How sick is the capitalist profit system? When the loss of 540,000 jobs in one month is considered “a good sign”! That’s how the economic pundits reacted to the government’s jobless figures for April, since they were allegedly lower than job losses for the previous two months. But even that figure is suspect.

The fact is real unemployment — reported figures plus “hidden unemployment — has passed 30 million, over 20% (not the government’s phony 8.9%). The latter figure represents 13.5 million jobless. Then add the 8.9 million part-timers who can’t find full-time jobs, plus 5.8 million “discouraged” workers who have given up looking for non-existent jobs, plus at least two-thirds of the 2.4 million imprisoned for non-violent crimes, plus the hundreds of thousands of jobless youth who joined the military, plus those on welfare who are forced onto Workfare who are not counted among the unemployed. Add it all up, and it easily exceeds 30 million.

This is “the longest, most punishing recession since the Great Depression.” (NY Times, 5/9; all statistics from that edition)

How sick is this latest capitalist depression? Consider:

• Nearly 10 million jobs will be needed just to get back to the “normal unemployment” at the start of the “recession” in 2007: the 5.7 million jobs already lost, plus the over 2 million jobs needed just to keep up with population growth, plus at least another 2 million jobs that will be cut before the economy may start growing again;
• Children in poverty will rise from 18% to 27.3% by 2010;
• Over 27% of the unemployed have been out of work for more than six months, the highest on record;
• Wages have been stagnant, while millions have lost their homes and millions more are behind on mortgage payments;
• “The employment picture for…men and women with four-year college degrees or higher is the worst on record,” now being labeled the “recession generation.”

Racism’s Special Toll

As has existed for generations among the last hired and first fired, racist discrimination takes a special toll on super-exploited black and Latino workers. If the “hidden unemployment” cited above is included, joblessness among black workers is at 30% and among Latino workers it’s 22.6% (doubling the “official” figures). Poverty among black children (39.5% in 2007) will exceed 50% when the “official” unemployment rate hits 10%.

The brutal fact is that, “There are a lot of people who lost jobs [that] …are not coming back,” according to Obama’s Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, especially in manufacturing industries like auto and steel. Many “are going to be economically desperate for many years” (Economic Policy Institute), especially when unemployment benefits run out (and only 40% of the jobless are even eligible at all), when tens of millions of workers with no health insurance fall sick, and when millions more who’ve lost their homes become homeless.

A 1971 Congressional study reported that for every 1.4% rise in unemployment, 30,000 workers die in the following five years. Amid this skyrocketing jobless rate, that means capitalism’s mass, racist unemployment will kill hundreds of thousands of workers in the near future. Truly the profit system is guilty of mass murder.

And this is in the “most advanced” capitalist country. Unemployment worldwide is in the hundreds of millions. Several billion try to survive on a dollar or two a day. This is besides the millions slaughtered in imperialist oil wars which will occur as long as imperialism exists.

No matter who’s in the ruling class’s White House, whether Republican Bush or Democrat Obama, unemployment and its gruesome consequences will go on and on, recession after depression….

Only the overthrow of the capitalist system by communist revolution, only a system without bosses and profits and racism and super-exploitation — communism — can free the world’s working class from the horrors of the murderous profit system.

Again… Figures Don’t Lie, But Liars Can Figure

Even the “official” figure of a “lower” amount of lost jobs in April is suspect. The government hired 72,000 people last month, mostly temporary workers to gather the 2010 census. When much of that is added into the reported 540,000 newly-unemployed, the total is well into the 600,000s. Moreover, the figure for March of 663,000 has now been revised to 699,000 and the one for February was upped from the initially-reported 651,000 to 681,000. So what will this April figure become when it is revised in a month or two?

And none of these figures included the “hidden unemployed.” So much for the “good news.”