Link: http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/10/19/jobs/

According to official statistics, the unemployment rate in the United States is now 9.8 percent. But those statistics understate the severity of the jobs crisis. The official statistics do not include the 875,000 Americans who have given up looking for work, even though they want jobs. When these "marginally attached" workers and part-time workers are added to the officially unemployed, the result, according to another, broader governement measure of unemployment known as "U-6," is shocking. The United States has an unemployment rate of 17 percent. Al Jazeera: Deep cuts push Californians to edge: They call it Tortilla Flats - a haphazard cluster of tents and tarps sprawling across a sidewalk and a vacant lot smack in the middle of Fresno, a city of 500,000 in California's Central valley. The tent city, reminiscent of the Depression-era "Hoovervilles" depicted by author John Steinbeck in his classic novel The Grapes of Wrath, is home to a shifting population of about 70 homeless people. WSWS: One in six Americans in poverty in 2008.