The The Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. Two guests

today as usual. Alex Vatale, a sociologist who studies cops will explore the

reasons they're behaving so brutally against protesters and

what we can do to get them under control. And then Ben Tarnoff, co-founder of

Logic magazine, which covers technology, we'll talk about tech worker organizing.

First, a few words about the economy. we'll talk about tech worker organizing.

First, a few words about the economy.

Wall Street spies a bottom forming the economic collapse.

The evidence for this is rather odd.

On Thursday morning, the Department of Labor reported that 1.9 million people apply

for unemployment insurance benefits last week. That's the fourth consecutive weekly

decline and the lowest number since the surge began in late March. It's still a massively huge number,

almost 10 times the average before the crisis started. Almost 30 million people are drawing benefits.

That was down almost a million from the week before, but it too is still a massively huge number.

Almost 20% of the number of people who were employed before the collapse began.

The decline suggests some people are going back to work as states open up, but we'll see how the coronavirus feels about that in a few weeks.

Also ADP, the firm that processes a lot of payroll checks reported on Wednesday that by their lights only 2.8 million people lost their jobs in May

which was below what people were expecting. There are technical reasons why this might be

an underestimate but even if it's not it too is a massively huge number.

Many civilians are wondering why the stock market has been going up.

I'd say two things are going on.

First is this deep belief that the pandemic is just a temporary interruption of a great economy and that once

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