The September jobs report is out: The private sector gained 64,000 jobs in September…  The public sector lost 159,000. And they weren’t all census jobs, either. Local governments fired 76,000 workers. In other words, this is the first jobs report in recent months that isn’t driven by census layoffs. If there were no census jobs [...]

Building Bridges: Your Community and Labor Report, National Edition
– Produced by Ken Nash and Mimi Rosenberg

Nobel prize winner Joe Stieglitz recently called for a second stimulus to reduce unemployment and get the economy working well again. But the Administration seems uninterested in pushing the idea or making it an issue in the election, because it has been unsuccessful in setting the necessary frame for persuading the public that its first inadequate stimulus was only a political compromise that has done some good, but left much more yet to do. Yet we badly need that second stimulus, and if the Democrats could get their act together, get people back to work this month, and were willing to get rid of the filibuster in the Senate, we could have it quickly, and they probably could even avoid catastrophic losses in November.

WARNING: DON’T READ THIS EXCERPT FROM A NEWT GINGRICH CAMPAIGN MEMO WHILE EATING. IT IS DISGUSTING.

This story originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.

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Weekly Audit: One Nation with No Jobs

Criminal background checks may keep parolees out or work long after their debt to society has been paid. Bad for citizens, good for the bottom line of for-profit prisons.

To the surprise of no one who’s paying attention to the American economy’s stall, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz yesterday called for a second federal stimulus, saying Americans face a significant reduction in standard of living because they no longer have home equity on which to borrow, spend, and live.

Cross-posted at River Twice Research.

So bipartisanship isn’t dead. By a vote of 348-79, Democrats and Republicans alike put aside their acrimonious differences and agreed, at least for a moment, to stop blaming each other for the sad state of American economic life. Instead, they agreed to blame China.

The bill authorizes the president of the United States to impose tariffs on Chinese goods in response to what it considers an illegal subsidy of Chinese exports in the form of an undervalued currency. It helps that the supporters in the House know that this bill has precious little chance of becoming law; it will not pass the Senate and it is unlikely that it would be signed into law by Obama if it ever came to that. As a result, the bill is the perfect campaign gesture, bombastic, angry, self-righteous, and without much real-world consequence.

“There will be no Arizona in Massachusetts!” echoed hundreds of revelers of all races, religious, ethnic and national backgrounds at the South End’s Titus Sparrow Park, the first major campaign rally for incumbent Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray.