It is worth noting that those who today are proclaiming the end of the global recession are the same "experts" that missed the danger signs last time around. The massive injection of liquidity by world governments, "life support" measures for banks, plus stimulus programs such as tax cuts and support for home and car sales, have succeeded temporarily in cushioning the economic fall, but at the price of stoking record deficits and worsening already unsustainable imbalances in the global economy.

Now I see the news media happily reporting that the banks are making profits. But where are those profits coming from? Well, $38.5 billion of it came from overdraft fees like mine, according to Yahoo News.

If people too discouraged to look for work and those forced into part-time positions are included, the real unemployment rate is over 16%, or 25.6 million people. In contrast, in that alternative reality known as Wall Street, the elite bankers and brokers are not “sharing the pain.”

“Job Losses Slow, Signaling Momentum for a Recovery,” is how the New York Times phrased it. The cause of such optimism? Employers destroyed only 247,000 jobs in July.

California’s state budget is facing an enormous $24 billion shortfall. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is taking a lesson from his silver screen days to “terminate” the state’s welfare programs.

June 4: News headlines announce the latest casualties of the current recession, as employers cut 345,000 more workers from their payrolls in May. Yet somehow, this is good news!

Many signs point to us still being in the midst of a bleak recession. The current 18-month-long crisis is so severe that it’s “the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all job growth from the previous business cycle,” according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Workers represented by the Boston Newspaper Guild rejected the offer of the New York Times parent company. This offer would have slashed job guarantees and cut wages by more than 10%. After the workers brave stand against concessions, the Globe announced 23% wage cuts immediately coming into effect. This is not only against the contract with the union, it is also against the law.

In March youth unemployment nationally reached a shocking 21.7%. Massachusetts state programs that were designed to aid youth unemployment and end youth violence are facing massive cuts. The consequences of these cuts would increase crime and violence, lost opportunities for youth education and increase dropout rates which would be devastating for this generation of teens and our communities.

Between the beginning of 2008 and March of this year, over 60 percent of job losses across New England have been from blue-collar industries. Suzanne Bump, the state’s secretary of labor and workforce development, recently told the Boston Herald that “This is definitely a blue collar recession. Only 3.5 percent of folks who are unemployed came from business and finance.” The domination of big business and their banks created this mess, and blue collar workers are forced to pay for it.

The current economic crisis has fuelled waves of anger around the world. Prime targets are the top bankers and stock market dealers who epitomise the rampant, ultra-free market policies of the last 20 years. Backed by their political accomplices, they gorged themselves while workers’ conditions worsened, and finance capital drove down living standards in the neo-colonial countries. LYNN WALSH argues that behind the obscene greed lie more fundamental reasons for today’s global turmoil.

News Item: "The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities predicts the combined budget shortfall for all 50 states could total upwards of $350 billion over the next 2.5 years…."

“My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” President Obama said to a group of 13 major bank CEOs in early April. Obama was referring to the explosion of popular outrage in the aftermath of the $18 billion in bonuses paid to bailed-out Wall Street bankers and the AIG bonuses scandal. These scandals are increasingly exposing the rotten nature of the capitalist system.

It’s the first Friday of the month. Time for another round of bad news. 539,000 more workers were tossed on the scrap heap by the current economic crisis, hanging by a thread of meager unemployment checks until the benefits run out, with little hope of finding work.

At a February 26 press conference, President Obama said: "There are times when you can decorate your home and there are times when you have to fix its foundation. Today we are fixing the foundation."