Congress, Fight Harder for the Unemployed

By Isaiah J. Poole
July 2, 2010
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010072602/congress-fight-harder-unemployed

If the members of Congress who are spending time in
their states and districts during the July 4 recess
only get one message, it must be this one: Fight for
the unemployed when you return to Washington. We mean,
really fight, with serious votes on bills that match
the seriousness of the unemployment crisis.
Enough with the kind of legislative appeasement that
we've seen in the past few weeks, where jobs
legislation that starts out at best barely adequate
gets watered down in ultimately fruitless efforts to
win a right wing that preaches that you're unemployed
because you're "spoiled" or lazy or no better than a
"stray animal."

Force votes on bills that would continue to stimulate
the economy and put Americans back to work-even when
they are destined to fail. Those failures will let us
know who really gets the crisis we're in, and who has
the political will to embrace the solutions, and who is
standing in the way.

Today's jobs report showed that in June the economy
produced only 83,000 private sector jobs. One-fourth of
those jobs are temporary. Since the beginning of the
year, the economy has produced 577,000 private sector
jobs. The number of workers who have been unemployed
more than 27 weeks remains at 6.8 million, and the
number of part-time workers who actually would take
fulltime jobs if they were available are 8.6 million.

The bottom line is that we are way behind the more than
400,000 jobs a month the economy should be creating
over the next two years in order to repair the damage
done by the Wall Street implosion and economic
recession.

I've been reading some of the experiences of unemployed
people being collected by the National Employment Law
Project. They are stories of people who have mailed
hundreds of resumes and have nothing to show for it.
Millions of people right now are at the very end of
their rope-or have already lost their grip.

I received this email yesterday via NELP from a man in
Cedar Hill, Texas:

     I am a highly skilled and experienced project
     coordinator who was making $20/hour when I got
     laid off last August. I have always been able to
     find a job quickly in the past, sometimes going
     through temporary agencies. Now I can't even get a
     temp job for $10/hour. I have resumes customized
     to match different types of positions, and have
     easily applied for over 400 positions since I got
     laid off. I've had 7 interviews and no offers.

     I received my last check under Tier I extended
     benefits on June 16. I am fortunate in that I rent
     my house from mother, so I won't be evicted
     immediately, but the electricity, phone, and water
     will probably all be shut off by the second week
     of July. I'm trying to be positive and think of it
     like camping, but no A/C in Dallas in July isn't
     very fun, and I have asthma, so I probably won't
     last long here.

Extended unemployment benefits for people who have been
out of work more than 26 weeks ended the first week of
June, and since then about 1.7 million of the nearly 7
million people who have been receiving benefits have
been cut off. By the time Congress gets back into
session the week of July 11, that number is expected to
exceed 2.1 million.

Conservatives in the Senate have said that they would
vote to restore those benefits if they were "paid for"
with spending cuts elsewhere in the federal budget, one
of their favorite targets happening to be yet-to-be-
spent stimulus dollars. But not only is such a demand
economically stupid in the middle of a recession, it is
also unprecedented at a time of high unemployment, as
this chart from the National Employment Law Project and
the Center for American Progress shows.

But making sure that unemployed people continue to have
a lifeline while they await the economy's recovery is
the least that Congress should do.

There's federal aid to states for Medicaid, children's
health care and other federally mandated health
programs that's been obstructed in the Senate.
Conservatives in the Senate last month would not allow
a bill with $55 billion in aid to come to the floor for
an up-or-down majority vote, and they blocked a pared-
down bill as well. Without that aid, budget cuts states
are making now to balance their budgets to compensate
for the lack of aid are expected to lead to the loss of
900,000 jobs, according to the Center for Budget and
Policy Priorities. House and Senate versions of the
Local Jobs for America Act are currently awaiting
action in both the House and the Senate. That
legislation would provide funding to state and local
governments to enable them to maintain a range of vital
services, including services provided by nonprofit and
community organizations.

But congressional conservatives could not even bring
themselves to support funding to prevent teacher
layoffs-even as they rail about the country their
children will inherit.

E.J. Dionne's column on Thursday bore a headline that
asked, "Have Obama and the Democrats forgotten how to
fight?" It begins with a Politico article about
complaints that Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., is being too
"aggressive" in pursuing climate change legislation.

     So there you have it: Once criticized for being
     too aloof and patrician, Kerry is now being
     assailed for daring to have passion for the cause
     of reducing the amount of carbon we are pumping
     into the atmosphere.

     Note that none of this is about the legislative
     merits. Kerry is being criticized for caring too
     much about an issue and not thinking enough about
     an election -- for being insufficiently
     opportunistic and unprincipled.

     And Democrats wonder why the polls find an
     "enthusiasm gap" that suggests their supporters
     will sit around grumpily in November while
     Republicans flood the polling places.

     It might help if voters saw President Obama and
     his party in Congress fighting for something going
     into these elections (including their record on
     health care and financial reform) rather than
     reacting, retrenching and retreating. Kerry's
     attitude is not the problem. It's part of the
     solution.

If hearing and reading the stories about the plight of
the unemployed is not enough to stop the retrenching
and retreating, our friends in Congress should at least
read the polls.

An impressive recent series of polls show that a
majority of the American public agree with
progressives, not conservatives, that stimulating the
economy to produce jobs is more important right now
that cutting the federal budget. USA Today-Gallup in
June showed that 60 percent of respondents would
"approve additional government spending to create jobs
and stimulate the economy."  In May, an NBC News-Wall
Street Journal poll that asked respondents to rank
their top priority for government action, 35 percent
said "job creation and economic growth" while only 20
percent ranked "the deficit and government spending" as
top priority. Even 47 percent of those those who
participated in a Fox News-Opinion Dynamics poll ranked
"the economy and jobs" as the item that was "most
important for the federal government to be working on
right now." Only 15 percent in that poll said the
"deficit and spending." Even Republicans ranked jobs as
the top priority.

Today's jobs report is one more note in what should be
a battle cry for the White House and for congressional
leadership. Our number one crisis is a jobs deficit.
Nothing we do to address the budget deficit will matter
as long as we continue to have chronic high
unemployment, and as long as our politics are dominated
by ideologues who have disdain for the victims of their
failed policies.

We should not be surprised, after conservatives
crippled the first stimulus response in 2009, that the
private sector has yet to be jolted into a self-
sustaining recovery. Given that, the answer today is
not to retreat but to get it right. President Obama got
it right when shortly after today's jobs report he
backed a series of infrastructure investments that
would help put Americans back to work in the short run
on projects that will bolster the economy in the long
run. That kind of talk steers the political
conversation in the right direction. That now has to be
amplified and emboldened.

Let's put "getting it right" to a vote. If it fails, so
be it. If proposals that would put Americans back to
work are whittled down to be almost ineffectual, then
at least let it be clear who is responsible for
diluting and contaminating the medicine that America's
economy needs to recover, so that they can be held
responsible.

_____________________________________________

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