LAST Thursday night US President Barak Obama addressed a joint session of the US Congress where he outlined his new initiative that would, he boasted, ‘solve’ the huge unemployment crisis.
In unveiling his American Jobs Act it became clear, however, that the only job Obama is interested in is that of President of the United States and that this act has only one purpose and that is his re-election next year.
What this act proposes is a $450 billion package of tax cuts and state spending plans which Obama claims will create jobs and boost the US economy.
He dangled before Congress the promise of ‘huge construction projects’ involving new schools and roads across America, coupled with tax cuts for ordinary workers and small businesses that would lead inevitably to job creation.
Large sections of the Republican party at Congress greeted this Act and Obama’s speech with cheers.
Outside Congress there was a similarly euphoric response from the leadership of the US trade union movement, the AFL-CIO.
Their president, Richard Trumka, hailed Obama’s speech saying it showed he was ‘willing to go to the mat to create new jobs on a substantial scale’.
In fact, this Jobs Act is the economic equivalent of using a band-aid as a cure for cancer.
$450 billion (£282 billion) is the proverbial drop in the ocean when it comes to dealing with massive unemployment levels in the US.
It is estimated that over 25 million workers are either out of work or in part-time employment, a figure that is increasing monthly – last month, 414,715 more people signed on as seeking jobs.
In order to get employment levels in the US back to what they were in 2008, the year that the US banking system exploded in crisis, 11.2 million jobs would have to be created.
It is not just, however, that these sums are woefully inadequate. An examination of Obama’s speech reveals that he has no intention of pumping new Federal money into this Jobs Act.
He stated: ‘The agreement we passed in July will cut government spending by about $1 trillion over the next ten years.’ Obama continued: ‘It also charges this Congress to come up with additional $1.5 trillion in savings by Christmas. Tonight I’m asking you to increase that amount so that it covers the full cost of the American Jobs Act.’
It couldn’t be clearer: the money for this job creation scheme will come from further cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
That money will be channelled into private companies for construction works while at the same time tax cuts will be given to businesses.
Unemployment will continue to rocket as US capitalism spirals out of control and the working class will literally be left to starve with cuts to benefits and no access to medical treatment.
Small wonder the Republicans cheered this speech.
As for the reformist leadership of the AFL-CIO, they are desperate enough to cling to any straws, no matter how broken, to keep the working class tied to the bourgeois Democratic Party.
What they fear above all is that the crisis is producing a revolutionary situation where, in order to defend their very existence, workers will force their leaders to break with the Democrats and form a Labour Party that will set out to expropriate the big US bosses and bankers, to make them pay for the crisis of their own making.
A section of the International Committee of the Fourth International must be built in the USA to lead the struggle for the foundation of a Labour Party to take the US working class forward and to lead the organisation of the US socialist revolution.