Fred Goldstein
Everyone by now has heard that the recession is over. The government says it ended in June 2009.
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Yes, it ended for businesses. Their production and profits began to rise. It ended for the giant transnational FedEx. Its profits just doubled. But FedEx also announced it is going to lay off 17,000 workers in the U.S. It ended for General Motors and Chrysler. They are showing a profit after getting an $85 billion bailout and terminating more than 100,000 workers.
The downturn in business lasted 19 months, the longest since the Great Depression. But since then, in the last 14 months of “recovery” for big business, unemployment has been going up.
Altogether, the capitalist class laid off more than 8 million workers from 2007 to 2009 and cut the wages and benefits of many more.
The downturn has continued for millions who cannot live on government statistics. The gross domestic product may have gone up, starting last June, but there is no recovery for the 30 million workers without jobs or on short hours.
Just last week the first-time filings for unemployment jumped by 12,000 — from 453,000 to 465,000. The layoffs keep on coming.
There is no recovery for the 2.3 million families who have lost their homes to foreclosures or the millions more facing future foreclosures and evictions. There is no recovery for the 45 million people living at or below the official poverty level — which includes one in every five children in the United States. Or for the 45 million people living on food stamps. Or for the 50 million people without health care.
Statistics confirm that this downturn reinforces racial, national and gender inequality because it hurts the African-American, Latino/a, Asian and Native communities and women disproportionately. Youth have the highest unemployment rate of all, especially racially oppressed youth.
What the workers, communities, youth and students are facing is not a recovery but a wholesale breakdown of the capitalist profit system — with no end in sight. The working class and the oppressed will never get out of this crisis by relying on politicians wedded to the capitalist system.
The only way out is for the workers to organize and fight on their own, independently, by means of militant mass struggle.
This is a gigantic jobless recovery. And things are about to get worse. The stimulus package, inadequate as it was, is running out. State budgets are about to suffer further cuts in jobs and services.
Election promises versus reality
It is election season. All the politicians of both capitalist parties are on the stump talking about jobs and blaming each other.
The Republicans openly show their racism and contempt for the working class. They block every proposal that would give even the smallest relief to the masses. They are trying to stop the trickle-down “jobs” bill that the Democratic Party leadership put forward.
But what does that bill do? It gives $50 billion to the bosses in tax cuts and easier terms for their business loans.
This is not a jobs bill. It is a handout to the capitalists in the hope that the bosses will create some jobs.
That’s been tried already — and failed. The $787 billion stimulus bill left 15 million workers officially unemployed. Millions more have dropped out of the workforce and aren’t counted. Giving the bosses $50 billion more in tax breaks and loans will hardly make a dent in the massive unemployment. It’s growing every month.
But meager as the Democrats’ bill is, the Republicans oppose it. So the strategy of the Democratic Party leaders is to tell the workers to vote for them — because the Republicans are even worse.
Most workers already see the Republicans for the right-wing, racist reactionaries they are. They hold hands with the ultra-rightist Tea Party. They inflame anti-Muslim sentiment. They scapegoat undocumented workers for the unemployment crisis. They are largely rejected by the workers and the Black, Latino/a, Asian and Native communities, and rightfully so.
But Democratic Party leaders are trying to divert attention from the fact that they gave the bankers trillions of dollars in bailouts when they should have been giving jobs to the millions being laid off. They gave the auto barons another $85 billion to shut down factories and lay off workers.
The Democratic Party leaders let the Employee Free Choice Act go down the drain. They didn’t even pretend to fight. EFCA would have made it easier for workers to get a union when a majority signed union cards. Instead, they have to go through the cumbersome National Labor Relations Board electoral process and face years of challenges by the company. EFCA was the most important piece of labor legislation in a decade since the anti-scab bill that the Clinton administration let die.
Yes, the Republican Party is racist. But since the Democratic Party took over Homeland Security, it has surpassed the Bush administration in carrying out deportations of undocumented workers. It has sent troops to the border of Mexico and allowed fascists like Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Phoenix, Ariz., to brutalize undocumented workers and prisoners.
The Obama administration has also fostered the charter school movement. This so-called “race to the top” would let most of the already run-down public schools go all the way down and then privatize a section of the school system. Part of the program is to break teachers’ unions all over the country.
The Obama Justice Department has just authorized the FBI to make simultaneous raids on the homes and offices of anti-war activists in Minneapolis and Chicago and in Michigan and North Carolina. FBI SWAT teams broke down doors, ransacked apartments and seized documents, computers and other material based on trumped-up charges of aiding “terrorism.”
This is a McCarthyite, COINTELPRO-style frameup/fishing expedition. It is an attempt to suppress the anti-war and anti-imperialist activities of the Minnesota Anti-War Network, Students for a Democratic Society and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
Both are war parties
Suppressing anti-war activity is in line with the aims of the Pentagon. The Democrat-led Congress has voted $800 billion this year to carry out wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan and fund the occupation of Palestine by the Israelis and the Zionist war against Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon.
This money could be used for jobs, for restoring people to their homes and for keeping services from being cut. Instead, it is spent to keep the giant oil companies in control of the Middle East; it is used to spread U.S. corporate influence in Latin America and around the world.
This is nothing new for the Democratic Party.
It is an imperialist party that defends capitalism at home and abroad. Its leadership is tied to the giant monopolies, the banks and the military-industrial complex.
It was the administration of Harry Truman that dropped the atom bomb on Japan and launched the Korean War. It was the Kennedy and Johnson administrations that started and escalated the Vietnam War. The failed attempt to invade Iran was under Jimmy Carter. The Clinton administration invaded Yugoslavia and at the same time destroyed welfare, instituted NAFTA and passed the first “anti-terrorist” law, as well as the Effective Death Penalty Act.
All were Democrats.
What can be done?
Under capitalism, workers can’t survive without a job. So the fight for a job is the fight for life.
Workers must oppose racist, divisive tactics and open up a struggle to make a job a right for every worker who needs one. Take the trillions of dollars spent on bank bailouts, the bosses’ wars and occupations and spend them on a real jobs program.
The politicians are running around talking about how much they care about jobs. But they won’t talk about the big issue: that the capitalists are not hiring. The government can shovel money at the banks, but they won’t lend unless they are guaranteed a profit. The government can give tax breaks to companies, but they won’t hire unless they can make a profit.
But if the capitalists won’t create jobs, the government can.
This is what happened in the 1930s. The workers battled until they won the Works Progress Administration and other government jobs programs. No capitalist bosses were involved. If a worker needed a job and was qualified, he or she got a job. No one had to beg a boss to be hired. No one had to make a profit before the workers could be hired.
The wages were at prevailing levels. More than 8 million workers were hired from 1935 to 1943 to build roads, dams, parks and public buildings; to plant trees; to create art and theater; to collect oral histories about slavery, among many other projects.
People might say a WPA program now is “pie in the sky.” Congress will never do it.
The way to get the pie out of the sky and onto the table is tried and true: Mobilize masses of people to go to Washington and shut it down until the government comes up with the money.
The politicians have been giving money to billionaires on Wall Street and corporate owners. It can be the workers’ turn if they organize to fight instead of being herded into a futile election campaign.
The right to organize a union and the eight-hour day were once called pie in the sky. Civil rights and affirmative action were pie in the sky. So were Social Security, unemployment insurance and many other things workers are now entitled to. But they were made real by great mass struggles.
Demanding these basic necessities also puts the working class in a stronger position to fight for an economy run on a planned, cooperative basis to meet human need and not capitalist greed. A social system that serves people instead of profits. That can really end war and exploitation. It’s called socialism and it also doesn’t have to be pie in the sky.
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