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As Unemployment Spikes, Obama's Got a Bigger Problem Than the Debt Ceiling
The big story out of Washington—and rightly so—is the debt-ceiling fight that President Obama seems to be coming very close to losing. If the president abandons his 2008 campaigvn promise to be an absolute defender of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, he will have very little indeed to run on in 2012.
But that won't be what beats him.
Because the biggest story in America is a different one from the biggest story in Washington. Americans are not that into the debt-ceiling debate. Polling has suggested that less than a quarter of Americans are "closely following" the fight. Those numbers will rise a bit as the deadline gets closer and as the media hypes the issue.
The issue that Americans have been following closely, and will continue to follow straight through the 2012 election cycle, the issue that tops the polls on the list of concerns, is the jobs crisis. Americans are worried about unemployment and underemployment.
And on Friday they got a lot more worried.
The Los Angeles Times headline was stark: "Dismal Jobs Report Shows Unemployment Rising to 9.2%."
The New York Times headline was, if anything, bleaker: "Job Growth Falters Badly, Clouding Hopes for Recovery."
The 9.2 percent official unemployment rate—up from 9.0 percent two months ago and 9.1 percent a month ago—is only a pale shadow of the real rate. Categorized in official terms as the "U6" unemployment, the real rate includes the offically unemployed as well as Americans who are underemployed and those who have given up on the search for work. It stands at more than 16 percent nationally. And in depressed states, such as Michigan (which Obama carried handily in 2008 but where is approval ratings are now troublingly low), it is well over 20 percent.
The official and the real unemployment rates are devastating. These numbers are some of the worst since the Great Depression. But they are not getting the response that high unemployment rates got from Democrats in the Depression era of other periods of economic downtown in the years since.
President Obama and his team have never focused on job issues with the intensity that is needed. And now they are simply being ridiculous.
David Plouffe, the president's political czar, said on the eve of the release of Friday's dismal jobs numbers that he does not believe that the high unemployment rate poses a threat to President Obama's 2012 reelection campaign.
Speaking to reporters this week, Plouffe said, “The average American does not view the economy through the prism of GDP or unemployment rates or even monthly jobs numbers. People won’t vote based on the unemployment rate, they’re going to vote based on: ‘How do I feel about my own situation? Do I believe the president makes decisions based on me and my family?’ ”
The almost 10 percent of Americans who are officially unemployed probably don’t feel all that great about their situation. The same goes for the the tens of millions of additional Americans who are underemployed or who have fallen off official radar because they have given up on the search for work in communities where there are simply no jobs to be had.
The unemployed, the underemployed and the abandoned add up to almost one in five Americans. And an awfully lot of them live in battleground states such as Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania —all of which President Obama won in 2008, all of which President Obama needs to win in 2012.
Now, let’s be clear, no one in their right mind thinks that Republicans who would be president are any more concerned about jobless Americans than is the Obama administration.
But neglecting unemployment as an issue—or presuming, as Plouffe does, that Americans will give Obama the benefit of the doubt—is political madness.
When unemployment reaches the level that it has nationally, and the even higher levels that it has in battleground states, potential Obama voters start losing faith that "the president makes decisions based on me and my family."
Some of the disappointed may still vote for Obama out of fear of the Republicans, some will find social issues that draw them to the Republicans, but millions will simply stay home —as they did in 2010.
That's the danger heading into the 2012 race, and it is more profound today that at any time in Barack Obama's presidency.
Obama is toying with the notion of running for reelection as the president who did what George Bush could not: cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
That calculus suggests that Obama and his team really are out of touch with the electoral dynamic.
But that is not the most politically tone deaf scheme to come out of the president's camp this week.
While the president's apparent willingness to take the best argument available to Democrats going into the 2012 election cycle—the promise that they will defend Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security—suggests that Obama learned nothing from the Democratic party's devastating electoral experience in 2010, his top political aide's statements with regard to unemployment suggest that his team has learned even less.
No president since Franklin Roosevelt has won reelection when the unemployment rate was over 7 percent. And Roosevelt won because he ran as a candidate who was fully willing to use the power of the federal government to create jobs —and programs like Social Security.
The notion that a Democratic president can win reelection with an unemployment rate that is edging upward—perhaps toward double digits—and talk of cutting Social Security is not merely unrealistic. It is evidence of a disconnect that could devastate not just Obama's reelection campaign in 2012 but Democratic prospects for years to come.
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63 Comments so far
Show AllIt's true-- this kind of standard, normative analysis sees the president as a beleaguered caregiver or physician attending to the failing patient of the national economy.
He's charged with the Herculean, or Sisyphean, task of managing countless wounds, infections, weaknesses or catastrophic breakdowns in metabolic functions in order to save the economy's life and nurse it back to robust health.
