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TechnoratiObama Vows Stimulus Plans Will Create Millions of Jobs
WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama projected Saturday that his yet-to-be-written economic stimulus plan would create nearly 3.7 million jobs by the end of next year, mainly in construction, leisure services and manufacturing.
![[A woman looks at a job listing board in Oakland, California. Barack Obama's advisers said Saturday his economic stimulus plan will "save or create three to four million jobs" as the president-elect sought to stem criticism of the 775-billion-dollar plan designed to revive the troubled economy.
(AFP/Getty Images/File/Justin Sullivan)]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/obama_jobs_0111.jpg "obama_jobs_0111.jpg")
But the
projected $775 billion plan won't stop the nation's unemployment rate
from reaching about 8 percent by the end of this year, an analysis of
the plan says, and will only have brought joblessness back to current
levels by the end of 2010.
Obama's release of the study based only a rough draft of his stimulus plan indicated he wants to get ahead of dismal economic news, economists said.
The latest hit came Friday, when Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers showed another 524,000 U.S. jobs vanished in December, lifting the national unemployment rate to 7.2 percent, its highest level in 16 years.
"This is a very honest picture of what a stimulus package would do, but it's still not a very good story," said Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal think tank the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "It's saying we're in for some difficult times."
The 14-page report warned the projections were subject to "significant margins of error" and were based on a "hypothetical package" of measures that must still undergo Congressional scrutiny.
That didn't stop Obama from promising massive job creation in his Saturday address.
"The jobs we create will be in businesses large and small across a wide range of industries," the president-elect said. "And they'll be the kind of jobs that don't just put people to work in the short term, but position our economy to lead the world in the long-term."
The Obama plan promises to invest heavily in infrastructure, education, health and energy; send needed fiscal relief to states; increase unemployment insurance and food stamp funding; and cut middle-class taxes.
The projections show the plan creating 678,000 jobs in construction, 499,000 in leisure and hospitality and 408,000 in manufacturing. The plan would also lower the national unemployment rate by 1.8 percentage points by the end of next year, the analysis said.
Those job fields are the same ones that showed the biggest cuts in Friday's unemployment report, with about 1 million jobs disappearing in the construction and manufacturing sectors between Dec. 2007 and last month.
The labor report also calculated a whopping 15.3 percent unemployment rate in construction and a 17 percent unemployment rate in agriculture and related fields.
How the analysis reached its conclusions was uncertain since Obama himself has acknowledged that there is no finished proposal. Speaking at a Friday press conference, Obama said he would work closely with the Democratic-controlled Congress to hammer out the details of his stimulus plan, which remains little more than broad principles.
"If members of Congress have good ideas, if they can identify a project for me that will create jobs in an efficient way, that does not hamper our ability to, over the long term, get control of our deficit, that is good for the economy, then I'm going accept it," Obama said.
Baker said the stimulus plan will need to be much bigger if it's going to make an impact. He suggested offering employers more tax breaks for providing health insurance to workers and increasing subsidies to public transportation.
Baker also urged the Congress and Obama to work more quickly to pass the stimulus plan. Some Democratic legislators have warned that work on the plan could stretch on for weeks.
"Timing here is very important because every day we wait we'll lose more jobs," Baker said. "I'd like to see all of them be more ambitious."
McClatchy correspondent Steven Thomma contributed to this report.
18 Comments so far
Show AllYep, our government has been vowing to "create family supporting jobs" for the past 30 years now. Billions of dollars have been passed along to corporations, largely in the form of "tax relief", to accomplish just that. And it has been successful! Big Business has been using this money for massive job creation -- in Korea, Mexico, Pakistan, Russia, Singapore, Yugoslavia...
The capitalist class is grasping at straws in an effort to keep the global capitalist system afloat. They are resorting to Democratic Socialist "solutions" which embody the shifting of wealth from future generations of the working class to today's working class with the hopes of prolonging the status quo. Future generations of the working class will bare the burden of this pump priming through the huge deficits that this priming entails.
