Jobs, Jobs and Socialism

by Stephen Fleischman

What this country needs is a whopping 18 million new jobs – and a good 5-cent cigar.

The chances are we’ll get neither. Everybody’s talking bout jobs, jobs, jobs –but everybody that’s talkin’ about goin’ to heaven ain’t goin’ to heaven…

We’ve got a killer whale in Barack Obama and John Boehner (R-Ohio), Minority Leader in the House, is calling him a socialist. Boehner slammed Obama’s budget proposal and his recently passed economic stimulus package as “one big down payment on a new American socialist experiment.” Others joined in.

Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina called Obama “the world’s best salesman of socialism” and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky leapt into the Obama-socialist bash-fest with his own epithets.

As with health care reform, there’s an obvious answer to the problem of unemployment but no one in our Congress has the guts to go for it—a government works program. But we can’t have that! That would be socialism!

So what’s a good socialist president to do? The answer—look back to our great tradition of government work programs.

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) under the New Deal worked for Roosevelt when it was passed by Congress in the depth of the Depression in 1935. The Republicans railed against Roosevelt then, too, for his socialist ideas. He struck back by calling them “economic royalists”. And millions of Americans were employed rebuilding the infrastructure of the country—roads, bridges, parks, airports. Even artists, musicians, actors and theatrical groups were funded by the WPA. To good effect. More popular culture in America. For example, “The Living Newspaper” brought forth Orson Welles. He gave us “Citizen Kane”, the brutal portrait of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. It riveted everybody’s attention on one of America’s most powerful oligarchs.

The corporate oligarchy that runs this country today is made of the same stuff—various segments of capital within the infrastructure as well as high ranking government officials, members of Congress, parts of academia, and other elements within the society. The mainstream media, mostly owned by five major corporate conglomerates, controls most of what we see, hear, and read.

Just about every elected politician is in one corporate pocket or another. The political system is fueled by campaign contributions. Politicians need money to get elected and the special interests that give it to them gets a quid pro quo. Everybody knows that’s the way the system works.

Chris Hedges, in his Truthdig blog (3-8-10) pulls no punches when he describes America today: “There are no constraints left to halt America’s slide into a totalitarian capitalism. Electoral politics are a sham. The media have been debased and defanged by corporate owners. The working class has been impoverished and is now being plunged into profound despair. The legal system has been corrupted to serve corporate interests. Popular institutions, from labor unions to political parties, have been destroyed or emasculated by corporate power. And any form of protest, no matter how tepid, is blocked by an internal security apparatus that is starting to rival that of the East German secret police. The mounting anger and hatred, coursing through the bloodstream of the body politic, make violence and counter-violence inevitable. Brace yourself. The American empire is over. And the descent is going to be horrifying.”

How do the progressive forces of a nation come together to keep that from happening? Must we wait for another Great Depression, with millions living in Hoovervilles, before the working and under classes get organized?

The oligarchs are smarter than that. They know they have to produce enough jobs to fend off the growing resistance and Barack Obama is their front man to accomplish their goal.

President Obama crawled out of the Milton Friedman den at the Chicago school of economics where economists still exhort laissez-faire and deregulated capitalism. They’re still looking for that illusive “invisible hand”.

“I’m a market man,” Obama chortled when he threw his hat into the ring.

After another year in the doldrums, the country is well on its way to an apple sale. The economy is floundering and the administration is still trying to talk its way into new days of glory. The hunt for a way to produce jobs (without the danger of being called a socialist) is getting desperate. The president and the Democratic congress are spinning their wheels. The disenfranchised Republicans have no wheels to spin. They’re fixated, as they always are, on cutting taxes for the rich.

What we’re talking about here are the two faces of the same monster. The two-party system, finely tuned to maintain the fiction of a democratic atmosphere. The capitalist oligarchy uses one or the other party to bolster the corporate interests as political environments change. No third party interlopers allowed. If Obama doesn’t cut the mustard, they’ll make him a one-term president.

Nonetheless, the infrastructure of the country, today, is a shambles. We can certainly use a little of that WPA mojo.

Any presidential candidate that can take the bullies by the horns and take some new ideas to the people could well become the next president of the United States.