This perspective neatly, and perhaps unconsciously, makes the president seem like a detached actor coping as best he can with the effects of a process over which he has no responsibility or control.
So there's a "jobs problem", as if "jobs" are disappearing from economic circulatory system like blood cells, or the blood supply itself, critically dropping in an ill patient.
But the fact that Obama has enthusiastically and exclusively supported and abetted Wall Street, the banksters, and corporate executives over the needs and interests of ordinary unprivileged citizens suggests that the "jobs problem" is iatrogenic in nature-- i.e. caused by the diagnosis, manner, or treatment of the physician.
Both the articles you're complaining about, and Obama and his apologists, are like Doctor Jekyll at breakfast-- deploring the horrible string of nocturnal murders reported in the morning newspaper, and wondering why there inexplicably seems to be so much blood under his fingernails.
Malcolm Forbes, right-wing plutocratic Republican buddy of Grover Norquist and publisher of the Forbe's 500 has been a multi-decade staunch advocate of the "flat tax." Let me see if I can clarify this for you.
If you make $15,000 a year under a flat tax of 10% you'd net $13,500. That $1500 you'd pay in tax would create a high impact on vital family essentials and the ability to face even minor financial emergencies.
If you were a hedge fund manager making $15,000,000,000 a year under the same tax you'd net $13,500,000,000. That $1,500,000,000 you'd pay in tax wouldn't even put but a dent in your casual ability to speculate MASSIVELY on Wall Street derivatives to blow up the economy again down the road, let alone seriously impact your family or any other aspect of your life.
Loopholes aside, If you lower taxes on a CEO from 35% to 10%, that's a mighty tasty goodie for him. If you raise taxes on the $15,000 a year man from, say, 7% (including something like an earned income tax credit to get it down to 7% in the first place) to 10%, you'd be screwing him big time relative to the real impact on him and his family. These types of gross inequities are why we need a truly progressive income tax that's based on the ability of the person taxed to pay to promote the "general Welfare" as the founding fathers put it. Otherwise you end up with a giant authoritarian banana republic with only one rich/super-rich class and one massive poor class with no upwards class mobility, which is what Amurka will be by 2013 at this rate.
In 1913, when the first (post-Reconstruction) true marginal income tax was enacted, ONLY the richest 1 percent were taxed. Why? Because they derived the greatest profit from their influence over the legal system and the political class, and they most relied upon the nation's physical and transportation infrastructure and middle- and lower-class markets to generate their enormous profits. Though it was unstated, they also relied most heavily upon foreign war adventures to secure their overseas resource interests. Sound familiar? At that time capital gains were fully taxed at the same rate as the marginal income tax. Now hedge fund managers are taxed at 15% before additional loopholes--not as income tax but as a gradually lowered tax on capital gains when these are some of the wealthiest people in the country.
Now we have CEOs and hedge fund managers who earn more in a few hours than the average American will earn in a lifetime who pay less in taxes as a percentage of their income than the maids who clean their offices and homes. They annually illegally and legally offshore over $300 Billion dollars in taxable income to minimize their contribution to maintain America's physical infrastructure and foreign resource wars of choice (overt and covert) that most profit THEM. They still rely on U.S. physical infrastructure to communicate about, electrify, transport, refrigerate, store, protect and market their goods, they just want poorer people to pay more of a share of their dropping incomes for our over-extended military and now crumbling infrastructure than they do. They've rewarded themselves for supporting Shrublette's & Obomber's oil/terror wars with historically unprecedented wartime tax cuts for themselves for a solid decade now when those wars don't benefit the dying middle-class but overwhelmingly benefit them.
In 1970 the average American CEO earned 25 times as much as their average entry-level employee. Now they earn around 480 times as much, with the income disparity getting wider every month since early 2009. CEO pay relative to entry-level workers' pay has increased 23% in just the last two years.
The super-rich have de-linked their god-like incomes and lifestyles from the plunging incomes, job opportunities and bare survival struggles of the American working-class by offshoring their manufacturing and manufacturing support jobs to foreign labor and creating for themselves the most regressive, loophole-ridden tax system since the Gilded Age. "Free trade" dividends generated by foreign workers is what they thrive on now. No American worker can survive in the U.S. on less than a dollar an hour wage like they do in China, India and elsewhere, no matter how many union concessions or cuts in benefits and pay they take.
Now that the super-rich have the lion's share of what was formerly middle-class wealth over-concentrated in their manicured little hands they can goddamn well afford to pay a hell of a lot more in taxes and to substantially raise wages (yes, including the minimum wage) for the remaining jobs that still exist inside this country that MADE them (or the plutocrats they inherited from) in the first place. Why you would want to LOWER their taxes relative to the real impact that would have on the rest of society is beyond me. Repealing the Bush II wartime tax cuts for the super-rich alone would solve the current State budget shortfalls and secure Social Security beyond 2036 until 2086.
