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As we go to press, U.S. job loss
figures for November have just been released. The official unemployment
rate remains basically unchanged at 10 percent, with jobs still being
lost in construction, manufacturing and
information, while temporary help services and health care added jobs.
This still leaves the economy down eight million jobs since December
2007. When those who have stopped looking for work are included, the
rate is over 17%.
Consumer spending remains stagnant. Decreasing revenues
are leading to more and more state and municipal budget crises, and new
waves of service cuts and layoffs. The U.S. Department of Agriculture
reported in November that the number of Americans who lack dependable
access to adequate food shot up last year to 49 million. Tens of
thousands of immigrant workers are being fired as Obama
steps up ICE enforcement.
Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke
told Congress recently that the most likely scenario would be “a slow
recovery with no job growth.” Yet Democrats in the White House and in
Congress are recreating on the jobs front their approach toward health
care: keep shoveling money to the rich and corporations to create
incentives for them to solve the problem. That approach was a key part
of last February’s stimulus package, as well as of a recently passed
bill to extend unemployment benefits, which gave away tens of billions
of dollars in tax rebates to businesses, four times the amount spent on
the ostensible purpose of the bill.
Economists have begun to express worry about what will
keep the economy afloat now that the brief and slight impact of Obama’s stimulus is largely over. The economists’ worries
include a rise in prime mortgage delinquencies, which now outnumber
those on the subprime mortgages that fueled
the first stage of the crisis. The
Wall Street Journal reported
on Nov. 24 that one fourth of homeowners owe more on their homes than
they are worth, which will mean more foreclosures and further declines
in home purchases and construction.
The Los Angeles Times called pay cuts “the new normal,”
predicting that “for years to come, there [will be] masses of people
willing to do what you do—but for much less.” The paper said pay and
benefit cuts are an “inevitable effect of massive job losses and
plunges in consumer and business spending.” “Never has business shed so
many workers so fast, so many people failed to find work who are
looking for work, and so many dropped out of the labor force,” said
Allen Sinai, head of Decision Economics.
AFL-CIO jobs plan
Richard Trumka, head of the
AFL-CIO and generally a faithful Obama ally,
announced a jobs program on Nov. 17 that was cosponsored by the
AFL-CIO, the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza,
the Center for Community Change, and the
Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. The program includes five
planks: (1) Extend unemployment benefits and other assistance for
jobless workers; (2) rebuild America’s schools, roads, and energy systems;
3) increase aid to state and local governments to maintain vital
services; (4) put people to work restoring our environment, providing
child care and tutoring, cleaning up abandoned houses and more; (5) put
Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds to work for small and
medium-size businesses.
But even those modest requests have been rejected by Obama. While some Democrats in Congress, like the
AFL-CIO, want to use a portion of TARP funds to help small businesses
get credit, or to help homeowners with mortgages and to pay for
infrastructure, Obama is considering putting
those funds toward reducing the deficit.
In his article “White House Plans Sham Jobs Forum,” Black
Agenda Report’s Glen Ford wrote: “Civil rights and labor leaders seem
not to understand that their president is philosophically opposed to
programs that might directly impact on Black unemployment. The
administration is determined to keep spending down, now that Wall
Street has already gotten its trillions.”
But, said Ford, civil rights and labor leaders “chose to
pretend they hadn’t gotten the drift. Diehard Obamites
still cling to the notion that the president secretly longs to be
forced to come to the aid of workers and people of color. If they beg
respectfully enough it is believed that the president will hear the
voices of his better angels.” Proving Ford’s point, Hilary Shelton of
the NAACP said: “We’re not so much trying to convince him [Obama] to do something he doesn’t want to do, but
urging him to move forward on an issue we have agreement on.”
Ford’s observations were echoed by The Wall Street Journal,
which said Obama was “keen to avoid measures
suggestive of a second, big-ticket stimulus” and that he was “hamstrung
by the nation’s $1.4 trillion deficit and his pledge not to raise taxes
on middle-class Americans.” The Nov. 23 New York Times claimed
that “Treasury officials face a trifecta of
headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings
that come due in the months ahead, and interest rates sure to climb
back to normal as soon as the Federal Reserve decides the emergency has
passed.
