OH: Socialist Candidate for US Senate Blasts Democrats and Republicans on Jobs

An op-ed by Dan La Botz, Socialist Party candidate for US Senate in Ohio.

AMERICAN ECONOMY IN FREE FALL – REPUBLICANS, DEMOCRATS USELESS
   U.S. Congress Must Act Now to Extend Unemployment and to Create Jobs for All
  By Dan La Botz, Socialist Party candidate for the U.S. Senate

The U.S. economy continues in free fall and the Republicans and Democrats have proven to be useless. They have no program to deal with the Twenty-First Century Depression and the unemployment crisis. Millions of workers have lost their jobs since 2007 and next month one million will also lose their unemployment benefits, and yet the Congress is paralyzed and the two major parties are doing virtually nothing to create jobs.

The U.S. Congress needs to act now, first, to extend unemployment benefits, and second, to act immediately to put the millions of unemployed to work.

Look at the desperate situation we’re now facing:

· In June the economy lost another 125,000 jobs. This is mostly a result of the 225,000 temporary Census Bureau jobs that ended.

· The official unemployment rate dropped from 9.7 to 9.5 percent, but this is a deceptive figure resulting from the hundreds of thousands of workers who stopped seeking jobs and therefore are not counted. The BLS reports that in June there were 1.2 million discouraged workers, up 414,000 from a year ago.

· If we include discouraged workers and underemployed workers, we have a figure approaching 15 or 20 percent, and in the Latino and African American communities even higher levels of joblessness.

· Private employers created only 83,000 jobs in June, part of the 600,000 jobs that were created this year—but we have lost 8.4 million private sector jobs since 2007.

While Ohio’s workers and the country’s workers are losing jobs, Congress is as usual in gridlock, with the Republicans principally responsible for blocking attempts to extend unemployment benefits.

The Republicans and Democrats both call for tax cuts for small business as the principal strategy for creating jobs. At this point, in a Depression like the one we’re now in, this is nonsense.

What should be done?

What should be done to create jobs? The Federal government has to put billions of dollars into a new stimulus program, a larger and more effective program that will really create jobs for all at living wages.

What was wrong, you ask, with President Barack Obama’s original stimulus program? First, it was far too small, far too little, and it didn’t last long enough. Second, it was targeted too narrowly to infrastructure construction. Third, it was meant to shore up an antiquated and obsolete economic system, not to create a new economic system with a permanent full-employment economy.

As Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has written on several occasions, the Obama stimulus has been inadequate, failing to revive the economy. Much of that stimulus was focused on infrastructure construction, which goes to a very narrow part of the population, particularly white men in the skilled trades. The stimulus program does nothing to begin to restructure our economy, but simply tries to reinforce a couple of its creaking joints.

What’s the Alternative

We need a stimulus program that puts money not only into construction, but also into education, health care, mass transportation, green technologies. We need to create jobs not only for construction workers, but also for teachers, nurses, computer programmers, social workers, and millions of others. We need to do this and we need to do it now.

Until we create those jobs, unemployment benefits must be extended. Demand that your Senators and Representatives vote to extend unemployment benefits. We can’t stop with that, however, we have to demand that the Federal government create jobs now. We should demand that the government takeover idle plants and put them to work under the management of the employees who worked there and under a state and Federal plan developed to produce for a green economy.

How Do We Make This Happen?

We need to be building a movement to demand jobs. Right now the AFL-CIO and other unions are putting all their time, energy, and money into electing Democrats with the hope that the Democrats will create jobs. What will make both Democrats and Republicans be forced to create jobs is a mass movement of millions in the street.

We need to build that movement, like the one that created unions and forced the Democrats to create jobs in the 1930s. Like the civil rights movement that brought us the Civil Rights and Voting Rights act. Like the movement that ended the war in Vietnam. Like the environmental movement that has forced the government to pass environmental legislation. Like the LGBT movement that fights for equality for gays and lesbians, for bisexuals and transsexuals.

We know from American history, if you do not build a movement with economic and political power, neither party will do anything for you. We need to build the movement now.

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Dan La Botz is the Socialist Party candidate for the U.S. Senate in Ohio. www.DanLaBotz.com On Facebook: Dan La Botz, Socialist for Senate. Also follow Dan on Twitter.