By Sam Wechsler – Talk Radio News Service

On Tuesday morning the Labor Department released numbers that show for the fifth consecutive month the jobless rate in metro areas increased from a year earlier. In May 2009, the national unemployment rate rose to 9.1 percent from last years’ 5.2 percent. The unemployment rate was higher than it was in May 2008 in all 372 metropolitan areas.

Two metropolitan areas in Indiana, Kokomo and Elkhart-Goshen, experienced the greatest increase in unemployment from May 2008, increasing by 11.7 and 11.4 percent respectively. These large increases are attributed mainly to layoffs in the transportation equipment manufacturing industry.

The Detroit Metropolitan area reported the highest unemployment rate in May 2009, 14.9 percent, among areas with greater than one million inhabitants during the 2000 census. The largest unemployment rate in the country, 26.8 percent, was reported in El Centro, California; Yuma, Arizona was second at 23.3 percent. Bismarck, North Dakota boasted the lowest jobless rate at 3.5 percent.

All metropolitan employment information for May 2009 can be viewed at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/metro.pdf

By Michael Ruhl, University of New Mexico – Talk Radio News Service

Paul Ingrassia, former Detroit Bureau Chief of the Wall Street Journal and Pulitzer Prize winner, said that Chapter 11 Bankruptcy may be of long term benefit to companies like GM and Chrysler. According to Ingrassia, bankruptcy could free the companies from contractual obligations which are otherwise overly burdensome to their operations. It would allow these companies to reduce the number of brands and dealers they have without lengthy legal gridlock, which in turn could provide the ability for the auto companies getting back on their feet through a very thoughtful reorganization. (00:48)

 

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Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and current senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute of Public Policy Research (AEI), gave a speech today focused on the problems America faces domestically and his thoughts about correcting such problems.

Gingrich’s speech was critical of Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic Party, and American culture in general. Gingrich expressed a desire for America’s poor to learn to bring wealth into their communities for themselves, not by doing so with the benefits of government programs.

Gingrich criticized Obama’s plans to improve urban education, even opining, “no one on the left is prepared to rebuild Detroit,” a city the former member of Congress was particularly adamant about rebuilding.

Gingrich’s plan to rebuild America focused primarily upon improving the cultural values that dominate our society today. Also, Gingrich praised former Mayor of New York City Rudy Guliani for his efforts to curtail crime in New York. Gingrich explained that American education must be reformed for our students to be able to compete with Chinese and Indian students.