The the Hello and

Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. Just one guest today Christian

Parenti talking about his new book Radical Hamilton, an attempt to reclaim the

founding father from the bankers and Clinton Democrats

as someone who could teach us a lot about economic policy today,

especially as we face the climate crisis, which means a whole new approach to

industrialization that market processes won't deliver on their own.

First, a few words in the economy, which by most measures continues to crawl back slowly from the depths but remains in a big hole.

There was some excitement last week when new applications for unemployment insurance, initial claims in the jargon, fell below 1 million for the first time since mid-March, though it wasn't much below a million.

As we learned on Thursday morning, claims were back in the seven

figures last week at 1.1 million bringing the total number of applications

since the crisis began to well over 57 million. That doesn't mean that

there are 57 million unemployed people. Many were either

recall to their old jobs or found new ones. But the number of unemployed remains

very high. The number of people drawing benefits under traditional state programs was just under 15 million,

well off the mid-May peak of almost 22 million, but still well over twice as high as the record level

before the Corona crisis hit. That record, the way was set in May 2009 during the

crisis it used to be known as the Great Recession. Additionally over 11 million

people are drawing benefits under the special pandemic program which covers people like freelancers who aren't

eligible for traditional unemployment insurance. Add those together and throw in a few other

miscellaneous unemployment insurance schemes and you've got over 28 million beneficiaries.

That's over 16 times the number of drawing benefits a year ago.

...