California's jobless hotline hours slashed. SACRAMENTO — Want help from the state getting unemployment benefits?
Don't call after noon. Because of federal budget cuts, the California Employment Development Department has told its call center workers not to answer its benefits hotline after lunch. Starting Monday, the thinning band of staffers will be reassigned to other duties from noon to 5 p.m., such as processing claims for benefits and responding to online inquiries. Limiting call center hours was the best of a number of bad choices, department spokeswoman Loree Levy said. "We're already having difficulties answering the phones. She urged claimants to use "self-help" options, including filing claims on the department's website at or visiting the agency via Facebook, Twitter or You Tube. Can Manufacturing Be Reborn in the U.S.A.? 'I wouldn’t say there’s a huge onslaught of manufacturing returning from offshore,' says Leo W.
Gerard, international president of United Steelworkers, the nation’s largest manufacturing union. 'Real' Jobless Rate Still Above 10% In Most States. So even if projections are correct that the economy is about 3 percent bigger than thought—say, another half-trillion dollars—the U.S. is still stuck in the slow-growth morass it has endured since the beginning of the Great Recession.
(Read More: The Economy May Stink, but the Market Doesn't Care) Nowhere is that more apparent than in employment. Though employment has risen by 1.3 million over the past year, unemployment that counts the discouraged and underemployed, as well as the jobless (often called the "real" unemployment rate) has remained stubbornly high, at 13.8 percent of the workforce, according to the most recent count. In fact, a state-by-state look at the numbers, released a few days ago and current through the first quarter, shows that just six states have real rates below 10 percent. Chicago’s Fast Food Workers: “We Can’t Survive on $8.25” Wednesday, Apr 24, 2013, 5:42 pm BY David Moberg Workers from Chicago fast food and retail outlets strike for improved wages, benefits and work conditions, as well as the right to unionize.
Foreclosure Crisis Still Has Millions in Its Grip. Five years after the mortgage meltdown sparked a wave of home foreclosures, millions of Americans are still in housing "limbo," battling to save their homes despite government programs meant to help them.
Courtney Scott is one of them. Having fended off three foreclosure attempts by her lender, she said she was hopeful that a recent national review of troubled loans ordered by bank regulators would help resolve her long-running effort to modify the loan on her modest suburban Atlanta home. Kelefa Sanneh: David Graeber and the Anarchist Revival. In the summer of 2011, when David Graeber heard rumors of a mobilization against Wall Street, he was hopeful but wary.
Graeber is an anthropologist by trade, and a radical by inclination, which means that he spends a lot of time at political demonstrations, scrutinizing other demonstrators. When he wandered down to Bowling Green, in the financial district, on August 2nd, he noticed a few people who appeared to be the leaders, equipped with signs and megaphones. All Ye Progressives, Take Heart. The Grand Old Party will eventually be the Dead Old Party: the inexorable logic of numbers.
Of 285 cities with populations above 100,000, Obama failed to capture only four—Phoenix, Oklahoma City, Fort Worth and Salt Lake City. Progressives—and pretty much most sane people—are understandably in a funk about the recent victories of those who think that it’s women’s bodies, not guns, that should be controlled by federal regulation. Yet, while these are painful times, it is in fact the Republicans who should suffer long-term depression. About the same time the gun reform legislation went down to defeat, in mid-April, the National Republican Caucus met. Their goal: To understand their loss in 2012 in order to forge a winning national strategy for 2016. It was a fractious meeting. The benighted Republican leadership—and most political commentators as well—describe us as a nation divided, evenly and forever, between red and blue states.
$2 Trillion Underground Economy May Be Recovery's Savior. Shadow economies are usually associated with illegal activity, such as drug dealing.
But anecdotal evidence indicates that off-the-books work in today's job market includes personal and domestic workers, such as housekeepers and nannies. "The jobs are in service industries from small food establishments to landscaping. " said David Fiorenza, an economy professor at Villanova University. "Even the arts and culture industry is not immune to working off the books in areas of music and entertainment. " US underground economy doubles from 2009 to 2012 - Charlotte Libertarian Philosophy. A recent study by Edgar Feige, an economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, suggests that the size of the underground economy in the U.S. in 2012 reached $2 trillion.
A study done by Friedrich Schneider, a professor at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, suggests that this figure was only $1 trillion in 2009.