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GRIM number of the week: 14,087,000.

Fourteen million, in round numbers — that is how many Americans are now officially out of work.

Word came Friday from the Labor Department that, despite all the optimistic talk of an economic recovery, unemployment is going up, not down. The jobless rate rose to 9.2 percent in June.

What gives? And where, if anywhere, is the outrage?

The United States is in the grips of its gravest jobs crisis since Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House. Lose your job, and it will take roughly nine months to find a new one. That is off the charts. Many Americans have simply given up.

But unless you’re one of those unhappy 14 million, you might not even notice the problem.

An initiative that would have asked voters to approve adding four appointed members to the five-member San Diego school board failed to gather enough valid signatures to put the measure on the ballot, San Diego officials said Monday.

San Diegans 4 Great Schools, a group supporting the proposed ballot measure, had submitted more than 133,000 signatures in April as they sought to qualify the measure for a future election.

However, the county Registrar of Voters found an insufficient number of valid signatures had been collected.

What began as a hunger strike among inmates of the isolation wing of California’s Pelican Bay prison has turned into a statewide display of solidarity. A number of prisoners in Pelican Bay’s Security Housing Unit, California’s highest-security complex, refused their state-provided morning meal on Friday to protest the inhumane conditions of their confinement. Inmates in the Security Housing Unit spend 23 hours per day in soundproofed, windowless cells. Their daily hour of exercise is walking around a small, walled space. The intent is to keep prison-gang members and those considered dangerous to others separated from fellow inmates.

Editor: The Casadys of People’s Food Co-op are in the news. Derek and Nancy Casady are suing some of the world’s largest financial institutions alleging fraud and misrepresentation around the federal government bail-outs. They have hired former San Diego City Attorney Mike Aguirre. The Casadys filed their suit as taxpayers. Nancy is the executive director of People’s.

By John Lawrence / Will Blog for Food

While the nation is close to a catastrophe of global proportions, the mass media treats us to one spectacle after another. Instead of discussing the jobs crisis or the debt crisis or the worst recession since the Great Depression, we are treated first to the saga of Anthony Weiner’s weiner followed closely by a 24/7 immersion in the Casey Anthony case.

By Gail Pérez / La Prensa San Diego

In 1970 when the Chicano community took over the land under the Coronado Bridge and demanded that a long-promised park finally be constructed in the Logan Heights neighborhood, park activist José Gómez announced to the world that anyone attempting to take the land from the community would have to “wade through our blood.”

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt / Excuse Me, Im Writing / July 9, 2011

He arrives after morning service, having thanked God for another day in an upright position. He stops at the nurse’s station, not to check in, but rather to greet whomever is on duty by first name, applaud the glorious weather, ask about the family, chuckle over the latest joke and say something as sweet and charming as his tousled white hair and proper bow tie.

San Diego breweries took home 19 medals at the 2011 San Diego International Beer Festival last week at the San Diego County Fair. Here’s a list of local winners, so you know what local microbrews to keep an eye out for. The contest included licensed microbreweries, small and large, and was based on guidelines published by the Brewers Association. There were 43 divisions/classes and many other sub-classes, plus mead and cider competitions.

Of note, Pizza Port, with breweries in Carlsbad and Ocean Beach, came out with the Best of Show for its Poor Man’s IPA and earned six medals, including three gold. And, Mission Brewery ranked high in the German-style ale contest, second only to Sunner, brewed in Koln, Germany!

On its current course, the United States is four weeks away from defaulting on its debt for the first time in its history. If that happens, businesses will fail. Financial institutions will fail. Home values will decline. Mortgage rates will skyrocket. Spending and investment will all but disappear. Social Security checks will stop being mailed. Everything from military pay to food inspection will be compromised, if not fully cut off. The millions upon millions of Americans who are unemployed or underemployed will be joined by millions more.

The “Just Say No, San Diego” Public Education Campaign released video today of Republican-controlled ballot measure campaigns using a phony petition to supposedly “lower gas prices” as a bait-and-switch in order to have voters sign ballot measures that eliminate a retirement safety net for city employees, abolish collective bargaining for construction workers and silence the voices of workers in politics.

Balboa Park institution lobbies for its financial backers

By Lucas O’Connor / Two Cathedrals / July 6, 2011

A new front opened last night in the saga of Balboa Park, with the Old Globe’s Executive Producer emailing the theater’s email list with a pitch for the Plaza de Panama Committee’s recommendations for park redesign and lobbying for theater patrons to contact their city councilmember. It reignites debate over Balboa Park’s future and sparks new ethical and pragmatic questions about the relationship between money and political lobbying efforts.

UPDATE: WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is pushing back against a Wednesday night report that the president is prepared to offer cuts to Social Security as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling.

Although specifics have yet to officially emerge, there is little doubt that among the Social Security benefit cuts the President is proposing will be a reduction in Social Security’s annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) through an obscure change in the COLA formula known as the chained CPI.

Update for those who haven’t seen it: The Washington Post reported last night that President Obama is “proposing significant reductions in Medicare spending and for the first time is offering to tackle the rising cost of Social Security,” in a meeting with top House and Senate leaders this morning.