The Three Million Forgotten Victims of the Great Recession

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/joshua-holland/58896/the-three-million-forgotten-victims-of-the-great-recession

The Three Million Forgotten Victims of the Great Recession
Economic Equity | Jobs
by Joshua Holland | October 10, 2014 - 9:20am

Washington greeted the latest jobs numbers with enthusiasm. In September, the unemployment rate fell below six percent for the first time since July, 2008. We’ve netted 2.64 million jobs over the past 12 months, and are on pace to add more jobs in 2014 than in any year since 1999.

But today, five years after the economy officially went into “recovery,” three million people remain among the ranks of the long-term unemployed — jobless for 27 weeks or more. That number is down from its 2010 peak, but as the Economic Policy Institute’s David Cooper noted earlier this year, it still “far exceeds pre-Great Recession levels in virtually every state.”

About a million Americans have been unemployed for two years or longer, and approximately 100,000 have been jobless for at least five years.

These are the forgotten victims of the economic meltdown triggered by the crash of Wall Street’s grand casino.