While there was lots of talk about the 1,000 or so jobs that Trump saved with a bunch of promised tax breaks—an approach to job protectionism that if it expands or becomes a national policy (jobs for tax breaks) could have very bad consequences for the larger economy, as Bernie Sanders pointed out—Obama, with no assistance from Republican lawmakers, returned unemployment to the level it was a year before the crash in 2008. His economy added 178,000 jobs in November and continues to break the record for consecutive months, currently 80, of job growth.
In the latest #JobsReport, unemployment is at its lowest level since 2007 https://t.co/v52CCCRPoB pic.twitter.com/XaNdO8ofVj
— NPR (@NPR) December 2, 2016
Now, it is true that full employment is something of a prison for American workers because it is not liberated by other social democratic features (such as meaningful wealth distributive mechanisms and checks on financial speculation) and favors the private forms of capital (rather than public) because it makes an expensive society durable for a large part of the population. And the reason why things must be expensive in an economy that can, if given the chance to produce and consume through public means, be cheap is to soak up surpluses and make capital scarce. If capital is not scarce, then its value falls, and this devaluation, which is prevented not by economic but political means, is what the owners of large amounts of capital, called rentiers, fear the most. It would euthanize them.
The result of all this, as the American post-Keynesian economist Hyman Minsky pointed out in the last chapter of a book recommended by last week’s Person of Interest, Alan Harvey, the local heterodox economist and executive director of the Institute for Dynamic Economic Analysis (IDEA), is a socialism for the rich. But it must also be said that it’s better to have full employment alone than high unemployment with a fully deregulated financial sector and low taxes for the rich, a situation which, with Trump in power, will happen within a few years. (The important thing to watch is not government debt but private debts, which will explode again under Trump and create a temporary asset boom in the equity markets—this is already happening, it’s called Trumphoria.) This situation, which will not have existed since the “red ’30s,” as those on the left like to call it, or the Great Depression, as the mainstream names it, will be terribly unstable and managed by a politician who is not known for a steady hand but for “shaking things up.”
But here is the really bad news: you do not want to go into a socialism for all in a state of economic panic. You want to win democratic socialism during a period of stability and relative prosperity. This is the mistake that many on the radical left make every time. They are waiting for the working classes to snap out of their dream-life in the Matrix (“You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist…”) and face the desert of the real. But this is precisely the opposite of what made the sequence of anti-neoliberal globalization protests that began with the WTO conference in Seattle so important. They erupted at a time when the US economy was booming. They were a positive or affirmative revolt. A revolt not out of the shock or fear of an empty stomach, but born of moral conviction.
But what are the activists and politicians who told voters that Trump was the same as Clinton (Sawant and others) doing now? Waiting for the rural and suburban voters to hurt so much under Trump that they wake up in Zion and revolt against the machines of their oppression (thus voting for Stein was a kind of political short selling). A negative revolt has always led to weak and damaged forms of democratic socialism that history has shown to fail again and again. (RIP, Castro.)
A socialism expanded from a stable political order and economy—this would be have been something new in the world.
The reason why Trump won those midwest swing states and the election is because of the economy. Period. The unemployment rate refers to people collecting benefits, it is not a measure of people of working age who would like to work if they could find a job. Whatever fantasy the news media would like to entertain about the economy, there are lots of people out there who have barely been able to pay the rent and feed their families. Note too that basically all of the new jobs created since the recession have gone to people with postsecondary education. Which means you have a ton of high school graduates who are still waiting for this “economic recovery” to do something for them. I know that Trump is a charlatan and snake oil salesman, but it’s important to know why people were desperate enough to vote for him. They knew that nothing would change if they voted for Hilary. If they voted for Trump there was at least a chance that something would change.
Berny5: Never mind the over 600 pieces of legislation that the Republicans blocked during Obama’s presidency. You know, legislation that would have helped people get back to work. Mitch McConnell laid out their plan in broad daylight ( goo.gl/ZJZXbw )and boy, did they stick to it. Forget about governing, their main goal was to obstruct!
Example: 2011, Obama gives speech under bridge in Ohio (Former House Speaker Boehner’s state) to try and plead his case on a $447 billion jobs bill that would have put Americans back to work ( goo.gl/QPGHQL ). Think it passed? Nope. Why? Because at the time, the Republicans main goal was to make Obama a one-term president. Remember?
Oh, how they failed miserably… and let thousands of Americans linger in the unemployment lines while doing so.
*correction: I meant to write MILLIONS of Americans linger in the unemployment lines, not thousands.
DB: Obama and Hilary are both proponents of “free trade” treaties that always have an effect of encouraging companies to move jobs overseas. If the jobs disappear, how do you get people employed? You can spend all the money you want on retraining, but if the decent paying jobs aren’t there, then that money is just being pissed away. If Obama had just concentrated on funding for infrastructure projects and gave as much lip service to that as he did for immigration reform, he might actually have gotten something done for Main Street. As it goes, he was able to give hundreds of billions of dollars in welfare to Wall Street banks under his quantitative easing program.
OS: You might note he was also “off topic” to my original comments. I was simply explaining why people voted for Trump whether their reasons were valid or not. And you both are correct that Republicans are stonewallers and as responsible for this mess, if not more, than Obama. Having said that, however, note that one of the biggest propaganda/discussion builder outlets in America is what comes out of the mouth of the President. Over the past 8 years I’ve heard a lot from Obama about immigration reform. I rarely ever heard him address Main Street economics. Bill Clinton had a hostile congress to deal with but he knew how to fight them. Why couldn’t Obama see at least by the second year that he was dealing with jerks who had no intention of bipartisanship?
Assuming you still think Obama is an innocent bystander, note that one of his last accomplishments as president is expansion of the H-1B outsourcing program. This is a program that allows foreigners to come to the US to get good paying jobs (much of it in the financial/tech sectors). That means an American can apply for a good paying job that he’s qualified for, and then find out it has been given to a foreigner. Should he be thanking Obama? Yes, Republicans are scumbags, but please tell me how this H-1B program reflects Obama’s concern over the plight of American workers who are having trouble paying their rent/mortgages?