the economy needs to add around 127,000 jobs every month, so the labor market needed to grow 2.3 million jobs over this period.  All told, the labor market is currently 8.8 million jobs below where it would need to be to maintain pre-recession employment levels.  If there is any good news in this report, it is that despite the increase in job loss from May, the pace of losses still appears to be slowing from the enormous declines of earlier this year.  In the first quarter of 2009, the economy shed 691,000 jobs per month,  on average, but in the second quarter the losses averaged 436,000 jobs per month. 

"The continued losses, however, mean unemployment is still rising.  This recession has set a new unemployment benchmark as unemployment has increased by 4.6 percentage points, higher than the rise of unemployment in the 1980s recession.  Unemployment rose from 9.4% in May to 9.5% in June as 218,000 people were added to the jobless rolls.  One of the reasons the unemployment rate did not rise more than it did in June was due to a shrinkage of the labor force of 155,000 workers, partially offsetting the labor force gain in May of 350,000 workers.  There are now 14.7 million unemployed workers in this country, up 7.2 million from the start of the recession.  The picture changes dramatically, though, when considering the broader measure of underemployment. If the ranks of the “marginally attached” (jobless workers who want a job but are not actively seeking work and so are not counted as officially unemployed) and “involuntary part-time workers” (those who want full-time jobs but can’t get the hours) are added to the mix, the figure rises to 25.9 million, which means nearly one in six U.S. workers (16.5%) is either un- or underemployed.

"The June employment report shows that while the pace of losses is stabilizing, the U.S. labor market is still losing jobs at a stunning rate, and unemployment continues to rise.  It is important that the relatively good news of the stabilizing pace of job loss does not overshadow the fact that the economy continues to shed hundreds of thousands of jobs per month and the pain in the real economy is deepening.  Unemployment will almost certainly pass 10% by the end of the year; the economic case for additional policy interventions to generate jobs and to assist those adversely affected by the recession keeps growing stronger. It is apparent that, despite the substantial positive impact of the February recovery package, the economy’s dramatic deterioration from November to March was even greater than anticipated.  Clearly, more work needs to be done to mitigate further damage."