[Peace-discuss] Another indication of whom they're working for

[C. G. Estabrook]

"The Obama administration, while nominally in favor of the extended benefits, 
did little or nothing to ensure passage. [The NYT wrote] 'The Obama 
administration has not fought aggressively for the legislation' ... The role of 
the Obama administration in this debacle has been particularly odious. The White 
House put on a full-court press to ensure passage of its cost-cutting healthcare 
reform legislation, but could not be bothered to make any significant effort to 
prevent a brutal attack on a most vulnerable section of the working class.

"Only hours after the Senate killed the extended unemployment benefits, Obama 
made a public appearance — not to denounce the Senate action, but to hail the 
House-Senate conference agreement on the terms of financial 'reform' legislation 
which does nothing to restrain the speculative mania and corrupt self-dealing 
practices that precipitated the Wall Street crash of 2008. Bank stocks rose 
sharply on Friday after the agreement was announced."


	Senate Democrats and Obama abandon the jobless
	By Patrick Martin
	26 June 2010

Senate Democrats gave up efforts to extend unemployment benefits for millions of 
jobless workers after the third vote on overcoming a Republican filibuster 
failed. The final vote Thursday was 57 to 41, three votes short of the 60 
necessary to cut off debate, with one Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, joining 
a unanimous Republican opposition.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, whose home state, Nevada, has the highest 
unemployment rate in the country, indicated there would be no further effort to 
revive the unemployment benefit extension unless one or more Republican senators 
expressed willingness to change their position. “We can’t pass it unless we get 
some Republicans,” Reid told reporters. “It’s up to them.”

Reid said that rather than continue efforts to pass the extension, he would move 
on to legislation cutting taxes for small business. “We’ve tried and tried. This 
is our eighth week on this legislation,” he complained.

While the Democrats, who control the Senate by a 59 to 41 majority, whine about 
Republican opposition, some 200,000 unemployed workers are losing extended 
benefits each week. The total number cut off benefits since June 2, when the 
last such extension expired, reached 1.2 million Friday. Assuming the deadlock 
continues, a total of 5.7 million workers will lose extended benefits by the 
time the program expires completely in November.

The benefit cutoff takes place in the midst of the deepest jobs crisis since the 
Great Depression, with the official jobless rate at 9.7 percent and the 
“underemployment” rate at 16.6 percent. It coincides with mounting signs that 
the “economic recovery” touted by the Obama administration has stalled. The 
Commerce Department issued revised figures showing GDP growth during the first 
quarter was only 2.7 percent, less than half the 5.6 percent rate posted in the 
fourth quarter, and below the level required to reduce unemployment rates to any 
significant extent.

Business spending rose only 2.2 percent, instead of the 3.1 percent initially 
reported, and state and local government spending fell at the fastest rate in 29 
years. With the expiration of a federal tax credit for new home purchases, sales 
of new homes plunged 33 percent from April to May, and sales of existing homes 
also declined by 2.2 percent. Only one economic figure was revised sharply 
upward: corporate profits rose 5 percent in the first quarter, more than double 
the initial estimate of 2.1 percent.

The Senate stalemate gives a glimpse of the political physiognomy of all three 
major actors in the bill’s demise. The Senate Republicans are adamant in their 
insistence that the pittance provided for the long-term unemployed should be 
sacrificed on the altar of deficit reduction.

The Senate Democrats cajole, wheedle and occasionally engage in populist 
demagogy, as when Reid declared, in the course of the final debate, “Those who 
want to help middle-class America will vote ‘yes.’ Those who want to protect 
corporate America will vote ‘no.’” But all this is to no effect, because the 
Democrats accept the deficit reduction imperative themselves.

The Obama administration, while nominally in favor of the extended benefits, did 
little or nothing to ensure passage. As the New York Times, a reliable supporter 
of the White House, was compelled to admit, “The Obama administration has not 
fought aggressively for the legislation.”

The extension of unemployment benefits was part of a larger bill that was 
repeatedly whittled down and narrowed in a futile effort to win the vote of even 
a single Republican senator. Senate Democrats cut the average benefit by $25 a 
week—a significant amount for the long-term jobless—and made other reductions in 
the overall cost of the bill, including cutting the proposed Medicaid assistance 
to near-bankrupt state governments from $24 billion to $16 billion.

