With 25 million out of work or underemployed, the U.S. is in the grips of a jobs depression

Eight months ago, Deborah Burnley, an administrative assistant in Baltimore, suddenly found herself among America's growing army of unemployed. Losing her job at a cash-strapped non-profit was a demoralizing and debilitating experience, she says, and to keep her spirits from crashing she's sought solace in, of all things, the bleak arithmetic of her job hunt: 226 positions applied for, six temp agencies engaged, and countless miles travelled across the region for interviews. "I try to think of it as a numbers game, that each day is basically one more step closer to being employed," says Burnley, 52. In other words, if she applies for enough positions, and meets enough prospective employers, some day - eventually - she's bound to find work. But even as she clings to that hope, Burnley acknowledges she and her husband, who also lost his job as a facilities manager six weeks ago, have depleted their savings and almost maxed out their credit cards. "It can be hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel."

Two-and-a-half years after the Great Recession was deemed officially over, that light has never seemed dimmer for the close to 25 million Americans who are either out of work or underemployed today. Like a gaping wound at the heart of the economy, the U.S. job crisis has cast a vast swath of the population into a state of semi-permanent unemployment. At the same time, America's housing market is in a shambles and poverty is on the rise. Even if economists weren't already once again warning of another global recession, a realization is slowly setting in: the United States is suffering from an outright economic depression, and it threatens to leave a deep scar on the American psyche for decades to come. As Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and a former secretary of labour, put it recently: "America's ongoing jobs depression, which is what it deserves to be called, is the worst economic calamity to hit this nation since the Great Depression."

Since the Occupy movement began we have see cops nationwide abuse pepper spray. From the first incident where NYPD sprayed a group of women protesters to a UC Davis cop spraying a group of non-combatitative student protesters in California. What was the intial purpose of pepper spray? Kamran Loghman, the inventor of pepper spray, tells us what the intentions of the chemical agent are for and why he thinks police are abusing his invention.

In Northeast Arizona the Navajo nation is living on contaminated land. The land was once full or uranium ore and in the 1940's the Navajo natives were employed by the US government to mine the Uranium ore. But since then the Navajo have been suffering severe health issues from the contamination of the elevated levels of radiation. Marina Portnaya reports.

The Police State. Are we there yet? In this local NBC news report you will see US cops shooting a man dead, punching women in the face, electrocuting someone pleading for mercy and screaming at a youngster on a skateboard while shoving him to the ground. But none of them are going to jail. Instead, Micheal Allinson is facing 75 years behind bars for 'eavesdropping on the police without their consent' when he recorded police coming to confiscate his car at his mother's home.

Crooked lobbyist Jack Abramoff explains how he asserted his influence in Congress for years, and how such corruption continues today despite ethics reform. (mirrored from http://youtu.be/CHiicN0Kg10)


Source: CBS

The following video is the full interview of Marina Portnaya, RT journalist, with rapper Immortal Technique at the Occupy Wall Street camp in New York in October. IT has some prescient things to say about the movement and what it is up against.

Nearly 1 million undocumented immigrants could live and work openly in California with little or no fear of deportation under an initiative unveiled Friday by a state legislator and others.

Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes, a Democrat, is helping spearhead the measure, called the California Opportunity and Prosperity Act.

The proposal was filed Friday with the state Attorney General's Office, marking a first step toward a drive to collect the 504,760 voter signatures needed to qualify for the ballot.

Fuentes called the measure a "moderate, common-sense approach" necessitated by the federal government's inability to pass comprehensive immigration reform.

An official at the University of North Texas says a man has been found dead at a campsite on the school's campus where Occupy Denton protesters have been gathering.

The Dallas Morning News reports that university spokesman Buddy Price says officers from the school's police department found the man's body Saturday after someone called authorities. Price says no one else was at the encampment when police arrived.

He told the newspaper the man is believed to have been a member of the Occupy Denton encampment.

The man's name and age have not been released. An autopsy is pending.

University police referred calls to Price on Saturday night. Price did not immediately return a phone call to The Associated Press.

Denton is about 40 miles northwest of Dallas.

Source: The Dallas Morning News

An 85-year-old woman said Saturday that she was injured and humiliated when she was strip searched at an airport after she asked to be patted down instead of going through a body scanner, allegations that transportation security officials denied.

Lenore Zimmerman said she was taken to a private room and made to take off her pants and other clothes after she asked to forgo the screening because she worried it would interfere with her defibrillator. She missed her flight and had to take one 2 1/2 hours later, she said.

"I'm hunched over. I'm in a wheelchair. I weigh under 110 pounds (50 kilograms)," she said from her winter home at a seniors community in Coconut Creek, Florida. "Do I look like a terrorist?"

But the Transportation Security Administration said in a statement Saturday that no strip search was conducted.

"While we regret that the passenger feels she had an unpleasant screening experience, TSA does not include strip searches as part of our security protocols and one was not conducted in this case," the statement read.

Why is the American establishment media sanitizing reality?

The December 5th, 2011 cover of Time Magazine represents a disturbing truth: the American corporate-controlled establishment media presents a picture of the world that is meant to placate and pacify the people of the United States in favor of presenting reality as it is.

While the covers of the European, Asian, and South Pacific editions have an image of chaos in the streets in Egypt with "Revolution Redux" in bold white letters in the center, the American edition is a cartoon with the headline "Why Anxiety is Good for You."

Is this just a meaningless marketing tactic or does it exemplify the greater trend in how the American corporate media presents the world to the people of the United States?

I tend towards the latter, given the fact that this is something that is inescapable when consuming media marketed to people in the United States.