New World Order University Forum

NWOU has been trying to put a human face, not a statistical face, on the global economic crash, but without much success. Recently we’ve come across more stories about hunger. This is part of the higher unemployment rates we’ve been experiencing in the past months.

From Forbes, 34 million people are receiving food stamps.

From CNN, the new face of hunger in Detroit.

From Huffington Post, food banks in Washington, D.C.

A couple of notes on unemployment:

John Williams’ Shadow Statistics points out that the real unemployment rate is over 20 percent in several states, and nationwide is about 16 percent. Here is the quote:

Current Economic Downturn Is Worst Since Great Depression

• Recession Started a Year Earlier Than Official Reckoning • Business Contraction Triggered Systemic Solvency Crisis, Not the Other Way Around • Still Heavily Gimmicked, Post-Revision GDP Shows More Realistic Numbers • Economic Crisis Is Far from Over.

• The U.S. economy is in a multiple-dip depression. The grand benchmark revision of the national income accounts on July 31, 2009 confirmed that the U.S. economy is in its worst economic contraction since the first downleg of the Great Depression, which was a double-dip depression. The current economic downturn increasingly will be referred to as a depression, and it is far from over. There will be intermittent blips of new activity, such as the current cash-for-clunkers automobile giveaway program that appears to be generating a one-time spike in auto sales. Yet, this downturn will continue to deteriorate, proving to be extremely protracted, extremely deep and particularly nonresponsive to traditional stimuli.

• Current Recession Now Longest Since Great Depression

• June U-6 Unemployment Rate Topped 20% (25% SGS) in Michigan, Oregon, Nevada, California, South Carolina and Rhode Island

• Inflation Signs Begin to Surface

• The U.S. economic and systemic solvency crises show no signs of abating, despite the happy hype out of Washington and Wall Street. While the pending second-quarter GDP estimate likely will show a narrowing quarterly contraction, such will be against a deepening annual downturn and revisions that should show the recession to have been not only longer and deeper than previously reported, but also the most severe recession since the shutdown of war production after World War II. Irrespective of media excitement around the fluttering of often statistically-insignificant or seasonally-warped monthly numbers, annual growth rates in key series have been holding at or pushing to new historic or post-war lows.

Mish observes that the social safety net is masking the effects of the Depression. Other posts on this site describe wage freezes and cuts, grocery store price wars, and other anecdotes about responses to hard times.

If hard times have found you, SurvivalBlog might help.

Tags: food stamps, hunger in America, survivalism, unemployment statistics

This entry was posted by Director on Friday, August 14th, 2009 at 3:19 pm and is filed under U.S. Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.