The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently released the jobs/unemployment report for the month of December, 2011. The report shows an increase in the number of non-farm jobs of an additional 200,000 in December. The number of unemployed persons is 13.1 million, which gives an overall unemployment rate of 8.5 percent. This is a small improvement from the (revised) November unemployment rate, which was 8.7 percent. And that in turn was an improvement over the previous month’s rate of 8.9 percent. So, things are slowly getting better. But, we need to ask at least three questions to make sense of these and related numbers:
Over the last three decades the U.S. economy has gotten fundamentally out of balance and increasingly dependent on private or public sector deficits to maintain demand. Since the start of the Great Recession in 2008 we have replaced (by bailing out – mostly financial) private deficits with public deficits. Cutting the public deficit (without fundamental restructuring) without restoring another unsustainable private deficit (as in the late 90′s) will simply cause the economy to further decline.
A common theme among critics of the Occupy Movement has been the argument that the movement lacks specific demands. Seeking to address this point in his article 
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