Democrats and the Corporate Media: Looking for Green
Shoots in an Economic Desert
10 January 2010By Dave Lindorff
So much for economic “green shoots.”
The Obama administration and the Federal Reserve,
along with the servile corporate media, have been
quick to grasp at and trumpet every little suggestion
that things might be improving, as they did when the
Labor Dept. announced last week that new unemployment
claims had dropped to “just” 434,000, from a high of
684,000 in the week ended March 28 or last year.
Or when the Commerce Dept. reported last month that
November housing starts had risen by 8.9% compared to
the prior month.
Of course, what none of the rose-glasses-wearing
analysts and politicians mention is that the number of
new unemployment claims would be bound to fall even if
the economy were getting worse, because so many of the
people who are covered by unemployment insurance have
been laid off already for months, or even for more
than a year already, and so the total pool of those
eligible to file claims is much smaller.
Look at it this way. The labor force totaled about 150
million at the end of 2008, when official unemployment
was then about 5%. Now official unemployment is at 10
percent, which means 5%, or 7.5 million people, have
become unemployed since that time, reducing the number
of working people to only 142.5 million. Actually, of
course, the job losses are almost double that, when
people who have quit looking for jobs, gone without a
job for a year or more or work part time involuntarily
are added, so really the total number of people
actually still working today is closer to 135 million.
Now when 684,000 people out of 150 million apply for
the first time for unemployment benefits, as happened
last spring, that represents 0.46% of the workforce.
But when 434,000 apply for unemployment for the first
time in a week, as just happened, that’s 434,000 out
of a total of just 135 million, which represents 0.32%
of the workforce. In other words, it’s a lower rate,
but not as significant a drop as if it had been
434,000 new claims out of a workforce of 150 million.
In any case, the real story is not that new
unemployment claims are down. It’s that the real
unemployment rate--the rate that includes discouraged
workers who have given up looking for a job because
there are none, and those who are only
part-timers--went up last month, from 17.2% to 17.3%.
As for housing, the bad news is that pending home
sales plunged by 16 percent in November. What that
tells us is that the little boomlet in housing sales
that resulted from the federal government’s $8000 tax
credit for new home buyers has kind of run its course,
just as did the earlier $4000 cash-for-clunkers
car-buying “stimulus”. These sorts of programs don’t
change the market long-term; they only push forward in
time purchases that people would have made anyway. So
we are actually headed into worse times, as those
programs end. It’s reminiscent of a scam that
companies get in trouble for with the SEC--booking
sales from the new year as having been made in the
prior year (and shifting inventory and returns over to
the next year), so their books look better, but then
of course they have to do the same thing again the
following year, but misrepresenting even more future
sales as present sales, and so on, until they get
nabbed.
The big test will come as the money provided by last
spring’s $800-billion stimulus bill (actually just
$400 billion in stimulus, with the rest in tax cuts)
starts to run out. Much of that money went to prop up
state and local government budgets and to thus prevent
public employee layoffs, but now those layoffs are
going to become a torrent of new jobless people.
It is going to become harder and harder, moving into
this new year, to find those “green shoots.” Not that
the government and the media won’t keep trying to find
them.
Basically, reporting on the economy has become a kind
of cheerleading exercise, while the president and the
Democrats in Congress keep trying to pretend things
are getting better, even as the ranks of the
unemployed keep climbing, and as families struggling
to get by run down what little savings they have left.
Their goal is twofold: to try and lure consumers, who
have lost over $11 trillion in household wealth as
their stocks and the value of their homes have
plummeted, to start buying again (good luck with
that), and to try and avoid having to take any
dramatic measures to create public sector jobs or
restore the tattered safety net destroyed during the
Reagan and Clinton administrations.
The only “green shoot” I see is that the Democratic
Party, that sclerotic husk of a once relatively
progressive organization that brought us Social
Security, Medicare, civil rights legislation, and
unemployment insurance, but that now is just another
corrupt backer of the banks, the union-busters, the
corporations that are disinvesting in America and
shipping jobs overseas, the pillagers of the earth,
and the insurance industry, is headed for an electoral
armageddon this November.
A good sign is that the voters of my home state of
Connecticut, a Democratic stronghold, who had the good
sense to dump Sen. Joe Lieberman from the Democratic
Party ticket in 2006, have now dumped the state’s
senior senator, Sen . Chris Dodd. Dodd has been a
servile backer of the banking industry, even accepting
special favors in the form of reduced rate mortgages
from the now failed and disgraced Countrywide
Financial Bank, and of the health insurance industry,
many of which companies are headquartered in the
state. It is progressive Democrats who have abandoned
Dodd and forced him to announce that he is not seeking
re-election. The evidence to back this? Lieberman is
also seeing his poll numbers crash, and it's sure not
because he's too liberal. I suspect it is also
progressive Democrats abandoning the equally servile
Sen. Byron Dorgan in N. Dakota who have convinced this
one-time prairie populist to quit the Senate. (Dorgan
gained a reputation, well-deserved, as an
anti-corporate populist for taking on multinationals
as North Dakota's tax commissioner, and later as a
Senator. But as senator, he has fronted for the coal
industry, and last year, he voted against so-called "cramdown"
reform legislation that would have allowed banks to
reduce the principal on troubled mortgages--a bill
that the insurance industry bitterly opposed. Dorgan's
wife is an insurance industry lobbyist.)
Even in Massachusetts, where the Democratic candidate
to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy is in a tight
race when matched against the likely Republican
candidate, according to polls, it looks like the
Democratic Party is in trouble. The media pundits,
reverting to their default setting, blame it all on
the party’s having moved “too far to the left” and
argue that its candidates need to move “back to the
center.” But there is no evidence that this is the
case.
The Democrats in power are decidedly not on the left.
Genuine progressives in the Congress can be counted on
two hands--or maybe only on one. (You don’t even need
a finger to count the number of progressives in the
White House!)
Almost nothing that President Obama and this
Democratic-led Congress have done since last January
could be properly called “progressive,” whatever the
Teabaggers may say. Certainly not ramping up the war
in Afghanistan. Certainly not the spectacularly
corrupt health “reform” bill. Certainly not what has
so far been done in terms of reforming the banking
sector. And certainly not in the area of restoring the
Constitution and civil liberties.
So there’s our green shoot. Perhaps this economic
crisis the country finds itself in, and the latest
war, which at least one expert, retired Gen. Barry
McCaffrey, predicts will see US casualties mount to
4-500 per month, will herald the demise of the
Democratic Party, or at least of its deceptive pose as
a vehicle for progressive change.
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