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Macomb, IL – The midterm elections done, Congress must seize the opportunity to do something for the economy in its lame-duck session, which started this week: Extend unemployment benefits, which are due to expire, pass the President's $50 billion infrastructure program and Fiscal Year 2011 appropriations as meaningful measures to spur economic stability, if not growth, and let the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of households expire on schedule December 31.
But keeping hope alive will be difficult in the face of timid and demoralized Democrats and loud and emboldened Republicans spurred to fury by the Tea Party movement, some of which opposes jobless benefits, Social Security, Medicare and other social programs even as it protests higher taxes for those making $200,000 or more a year.
There are 14.8 million unemployed Americans, as initially defined by the US Department of Labor, according to its Nov. 5 announcement. The jobless rate was unchanged, at 9.6%, despite October employment rising by more than 150,000 jobs, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In Illinois, the jobless rate dipped below 10% for the first time since April 2009, according to the state Department of Employment Security, which reports more than 50,000 new jobs in the state this year.
However, long-term joblessness has increased sharply since December 2008, about a month before President Obama was inaugurated. The BLS reports that 41% of jobless Americans - more than 6 million people - have been unemployed more than 27 weeks, a 1% increase from a year ago.
What's far worse is that the number of part-time, "marginal" and "discouraged" workers is very high. In fact, a total of 84 million Americans are no longer counted as in the labor force - up 2% from a year ago.
These are jobless people plus those who work part-time but want full-time employment, jobless workers who'd not searched for work in the last month, and unemployed people who've given up looking altogether, because of illness, family obligations, transportation problems, etc.
That translates to a 15.9% unemployment rate: catastrophic.
Economic erosion has been made worse by an area targeted by the Tea Partiers and other business-cozy right-wing elements that seek more spending cuts: government jobs. Local government layoffs are happening at their fastest rate in 30 years, the Labor Department reports: Employment in local government, excluding education, was down 14,000 in October, according to BLS, which notes a drop of 123,000 local-government jobs over the last 12 months.
In fact, in the face of assertions to the contrary, Obama's economic stimulus worked.
(It must be repeated that that stimulus is not the same as the Bush administration's TARP bailout, nor Obama's loans or assistance to select corporations.)
Moody's chief economist Mark Zandi, at a Christian Science Monitor briefing in August, said, "I think if we had not had the stimulus, estimates put forward by the Congressional Budget Office are absolutely right: We'd have 2.5-3 million fewer jobs than we'd have today."
Zandi - a former adviser to Republican presidential nominee John McCain - added, "The benefits of stimulus are fading because we've gone from $100 billion in spending to zero."
Meanwhile, demonstrating once more that the economic disparity in the country is worsening, the Labor Department reports that the average work week (for those working, of course) is up, to more than 34 hours, and the average hourly earnings (for those working) is almost $23. That translates (34.3 x 22.73) to average weekly earnings of some $780.
That's average.
So that means, given almost 16 million Americans earning diddly, that there's a lot of wealth generated by the 2% elite.
Will Congress act?
Or will Congress act like cowards or bullies, putting political or personal interests ahead of the nation's?
Bill Knight is a freelance writer who teaches at Western Illinois University