The economy, over the last 30 years has seen a major shift away from industrial capital to finance capital. Although REAL capital can only be created at the point of production through the appropriation of surplus value, the capitalist class has been faced with diminishing returns and falling profits. They've managed to artificially prop up the system by diverting their capital to the financial sector where their profits have soared on paper. This whole house of cards has been dependent on consumption based on debt, as the real incomes of the working class have been in real decline over this period of time. This shift to finance capital has resulted in artificial bubbles that inevitably burst because they had no basis in the real economy.
The hens have come home to roost. The Dotcom bubble burst, now the housing bubble has burst and soon we'll see the same thing happen to the credit card bubble and the most serious bubble of all, the ecological bubble that can result in the end of life on earth.
The capitalist system has become a moribund system, a cancer that is eating at itself and destroying itself. The costs of the crises are being foisted on the working class, as is always the case. But they can only grind down the working class so far. The only solution to the crises of the economy is to replace the capitalist system with a system that eliminates the anarchism of capitalist production - a socialist system. This latter system calls for the elimination of the capitalist class itself. The capitalist class knows this and of course will do all in its power to prevent this even though it will mean it must take down the whole planet to preserve its hegemony.
Obama didn't just happen through some act of God or accident of nature or the alignment of the planets. A major section of the capitalist class required a political instrument that could shift capitalism from the neoliberal model to a social democratic model, to correct the decades of wealth transfer away from the working class with the resultant loss of consumer purchasing. But true to form, the capitalist class wasn't/isn't going to pay for this lifting up of the consumer purchasing power by letting their wealth be redistributed. They are relying on deficits to be paid by future generations of workers to pay for this pump priming. They have agreed that whatever it takes to keep the class struggle from erupting to a full fledged revolution that will over-throw them is today's agenda. They are putting off the inevitable, but in so doing, offer no real "solutions" to the crisis bound systemic conditions of capitalism.
The question of the day, facing the international working class is whether this generation will plant the nail in the coffin of capitalism or leave it to their children and grandchildren to do so. Each day that passes makes this impending struggle more and more difficult and urgent if we are to have any hopes of saving this planet from ecological disaster. Obama's plan to pile bandaids upon bandaids in the way of pump priming, job creation through infrastructure investments, extension of health care, the greening of the capitalist economy, etc., etc. while a positive thing for the short term, will NOT resolve the ultimate problem of the unworkability of the capitalist system as an economic system that offers real solutions. It does however help to set in motion a sea change from the neoliberalism model and open up the possibilities of a more organized effort by the working class to heighten the class struggle and challenge the ruling elites through things like increased union membership, the only organized structures the working class has to directly challenge the capitalist class. Whether the working class in the highly developed world will seize these opportunities is yet to be written. Whether the working class will arm itself with the ideological knowledge it will require to take on its mission, is yet to be written. The forces aligned against the working class are indeed great. The capitalist state has become more and more evolved in its primary mission of safe guarding the hegemony of the capitalist class. The propaganda machine of the capitalist state has been very successful for decades now in convincing the working class that a class struggle doesn't exist and that the working class are partners with the capitalist class in this economic system.
Whereas the capitalist class is prepared to sacrifice certain things to some degree, you will notice that its real power, through its armed state - the military, prison system, judiciary, police forces, etc. are not being placed on the table for downsizing. This remains the trump card that the capitalist class will depend on to protect its hegemony. Now is the time for the working class to question and demand that the large military budgets of the capitalist states be rolled back and that money invested in the real economy. To ignore this is to leave the class enemy fully armed to continue to suppress any outcroppings of progressive change that is developing in the world. The working class needs to stop thinking of its interests as being confined to national borders, as the capitalist economic system knows no borders. The working class needs to adopt an internationalist perspective in its struggle against the capitalist class, if it hopes to be successful in its historic mission. Go back and read the classics of Scientific Socialism to get the roadmap to success.
endCapitalism, that was really an impassioned call for change (did you write this as a comment on this article? It's so well written :).
