Ninety-three American cities reported unemployment rates higher than 10% during the month of April, data released by the Labor Department on Wednesday shows. That’s approximately 13 times higher than the number of cities that claimed the same in April 2008. You’ll recall that the national unemployment rate is 8.9% and rising.

Additionally, just 117 cities posted unemployment rates below 7% during the same month. That’s half of the 347 cities with an identical rate in April 2008. Nine of the thirteen metropolitan areas with unemployment rates higher than 15% are located in California — yet another sobering statistic for a state facing a massive budget deficit and plummeting housing prices.

The state’s city of El Centro, less than a half hour’s drive from the Mexican border, had the highest rate in the country at 26.9 percent. The city has outpaced all others in unemployment each month in 2009.

Of the 49 metropolitan areas with populations of more than 1 million in the survey, Detroit had the highest unemployment rate of 13.6 percent. The city, home to the beleaguered U.S. auto industry, is the most prominent city in Michigan, which was the state with the highest jobless rate for the month.

It was followed by California’s Riverside area, which is north of El Centro and still smarting from the housing slump.

The Labor Department said that 291 metropolitan areas reported drops in the number of jobs from a year earlier.

Want another sobering number just to darken the day a bit more? The Labor Department is set to release unemployment data for the month of May on Friday. Economists project 520,000 jobs lost last month, which would bring the national unemployment rate up to 9.2%. Don’t expect that number to go down anytime soon, either. Predictions include well over 10% unemployment before the end of this massive recession.

How’s that $700 billion+ stimulus package that put us further into debt working out? No new job growth projected for 2009, a projected nearly 10% unemployment rate in the near future, American cities facing a quarter of their workforce laid off, housing prices still looking bleak, major American corporations filing for costly bankruptcy, and bailouts still coming down the road. And yet the White House will pull numbers out of its ass claiming that jobs have been created or saved.