New Yorkers protest jobless aid cuts, Fed’s policies

Protesters in New York City gathered on Wall Street on Friday, urging Congress to restore long-term unemployment benefits for millions of unemployed Americans.

During the demonstration in front of the New York Stock Exchange, the protesters also called for a change in the Federal Reserve’s policies which they said are in favor of America’s big banks.

The protest rally, dubbed ‘Rise Up for the Unemployed,’ came one day after a bill to extend the federal unemployment benefits stalled in the US Senate for the second time this year.

US senators failed to extend extended unemployment benefits on Thursday when Republicans blocked the legislation which called for a three-month renewal of an expired program that provided up to 47 weeks of federal benefits after the long-term unemployed would run out of state benefits.

Fifty-nine senators, including four Republicans, voted to advance the legislation, falling one vote short of the 60 needed to break a Republican filibuster effort.

Thursday’s vote came less than a month after US senators rejected the three-month extension of the benefits on January 15.

The emergency federal program, which was launched by the Bush administration during the recession, ended in December. The expiration of the program affected more than 1.7 million Americans while some economists have estimated that the number of Americans impacted by the loss of benefits will rise to 5 million before the end of this year.

Opponents to the program say the time has come for ending the program, citing the drop in the US unemployment rate, which has fallen from a high of 10 percent in October 2009 to 6.6 percent in January, as the reason.

However, much of the decline in the US unemployment rate is attributed to people who dropped out of workforce.

According to The New York Times, without the federal program, only 26 percent of American unemployed workers will be able to receive any type of jobless benefit by the end of 2014.