I have some problems with your arguments, though:
First off, times seem to have changed in some ways. The "capitalist class" that you refer to seems to have successfully convinced the "working class" that they too could be capitalists some day. For example, when pension funds invest in the stock market, essentially that's what they are attempting to do - IMO.
Also, I am not sure if an "international working class" exists anymore - the reason may be just human nature, selfishness, vanity and just plain ignorance. For example, suppose certain subsidies that are given to certain industries in a developed country are clearly shown to hurt the poor in a developing country - do you think the 'working class' in the developed country will be willing to let go off this subsidy? As another example, suppose you can show that regular meat consumption leads to ecological damage, contributes significantly to the climate crisis, destroys forests in other countries, etc., do you think the "working class" in a developed country would switch to a predominantly vegetarian diet - even if it can be shown that it's better for their health? Another scenario: if a typical workers union is promised certain benefits if they agree to go along with some proposed project that would seriously damage the environment in some other community, do you think they'll turn down this offer? They won't - because they have been convinced that they are the underdogs and they are the victims.
I can give more examples. But my point is that even those who might have been classified as belonging to the "working class" some decades ago, do not think and act like "working class". And I see NO evidence that the majority of this "class" have any sympathy or empathy for their counterparts in other countries, whatsoever. Their hearts have been hardened - partly by propaganda, and partly because it's human nature.
So here's my proposition:
Stop making the distinction between these classes, even as you continue to point out the evils of the capitalist system. Start from a humanistic approach - think of, and talk about, fairness, equity and sustainability. And about nature. Though sustainability implies that we shouldn't be messing with nature indiscriminately, some may think of only 'economic' sustainability. Instead, if you seriously think about ecological sustainability - and if you are convinced that it is a primary consideration, then that would lead to new thoughts, new actions, new creativity.
Discard all socialistic concepts that ignore or somehow downplay ecological sustainability.
Say "Never again!" to any form of authoritarian arrangements, even if it is in the name of the "working class". They are not good for the soul. The individual is supremely important - much more than any Utopian concept. An enlightened individual can easily work for the benefit of mankind, if that's what he's called to do.
Highintel: Can we do better?
Your response to my comment simply reinforces what I said, "The propaganda machine of the capitalist state has been very successful for decades now in convincing the working class that a class struggle doesn't exist and that the working class are partners with the capitalist class in this economic system." This great depression that we're entering is surely removing the blinders from the working class, as the myths that the capitalist class has been promoting all these years more and more lose any connections to the real experience that confront workers. That is why I suggest that capitalist hegemony and a real change to the system can only be accomplished by going back and studying the classics from the great socialist thinkers and agitators of the past.
The financial collapse is a case in point. Workers have been sold the goods that their economic wellbeing is tied to their investment in the stock market, as you point out. Hard reality has shown that this is a myth, a lie and the savings and future retirements of workers has been wiped out. More disasters are unfolding. The big lie is not sustainable when workers are faced with the reality that the system has failed them. Hence my optimism that real change is possible. But it's going to be a tough and painful change that we're either going to have to undertake or leave it to our children and grandchildren to handle in an even more painful time. Sad.
endCapitalism, I don't mean to be splitting hairs here - but what I was referring to is the absence of any great 'class consciousness' at present, because a 'struggle' would imply some kind of large-scale identification with a class - which existed in the first part of the 20th century. And, more than that, personally, I do not feel such an identification is necessary or useful (I may be alone on that). Although the capitalist system itself thrives on this distinction, it tries to keep it hidden. Based on my interactions with 'regular' folks, I think it would be difficult to convince the majority that they are in fact the 'working class' and that they've been suckers for this big lie all these years. It's an unfortunate human trait - that until someone is really driven to the brink, they would refuse to acknowledge reality. Especially if they are making a meager living by working as a cog in this machine. They are so afraid to lose their 'cog' position that they refuse to see that they could be victims. And if someone is fortunate to be making more than a meager living, then they clearly do not want anything to do with anything that 'smacks' of socialism. I know I'm rambling here - because I am thinking out loud. May be we'll get to continue our dialog another time :)
Highintel: Can we do better?
the root of the problem is the molecular and systemic alteration of our planet's natural substances and arrangements...
dfairley January 11th, 2009 5:11 pm
"These analyses fail to get at the roots of the problem".