The bill would also have paid for Medicaid assistance to the states by using 
money from last year’s stimulus bill, not yet expended for a planned increase in 
food stamp benefits. If the bill had passed the Senate and become law, there was 
to be a reduction of $11 a week for each food stamp beneficiary.

In other words, one low-income group, those on food stamps, was to pay for the 
extension of benefits for another low-income group, the long-term jobless. In 
many cases, of course, the two groups overlap, so that a jobless worker on food 
stamps could find his or her children’s food stamps cut to pay for the 
unemployment check.

Rather than attack the Republicans for their brutal treatment of the unemployed, 
the Democrats sought to mobilize sections of big business to lobby for passage 
of the bill, citing a series of tax breaks incorporated into the legislation. 
But business lobbyists focused instead on several proposed tax increases on 
hedge fund managers and multinational corporations.

As the Washington Post noted, “So far, business groups have complained loudly 
about the tax increases but have done little to build Republican support for the 
tax cuts.” Bloomberg News reported, “The legislation’s failure is a win for 
US-based multinational companies such as International Business Machines Corp., 
which lobbied against proposals to increase taxes on their international 
operations.”

Besides aid for the long-term unemployed and bankrupt state governments, the 
bill also included a youth summer jobs program, already delayed beyond the 
beginning of summer, and now canceled altogether. There were also provisions for 
farm disaster aid, and $4.6 billion to settle a long-running discrimination 
lawsuit brought by black farmers against the Agriculture Department and another 
suit by American Indians against mismanagement of trust funds by the Bureau of 
Indian Affairs.

According to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the 
defeat of the legislation significantly raises the risk of a double-dip 
recession as the “loss of spending power ripples through the economy,” both from 
the lost income of the long-term unemployed and the expected mass layoffs by 
state governments, which had been counting on passage of the bill to help them 
meet a July 1 deadline for balancing their budgets.

Six Republican senators had supported cloture resolutions on earlier extensions 
of unemployment benefits, in February and March. Three of them—Olympia Snowe and 
Susan Collins of Maine, and Scott Brown of Massachusetts—continued to negotiate 
and extract concessions from Reid & Co. right to the last minute. Then they 
joined the unanimous Republican bloc, backed by Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson, 
who was seeking to block tax increases for several real estate companies based 
in his state.

Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington state summed up this protracted 
process by lamenting, “They asked to have it reduced, we did it. They asked to 
have it paid for, we did it.”

Media commentators invariably described the stance of the Republicans as a 
response to popular concerns about the growing federal deficit. This is a 
grotesque distortion. Opinion polls show that jobs and the plight of the 
unemployed are the greatest concerns, particularly among working people.

“Deficit reduction” has been raised as a mantra by the Democrats as well as the 
Republicans in response to demands by the ruling elite that the enormous cost of 
the bailout of the financial system be imposed on the working class in the form 
of reduced consumption. This is to be accomplished both by cutting jobs and 
wages directly and by slashing public spending on social services like 
education, health care and retirement benefits.

No such concerns were raised over Bush’s gargantuan tax cuts for the wealthy, or 
the trillions expended on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The deficit becomes 
the focal point of official Washington only when it is a matter of aid to the 
long-term unemployed or other forms of relief for the working class. The amount 
in question, $3 billion a year ($30 billion over ten years), is less than the 
money squandered in a week on the war in Afghanistan.

The role of the Obama administration in this debacle has been particularly 
odious. The White House put on a full-court press to ensure passage of its 
cost-cutting healthcare reform legislation, but could not be bothered to make 
any significant effort to prevent a brutal attack on a most vulnerable section 
of the working class.

Only hours after the Senate killed the extended unemployment benefits, Obama 
made a public appearance—not to denounce the Senate action, but to hail the 
House-Senate conference agreement on the terms of financial “reform” legislation 
which does nothing to restrain the speculative mania and corrupt self-dealing 
practices that precipitated the Wall Street crash of 2008. Bank stocks rose 
sharply on Friday after the agreement was announced.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/jobs-j26.shtml

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