Unemployment stubbornly stayed at 10 percent in December, the government reported on Friday. “What’s going on in our economy is nothing less than a disaster,” Senator Bernie Sanders told Thom Hartmann on his nationally-syndicated radio program.  “We have massive unemployment.” As the administration and Congress worked on jobs programs, Vermont was awarded almost $5 million on Wednesday to train thousands of workers for good-paying green jobs.  As Vermonters and people in much of the rest of the nation shivered through the winter’s first blast of sub-zero temperatures, Sanders and other New England senators sought emergency assistance from President Obama so people don’t go cold in their homes.

Double Digit Jobless The Labor Department reported Friday that employers shed another 85,000 jobs. A staggering 15.3 million Americans are now unemployed. The number out of work for six months or more hit 39.8 percent in December, the highest level since records were first kept in 1948.  More than 17 percent of workers are unemployed, under-employed, or have stopped looking for work.  In Washington, Senate Democrats are crafting a jobs bill that would boost funding for small businesses, public services, infrastructure projects and energy efficiency programs. President  Obama planned to announce today new stimulus funding and to call for a new round of tax credits for clean technology manufacturing that will support tens of thousands of new domestic manufacturing jobs. 

Green Jobs A $4.8 million economic stimulus grant was awarded on Wednesday to the Central Vermont Community Action Council to train about 2,400 Vermonters under a green jobs program authored by Sanders. The Vermont grant was one of 25 announced by the U.S. Department of Labor. “One way to move our country toward energy independence, slow global warming and create good-paying jobs is to use energy in a smarter way,” said Sanders, the chairman of the Senate Green Jobs and New Economy Subcommittee.

Terrorism Reacting to the attempt to blow up an airliner bound for Detroit on Christmas Day, hundreds of law enforcement officers are being trained as federal air marshals and President Obama ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to do a better job recognizing serious terror threats and sharing information with those who can quickly disrupt plots.

Health Care Costs Health care spending in the United States topped $2.3 trillion or an average of $7,681 per person in 2008, according to a new federal study published on Tuesday. The figure was far higher than in any other industrialized country in the world. While the increase was held in check due to the recession, health spending still accounted for more than 16 percent of the nation's economy. The new analysis by economists at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid found that total national health spending grew 4.4 percent in 2008. That was the slowest rate of increase since the tracking began n 1960, but health costs grew much more than the overall growth in gross domestic product, which stood at 2.6 percent in 2008.

Prescription Drugs More than 1 million low-income seniors on Jan. 1 became eligible for more generous prescription drug benefits. Those who could be helped by the new law are those with life insurance policies and those who regularly get money from relatives to help pay household expenses but were previously disqualified because of too many assets or too much income.

Killer Cold An arctic air mass that sent temperatures plummeting across the eastern half of the nation was blamed for at least six deaths.  In Vermont, weather forecasters predicted low temperatures would fall to below zero in the week ahead. Nationwide, there are about 700 deaths per year due to hypothermia. Sanders and other New England senators on Thursday sent a letter to President Obama urging him to release $590 million in emergency home heating assistance.  Sanders last year authored legislation cosponsored by Leahy that doubled funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program to $5.1 billion, the highest funding level in the program’s history. The same amount was approved for this year, including $590 million in emergency assistance that the senators asked Obama to release. In Vermont, the emergency assistance could provide millions of additional dollars to the $25.6 million already allocated for the state, matching the funding level last winter when 26,313 households got help, 4,633 more than the year before.