Yes, they certainly do.
The root of the problem is the privately-owned Federal Reserve Bank which is suppose to regulate and stabilize this economy rather than create high-tech and real estate bubbles and risky investments like credit default swaps that are destroying the U.S. along with other nations who bought-into this 3rd party default bullsh!t.
Since the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, these self-serving scum have done nothing but create one inflation bubble after other while enriching themslves on the backs of the middle class and poor.
Nothing has changed; and it won't until this private-for-profit entity is dismantled and the Constitution is returned to the hard-working people of this country.
>>The root of the problem is the privately-owned Federal Reserve Bank which is suppose to regulate and stabilize
I too have been trying to wrap my head around the monetary system. Ron Paul talks about it routinely - it's too bad not many took him seriously. There are a few sites that have a different take on the basics of economic and monetary systems. Here is one on the latter:
Web of Debt - How Banks And The Federal Reserve Are Bankrupting The Planet...
I think the book glosses over certain aspects of history, but on the whole, I think there should be greater debate on this topic. No one in the MSM is talking about it - I wonder why.
Highintel: Can we do better?
These analyses fail to get at the roots of the problem. Americans are in debt up their eyeballs because incomes are declining and the cost of living is increasing. This isn't because Americans are lazy; in fact, productivity has increased dramatically over the past couple of decades. But during that time the benefits of the country's economic gains have gone almost entirely to the super-rich. This is no accident either, but a direct result of the policies put in place by the representatives of the rich, namely the US Congress and the US President.
As Eugene Debs pointed out long ago, the US isn't a democracy, it's a plutocracy -- a government of, by and for the rich. True, there have been periods, like the 50s and 60s, where the wealthy allowed more crumbs to dribble down to us common folk. Those days are gone. Today, the US has the most extreme inequalities of income and wealth among the industrialized countries, and even among 3rd world countries it's in the bottom half.
But things are getting shaky in the world's richest (or maybe not anymore) third world country. In their super-greed, America's wealthy have forgotten the lessons of their more enlightened forebearers. Henry Ford recognized he should pay a decent wage so that his workers would be able to afford his Fords. Today, America's rich are killing the consumer goose that gives them their golden eggs.
A stimulus package won't change that. It won't change the underlying dynamic of the wealthy and powerful getting more wealthy and powerful. And unless that changes the US is doomed.
Joblessness is going up thanks to Obama and the Democrats voting for those huge bailouts and joining the GOP on more war funding and tricky recruiting methods. I was surprised that more Democrats than Republicans voted for the bailouts for Wall Street when it's usually supposed to be the other way around. Obama can shove his stimulus package up his rear end and concentrate on actually paying down the fucking national debt !
Rather than point out the obvious, here is a solution: http://www.thoughts.com/index.php?_action=blog_view&id=211792&type=1
Four million hewers of wood and carriers of water for our Israeli masters?
Is this a great country, or what?
Don't bail out the crooks. Listen to Huey Long, Roosevelt did and at least achieved some minor improvements. Here is the "Share the Wealth" speech and "Barbecue Speech" of January 1935:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/hueyplongshare.htm
then there was the Coup Attempt of 1934.... when the tyrant tycoons of Dupont, General Motors, Morgan Bank, etc tried to assassinate Roosevelt. Please hear December 30, 2008: FTR #602 The Plot to Seize the Whitehouse: Interview with Jules Archer
http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/DX
and ofcourse in 1935, they succeeded at killing Huey Long, who was poised to become our next president and solve these wealth problems once and for all. So sad the Big money interests succeeded..