Noblesse oblige. To whom much is given much is expected. Americans of all classes have forgotten this and the country will pay dearly for it--much more dearly than it already has.
America has very obviously already culturally and spiritually broken down and undocumented workers had the LEAST to do with it compared to the adverse economic factors generated and maintained by our upper-class and their various stooges scattered all throughout the upper-middle-class.
The huge wave of undocumented workers who flooded into the U.S. between early 1995 and now is due primarily to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) bipartisanly supported and passed into law by Bill Clinton in 1994. According to the Carnegie Endowment (no left-wing bunch of pinkos) NAFTA drove over 10 million Mexican family farmers off the land when the U.S. started annually dumping 60 million tons of subsidized, mostly genetically modified corn on their domestic corn market--crushing the prices. Since, on average, a Mexican farm family has six to eight members, that means 10 million Mexicans and many of their dependents who, thanks to U.S. "free trade" treaties accepted by their country's corrupt PRI Party, lacked sufficient jobs in Mexico to feed their families went looking in the only place within reach that had enough jobs: The United States of America.
We brought the influx of undocumented workers on ourselves. And so long as the '90s techno/dot.com bubble or the Housing bubble kept the financialized economy humming, we didn't much care. It was only after the 2008 Bubble blew and we started to realize how "free trade" had withered the underlying real economy that used to be based on domestic manufacturing of tradable goods that some of us suddenly became so irate about illegal aliens. Most Americans were "illegal aliens" in this country at one time or another going back to the early 1600s. I'm tire of these endless tirades about illegals--as if deporting all of them would even BEGIN to solve the tangled web of problems that ignorance and greed and oh so racially selective poverty have inflicted on this country.
The ONLY true solution to "the immigration problem" is to either re-negotiate "free trade" with globally enforced labor and environmental protections (which I think is politically impossible, not just here but in most countries) or slowly phase out the "free trade" treaties on an agricultural and industrial sector-by-sector basis over 12 to 15 years and rebuild as many of those jobs inside the U.S. as possible. It took us 16 years to dig ourselves into this offshored job hole and it will probably take about as long to dig ourselves out.
As long as those treaties exist in their present form they are a direct barrier to rebuilding domestic middle-class manufacturing and manufacturing support jobs.
Once we no longer annually dump tens of millions tons of government subsidized U.S. corn and other agricultural products on the Mexican market, then Mexican farmers can return to the land and grow their own food to sell at prices that can allow them to support their families without having to look for jobs in the U.S. It's that simple.
Our real enemies? The plutocrats and their economists and lawyers who concocted NAFTA, WTO, CAFTA and every other post-1994 "free trade" treaty in the first place, and their politicians who voted for it and signed it into law.
I've been using Flim Flam Man to describe Obama but I think I like Hatchet Man a little better. Actually though, he's both; he's the Flim Flam Man on the campaign trail and he's the Hatchet Man while in office.
There are many more people who are part of military families who will vote for Obama than you'd think. Obama has promised the military increases in benefits and combat pay that he won't be around to ensure will be enacted, but he's promised them widely. He's proliferated wars that put more in the military to work with extra combat pay and is using the military as his only politically expedient "jobs program."
Plus, sad to say, the millions of Americans who are economically desperate enough and/or dumb enough to willingly participate in these cruel wars of choice are well and truly stupid enough to be swayed by Obama's promises of increased military benefits and wages. What matters more with respect to military families is how many of their close friends and non-military family members are experiencing increasing economic suffering since Obama took office and how that might influence their vote.
Either way, Obama has done nothing but take a slow piss on the non-military traditional core constituencies of the Democratic Party from day one.
sivasm,
I live in the Deep South in a majority black area. In 2008 I couldn't get on a downtown train car without seeing 30 or 40 blacks of all ages wearing Obama T-shirts and baseball caps. Now even on the most crowded trains I seldom see even one. The older blacks realize his treachery and how his politics have NOTHING to do with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The younger ones deal with the highest unemployment of any demographic group in the country and know Obama hasn't lifted a finger to help them. I don't know any union worker who's enthusiastic about re-electing him and most of them are incredibly pissed off about the way he broke his campaign promise and ignored the Koch-funded Tea Bagger assault on the public sector unions in Wisconsin. They are just as angry at those Dem governors who openly attacked public sector union workers in their States shortly afterwards. A hell of a lot more people than you think are going to stay home on election day 2012.
You are wrong, for a start NEA the nation largest union just yesterday came out to support Obama's reelection and that's a start as the ball rolls on. Further, have you heard loud voices from the civil right, Liberals leaders from both Houses or elsewhere beside Kuncich and Bernie Sanders?
I am more inclines to believe Obama will win reelection, unless Jon Huntsman a moderate Repug from Utah may draw many independent voters. I am no expert but as I see it.
