By The Editors
The January 14 news article in the Washington Post describes in wrenching detail the struggle of several Washington-area families who, having lost their relatively well-paying jobs, are struggling to hold on to a basic standard of living.

It’s clear that, if they lose that struggle, what likely awaits them is what awaits many others unable to overcome a fruitless search for work: homelessness.

By The Editors
These are the Americans who are disappearing. Their jobs have ceased to exist, and so – because work anchors most people to the civic life of their local communities and the larger society – they, too, are effectively ceasing to exist, vanishing like dust in the wind.

By The Editors
President Obama Friday quickly signed legislation the House of Representatives had passed at midnight Thursday authorizing more than $800 billion in tax cuts and extending unemployment benefits to millions of jobless workers for the next 13 months.

By The Editors
The Senate appeared ready Tuesday to pass the controversial compromise tax plan fashioned by President Obama and Congressional Republicans, legislation that would also extend unemployment benefits to millions of jobless workers to the end of 2011.

By Lee A. Daniels
The deal between President Obama and the Congressional Republicans has been struck. Whether it will hold amid fierce criticism from some Democratic Party activists and liberal pundits and some Democrats in Congress remains to be seen.

By The Editors
Are America’s long-term unemployed – those unable to find work for six months or more – being pushed further down the road to ruin?

Two million of the nation’s nearly 15 million jobless workers will lose their unemployment benefits between November 30 and December 31 unless Congress once again extends unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed.

By The Editors
In mid-November, right after the mid-term elections, the new Congress will immediately face a revealing test of its character: It will have to decide whether to extend the federal unemployment benefits that have kept millions of Americans afloat through the long-lived economic crisis.

By Lee A. Daniels
There is no good news in last week’s federal jobs report. The situation its statistics outline is largely unchanged from that of August or even of several months earlier. But that is precisely why it’s seemed to produce a noticeable sag in the spirits of Democratic Party partisans, who had hoped for a political boost going into the mid-term elections early next month – and in the hopes of millions of American workers.

By The Editors
How many canaries can a mine hold?

By now, the U.S. economy must have enough of those early-warning sentinels of impending disaster to make up a symphony orchestra – with more joining the ensemble seemingly every day.

But the tune they’re tweeting sounds ominously like a dirge.

By Lee A. Daniels
The Great Recession still gripping the American economy has produced alarming numbers in such volume and for so long that new ones have lost their power to shock.

But among the fateful questions those numbers provoke are these: Is the American middle class as a whole caught in a spiral of downward mobility? And are the black and Latino middle classes caught in spirals of even greater virulence.