Meanwhile, the Big News Gets Ignored

The Zimmerman case was one trial about one deadly encounter in Florida, albeit a particularly pathetic one.   Meanwhile, the big news gets ignored.... the jobless "recovery" America has had since the recession that began in 4Q 2007.   Mort Zuckerman has the data today:

The longest and worst recession since the end of World War II has been marked by the weakest recovery from any U.S. recession in that same period. 

The jobless nature of the recovery is particularly unsettling. In June, the government's Household Survey reported that since the start of the year, the number of people with jobs increased by 753,000—but there are jobs and then there are "jobs." No fewer than 557,000 of these positions were only part-time. The survey also reported that in June full-time jobs declined by 240,000, while part-time jobs soared by 360,000 and have now reached an all-time high of 28,059,000—three million more part-time positions than when the recession began at the end of 2007.

That's just for starters. The survey includes part-time workers who want full-time work but can't get it, as well as those who want to work but have stopped looking. That puts the real unemployment rate for June at 14.3%, up from 13.8% in May.  

The 7.6% unemployment figure so common in headlines these days is utterly misleading. An estimated 22 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed; they are virtually invisible and mostly excluded from unemployment calculations that garner headlines.