Didn't Obama promise us he was going to fix this if he was elected?

I think his program to bump our taxes and national debt through the roof should fix all of this. Don't worry - we will all be ok....

A lot of construction workers are out of work.  Even the ones in demolition.

Obama is doing about the same things as Japan tried to fix their banks (i.e. shifting bad debt from banks to the government instead of defaulting on it or paying it down).

It didn't work for Japan and it probably won't work for USA either.

Read this article if you want to know more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/12/business/worldbusiness/12iht-yen.html

Yeah, so it's true that there's also an inventory recession here... but there's much more than that too, with almost all the economic sectors getting affected right from the start.

One of the things that I always find disapointing about announcements like these is that they point out how poorly statistics like the Unemployment rate are measured ...

The economy lost 465,000 jobs but the unemployment rate only increased by 0.1% even though 465,000 jobs represents (far) more than 0.1% of the workforce. What this means is that we have had a remarkably large number of people (300,000+) leave the workforce because the economy is so bad they have no expectations of finding a job.

This is (obviously) done on purpose, which is why they don't publish the participation rate alongside the unemployment rate; and if they included information like the percentage of the workforce who were working part time, the mean and median wage for employees, and employee confidence in their company the economic picture would be far bleaker.

lets also not overlook the number of "underemployed," that is to say, those who aren't technically laid off, but are either forced to work less hours (4 days a week instead of 5, or etc. etc.), or are forced to work at a job that they are totally overqualified for; i.e. a laid off teacher working at mcdonalds or something.

I read that the "underemployed" numbers are as high as 12%, if not more.

The unemployment figure which the mainstream media usually reports is U3 unemployment. There's also U4, U5 and U6, which use broader definitions of unemployment.

You can find the more detailed data here:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t12.htm

Depending on the definitions, unemployment is between 9.5% and 16.8%. The last figure is U6, which is described as:

"

"

Spin into something good ey? er, At least all those workers now get to spend more valuable time at home with their loved ones.

But seriously, the USA is in recession and I, like everyone else, expected large job cuts and I'm sure many more cuts are yet to come. It's not fun for anyone, but hopefully recovery will begin soon.

Employment is one of the lagging indicators of a downturn because companies don't start hiring until they see things start to turn around

Your last statement is true, but it doesn't mean employment is a strictly lagging indicator. In a consumer-led recession, the turn around can't start before unemployment starts letting up. Simple logic there I think.

I really want to know how this recession can end while people are losing their jobs and lowering consumption, with their homes getting foreclosed pushing them even farther into poverty.

IMO there's just one way for the recession to end, and that's for more people and companies to get out of debt (either by paying their debt or defaulting on it, the latter of which will cause the banks and the government to lose a lot money due to bailouts).