Yepper. We and our "people's tribunes" have been excluded from even minimal participation in the real power structure and its mass media. We are now just neo-feudal peasants suffering the whimsy of Ayn Rand's fairytale "free market." How many homeless hungry Americans can dance on the head of a pin? It depends on whether they're dead in the streets yet or not.
Government layoffs are accelerating as Obama's weak stimulus fades and Quantitative Easing 2 runs out (that last will help weaken the now hyper-corrupt stock market). Consumer prices for food, utilities, clothes, toiletries, mass transportation, car repairs, etc., have been slowly and steadily ticking up for months despite a recent slight drop in gasoline prices due to Obomber's short-term machinations in the oil market.
His military, ICE, FBI and other "homeland security" spending is up, up and away through the exosphere. It's more "wars of choice," police brutality & massive deportations from proto-Oceania, er-um, post-Bush Amurka these daze.
Because of climbing food prices I've run out of food earlier and earlier each month over the last three months. Lost more weight, though! Thursday the church food pantry I visit every three or four months was closed so I went to a different one I hadn't been to in about six months. There were at least four times as many white people in the line this time. All of them over 50 and many of them freshly fallen from the middle-class by the look of their newer clothes and fancy hairstyles. This country's going to be like a hot grain silo awaiting a spark by this time next July.
Obama's top economic advisor, Timothy Geithner admitted in a closed door meeting a couple of weeks back that "another meltdown is on the way." He said the timing of it would be unpredictable. The way his ilk in the Fed and Wall Street lanced the 2008 Bubble by deliberately icing Lehman Brothers, "engineering the handling of AIG" and specially protecting Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, et al--well, just let's say I don't think the timing will be unpredictable to the high rollers and their political clowns unless some other outside market factor(s) unpredictably mess with their inner circle's pre-arranged timing. They're just waiting for the next bubble to get fat enough while they concoct which story to use to extort another tax-payer plus foreign borrowed bailout from the overwhelmingly ignorant, brainwashed and divided American public.
The order to lance the secondary bubble will be purely for the benefit of the oligarchy and it's upper-middle-class servants regardless of which political party is in power. American democracy and its middle-class have become historically "quaint" to the ruling elite. Even the cultural memory of the middle-class America I once knew is fading fast. To all you ex-pats who have reason to: Come and see it soon before it's gone.
The Dimcrap Party has shit itself and is both pointless and soul-dead. The best thing we can do is take the responsibility upon ourselves to support the AFL-CIO's call for a national independent labor movement that is no longer shackled to the failed Dimcrap Party: No longer donating to it and no longer knocking door-to-door campaigning for it and getting nothing but more offshoring in return. The unions can still hit these treacherous neo-liberal Dims where they hurt--just when they need them most in the weeks before election day--and they can do it at the State and national level.
The AFL-CIO alone still has over eleven million members. A national cross-union independent labor movement that includes the UAW, public sector unions, teachers unions besides the NEA, nurses unions, skilled trades unions, entertainment unions, SEIU, etc., could potentially include well over 50 million unionized members and their non-union supporters and sway any election it focused on. It could field candidates from the working-class Left to run against any Democrat almost anywhere in the nation and speak truth to power against the current neo-lib/neo-con tri-partisan hydra in Washington D.C.
Several unions have been meeting around the country or organize across multiple job fields. Find the local unions near you and encourage them to (1) heed the AFL-CIO's call for a national independent labor movement and (2) organize with other unions in their region to begin to create a national movement that can field its own candidates against treacherous Democrats. The Democratic Party must be replaced by a Labor Progress Party that represents the betrayed American working-class and authentic progressives, socialists and left-libertarians both union and non-union.
Some articles of our times that speak for themselves:
The Breaking Point: http://firedoglake.com/2011/07/07/the-breaking-point/
Cut the Crap and Create Jobs: http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/economy-a-budget/170347-cut-the-cr...
The FBI's New "Relaxed" Domestic Operations and Investigations Guide: [You know it's bad when even the corporate media worries enough to cover it despite all the other assaults on the Constitution by Bush II & Obama they routinely ignore]: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/06/13/national/main20070845.shtml
New Documents Reveal Behind-the-Scenes FBI Role in Controversial Secure Communities Deportation Program [And its link to the FBI's "Next Generation Identification" project--straight out of Orwell's 1984--metal]: http://www.ccrjustice.org/newsroom/press-releases/new-documents-reveal-b...
Joint Onslaught by U.S. and Russian Oligarchs: Belarus Under Siege: http://www.counterpunch.org/brand07082011.html
The Globe’s Not Only Getting Hotter. It’s More Unjust and Unstable, Too: http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/07/global_turmoil_drives_a_wave_of_e...
I don't know about you, but I've had all I can stand of this dumbass fascist neo-lib/neo-con globalized suicide pact. Don't mourn: ORGANIZE.