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1963 & 1968- Dallas and Los Angeles Coup d'État by the US Military Industrial Junta completed, according to modern examination of old evidence
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.", Albert Einstein. (Ed note: WHITE PHOSPHOROUS, DENSE METAL SUPER WEAPONS, NUCLEAR STICK UP, MISSILE DEFENSE, AND PROPAGANDA!!!!!)
fakedemocracy,
Huey Long? Really? That old thug? He was a Al Capone wannabe. Thanks, But I'll take FDR over Huey Long.
The reason Obama and FDR are wiser than Long is because they understand/understood that you can't save an economy by bankrupting it's major institutions. Long's "Share the Wealth" program would have turned the USA into an industrial wasteland by causing a flight of capital to Europe. If you care about "the little guy" then you had better care about large corporations as well, or else that "little guy" is going to be out of a job. That's why it is so important that we pass the second $700 billion stimulus package quickly.
Let me steal this from fakedemocracy below because it is so true.
"Even Thomas Jefferson warned about the need to guard against the rise of corporate power and concentration of wealth, otherwise we can kiss our liberty goodbye."
I would point out that the majority of people are employed by small business, not large corporations.
Wouldn't it be better to be a bit more sure of what this package will do or is supposed to do? Especially considering the the last bail out package was bait and switched, plus it did nothing for us.
The Al Capone label is in reference to when Huey got word of an assassination plot brewing, a coup to unseat him as Louisiana governor. So he called in the national guard to protect the capital and yes, they used tommy guns back then. But you are quoting the opposition, the big money capitalists, Standard Oil, Morgan Bank, etc., that were threatened by his plan.
FDR was just a panderer... listening to whatever side was loudest at the moment, but no coherent long term plan. It's going to be the same with Obama. Since the poverty of the depression was loudest back then, he did listen and achieved some progress at addressing it, but not enough. That's why we're now sinking into a second depression. Huey was loud... and he definitely had an influence on Roosevelt. Huey provided a strong pull to the left. As a lawyer, Huey always liked to say that he never prosecuted a case against a poor man.
Maybe the "Share the Wealth" program, "Every Man a King", might have turned us into an industrial wasteland, 'maybe'. But we are already an industrial wasteland. A military industrial wasteland. I wouldn't shed a tear if it disappeared. But this issue calls for more examination- there has to be a middle ground that offers the best outcome and balance.
Even Thomas Jefferson warned about the need to guard against the rise of corporate power and concentration of wealth, otherwise we can kiss our liberty goodbye.
I would like to suggest reading Huey's bio on wikipedia. It's a pretty straight look at the man's policies and achievements. He really has a long list of huge and cutting edge infrastructure improvements that he brought to the state of Louisiana for back in the day.
"Long began an unprecedented public works program, building roads, bridges, hospitals and educational institutions."
"a free textbook program for schoolchildren, an idea advanced by John Sparks Patton, the Claiborne Parish school superintendent. Long also supported night courses for adult literacy and a supply of cheap natural gas for the city of New Orleans."
"As governor, Long inherited a dysfunctional system of government tainted by influence peddling. Corporations often wrote the laws governing their practices and rewarded part-time legislators and other officials with jobs and bribes."
"In 1929, Long called a special session of both houses of the legislature to enact a new five-cent per barrel "occupational license tax" on production of refined oil, to help fund his social programs. The bill met with fierce opposition from the state’s oil interests."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huey_Long
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1963 & 1968- Dallas and Los Angeles Coup d'État by the US Military Industrial Junta completed
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.", Albert Einstein. (Ed note: WHITE PHOSPHOROUS, DENSE METAL SUPER WEAPONS, NUCLEAR STICK UP, MISSILE DEFENSE, AND PROPAGANDA!!!!!)
It hasn't been to long ago people were starting to think about over consumption and resource depletion. Now we are getting back on the same growth train again. We will never learn.
Personal wealth is not measured by how much you have, but by how little you need.We need to get back to absolutely zero consumption, starting with laffingbear. Then every man will be king. We will not need food, so no food stores, food production or transport. We will not need cars, so no car manufacture or repair, or fuel. We will not need armies, highways, or pensions. All we will need is the church.