Obama’s New Jobs Bill Just More Corporate Welfare

WASHINGTON, Feb. 19 — After over one year in office, President Obama and the Congressional Democrats are finally turning their attention to the issue that got them elected in the first place: the economy.

The White House has submitted a “jobs bill” that will allegedly reverse the seemingly skyrocketing unemployment rate — “officially” at 9.6 percent, but really at over 21 percent — that the current crisis has created.

As with the Obama administration’s attempts at health care “reform,” not only is the “jobs bill” currently on the table a tragic case of “too little, too late,” it also represents an attack on workers’ living standards!

In the Senate’s version of the bill, sponsored by Democrat Max Baucus of Montana and Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa (of health care “reform” infamy), the largest item, totaling $31 billion, is to renew corporate tax breaks set to expire this year.

The “stimulus” part of the bill is a miniscule $15 billion to finance tax credits for employers who hire unemployed workers throughout the remainder of 2010. (Most of the time, these “credits” are handed out to companies that only have to promise they might hire someone this year; they don’t actually have to employ a single new person.)

But despite its already extensively watered-down character, the bill is unlikely to pass due to a lack of support from corporatists in either party. Instead, a stripped-down version will be voted on by the end of February, with the rest of the bill’s contents being returned to for discussion at a later date.

What’s remarkable isn’t the typical half-measures of the representatives of the exploiting and oppressing classes, but the response of the leaders in the so-called “workers’ organizations” to legislation that is completely unable to address the needs of American workers, employed or unemployed.

Speaking on Bill Moyer’s Journal, Richard Trumka, President of the AFL-CIO business (company) labor union federation, claimed that Obama has “realized there is a lot of anger out there” on jobs and the economy, and that action is now being taken.

In other words, he agrees that economic recovery efforts need to be large-scale to be effective, and that those efforts should be financed by increased taxes on the wealthy — who, in his own words, “got us into this mess and should be the ones to get us out.”

But, as usual, the words of this corporatist union official are one thing. His actions are something else. The AFL-CIO, while registering complaints with Obama’s “jobs bill,” have given it their backhanded support.

These corporatist officials and “leaders” of the business unions have historically traded away the potential strength of their organizations in favor of “social peace” with the bosses and managers, ultimately converting them from instruments of struggle for workers’ rights and livelihoods into a weapon to push through concessions, channel support for anti-labor politics and spy on workers.

Working people need to begin building revolutionary industrial unions that can organize to fight for and implement a real workers’ economic recovery program of living-wage jobs, and to remove all the corporatist officials from the labor movement.