Nathan Newman Gets The Surging Jobless- and Fake Unemployment Numbers

Catch the key number-- a 4 million person increase in the number of people now without work compared to 2001, yet not counted as unemployed in the statistics.

As I noted last fall, since 1990, the number of people receiving disability pay has nearly doubled, to 5.4 million and we now have 2 million people in jails and prisons today, up from 1.1 million in 1990 and 500,000 in 1980. What you find is that the miracle job economy of the US is really a disability welfare state and a prison-industrial system which kept the unemployment rate down in the 1990s by keeping unskilled workers out of the labor pool to make the numbers look good.

Now, Bush's disasterous economic policies are making even those political patches ineffective and job numbers are in complete freefall. The lie of the unemployment rate mumbo-jumbo just can't disguise an economy unable to provide decent jobs for larger numbers of the population.