“The White House estimates the tab for servicing the
national debt will exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202
billion this year. Other forecasters say the figure could be much
higher. An additional $500 billion a year in interest expense would
total more than the combined federal budgets this year for education,
energy, homeland security and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
“Scare stories from Wall Street”
But the very same day, Paul Krugman, The Times op-ed
economics columnist, downplayed the effects of the deficit in his
story, “The Phantom Menace,” stating: “Obama
ha[s] been intimidated by scare stories from Wall Street.” In fact, he
noted, “the big risk to recovery comes from the inadequacy of government
efforts: the stimulus was too small, and it will fade out next year,
while high unemployment is undermining consumer and business
confidence. … But instead, Obama is lending
his voice to those who say we can’t create more jobs. And a report
suggests that deficit reduction, not job creation, will be the
centerpiece of his State of the Union address.
“The concerns Obama expressed
become comprehensible if he’s getting his views from Wall Street,” Krugman stated. “Budget deficits will lead
to a collapse in investor confidence, and rates will soar. … It’s this
claim that Obama has echoed.
We would add the observation that all the figures being so
casually thrown to deny the possibility of job creation represent
artificial values with their origins in speculative capital. The
alleged debts created by lowered interest rates and increased borrowing
could be wiped off the books as easily as the trillions that were
forgiven the biggest banks and corporations earlier this year. Just
this month, as financial regulation “reform” was being debated once
again, there were reminders of equally huge sums wiped off the books of
banks owing money to failed insurer AIG.
And workers are supposed to accept austerity to pay for
such artificially concocted swindles?
Glen Ford’s predictions about Obama’s
“sham jobs forum” were more than borne out. At the Dec. 3 meeting of
130 business executives, union heads and economists, said The New York Times,
Obama “offered no promise that he could do
much to bring unemployment down quickly. While “he would entertain
‘every demonstrably good idea’ for creating jobs, he cautioned that
‘our resources are limited.’”
And what resources are available would not go primarily to
public-works jobs, but rather to tax breaks and job-creation subsidies
for business. Said Obama: “While I believe
the government has a critical role in creating the conditions for
economic growth, ultimately true economic recovery is only going to
come from the private sector.” Obama, said the Washington
Post, “repeatedly returned to his point that the
ability of the government to spur job creation is limited.”
A Workers’ Jobs Program
Clearly, workers need our own program for job creation. We
cannot peg our demands to what is deemed “possible” in bourgeois
political terms, or to what might be “realistic” according to the
dictates of the ruling class and its market mechanisms. We start from
the standpoint that every worker should have a full-time job at union
wages. We say that every service that a given community decides it
needs should be fully funded at amounts voted on by that community.
And, in contrast to our petty-minded “leaders,” we think
big: We say that such decisions must be aggregated nationally, even
internationally, and democratically voted on as part of a plan for
allocating funds to provide all the jobs and services needed. Of
course, only a revitalized labor movement, in collaboration with
revitalized movements of women, oppressed nationalities, fighters
against war, etc., can make such big ideas part of the common currency
of U.S. political debate.
Recent militant struggles by U.S. workers show
there are some signs, however modest, that fertile ground may soon be
discovered for planting these ideas. We refer to the September and
November student/labor strikes against fee hikes and layoffs at
California universities; the militant victory by striking graduate
students at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign; the prevention
of health-care givebacks by a 10-week Chicago Teamster strike; walkouts
among California hotel workers; struggles of warehouse workers led by
the UE in Chicago; and the unexpected rejection by Ford workers of yet another
concessionary contract.
It is from among leaders of such struggles, as well as
those leading fights against foreclosures and other battles of the
oppressed, that the beginnings of a class-wide fight for jobs will be
found.
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