No Jobs: Government Business as Usual

The September jobs figures are out. And once again the political uproar that should have happened if our government leaders and candidates were serious about the seriousness of our economic situation was astonishingly pitiful and about spin not honest solutions.

This is what we understand. By this spring Massachusetts was down some 300 to 325 thousand jobs! With some 6 million residents that means anyone who is not very wealthy was affected. The rest of us are either unemployed ourselves or know someone close to us who is. And for many it has been so long that their lives are fractured by it.

The Governor has been claiming job growth of 66 thousand jobs since the low-point and claiming its his economic planning that got us there.

The September job figures show us having lost 20,900 jobs in one month!

And, what no one is admitting, Massachusetts at the height of this last upturn had created 83,000 fewer jobs than if we had been in line with national trends. So we entered this recession/depression 83,000 short of where decent economic policies should have had us!

Anyone want to claim September’s job losses and that shortfall at the peak of the upturn? What about policies that about 10,000 run out the far end of unemployment benefits in our state every week – and given the warped way “official unemployment” is calculated the drop in unemployment figures measures workers’ discouragement not job improvements.

The Governor is running on this bizarrely out of touch mantra that our state economy is rebounding early. AND amazingly, the other gubernatorial candidates have nothing better to offer! How do we know? Because not one of them had the leadership capacity to show up with the devastating press conference on the steps of the State House that they should have on Friday, the day after the statistics came out and offered realistic, fact-based alternatives.

In fact, if the Emerson debate is any measure, these millionaires are so woefully out of touch with fact-based economics that I feel bad for the near future of our Commonwealth and the economic choices our top elected officials will offer us. They did talk about small-businesses as our job engine but they offer big tax-breaks and publicly-funded infrastructure deals to their big corporate friends (Cape Wind being just one such example when supporting locally controlled wind development would be cheaper and pass the savings onto consumers). And they all tout how they will cut government jobs.

And so long as government and big business are cutting wages, benefits and jobs, we cannot rebound economically. Here’s why:

The economy is primarily about the economic activity of people – we are 70% of the economy, private business 20% and government 10%. And it is those of us whose every day activities spend the highest percentage of our dollars who make the most difference. So contrary to Reagonomics and everyone since then, the same money in the hands of a few wealthy people will mean much less regular, local spending that drives our economy than that money in the hands of many more people with fewer resources in general. Consolidation of wealth kills capitalist economies, too, it turns out.

And sorry, political pundits, but here’s the real story of this downturn and the myth of a job-loss recovery cannot just be washed-over this time:

Line up all the beginning of economic downturns since 1948 and look at the relative job losses and how long it took for those jobs to return:

Yeah, that bottom line is us. And no kinder and gentler corporations are going to dig us out out of their own free-will. Is anyone running that has talked about real leadership overhauling this serious a situation? Think of the massive protests of the Great Depression and what is happening now in Europe if you want to be reminded where hope lies.

That’s job losses. And remember Massachusetts was off by 83,000 jobs that were never created by 2007, the peak of the last upturn. And jobs that actually create something? Of course, we want more green manufacturing jobs but this is what Massachusetts economic policies have really been about in terms of manufacturing in recent years (look at the years of this most recent supposed “upturn”):

Most manufacturing in Massachusetts historically has grown up locally and led to large locally-owned factories. Big deals to big corporations have not been the historical answer.

Remember about the supposed success of Evergreen Solar? Home-grown manufacturing company manufacturing solar panels. Our state leadership paid for them to move to Devens and build there to the tune of $54 million and they have since announced that while they will keep the jobs they have here, BUT they are moving all new manufacturing jobs to China! Where were the teeth in that subsidy agreement for green jobs in our state? And why, instead, did not the economic – apparently– idiots in our state government follow Germany’s model and use that same money to subsidize our actual residents to buy solar panels? That would have meant a guarantee of a huge local market for some time and Massachusetts could get out front like Germany with the most solar panels per capita of any country. There go the green manufacturing jobs in that sector.

Oh, and by the way that one deal was more than the $50 million this administration put aside for all small businesses in our state. But don’t imagine that any other gubernatorial candidate is offering better right now – they seem to all be at best completely clueless.

Finally, it’s not just about job loss, here are the similar economic policies guaranteed to drown us: loss of hours and earnings we would need to return to being the economic engine of our economy.

And while it is fashionable to beat up on unions these days, if organized workers are getting the raw deal they are these days, woe to those of us completely at the mercy of the policies of unorganized work places. (We have to break our tendency to compare our economic misery to those of workers we can identify and instead focus on the outrageous and immoral salaries of the very wealthiest and getting wealthier because of our government’s policies.) I see contract offer after contract offer with actual salary cuts of $10 to $25 thousand per year! And these are often government jobs – our own government is instituting policy decision after policy decision to kill off what remains of the economic activity of regular people while continuing huge ( often out-of-state) corporate deals.

I don’t have space here to go into the economic stupidity not to mention morally questionable state government’s choices to cut the very income programs that represent the most consistently effective economic stimulus paid for by the federal government such as denying unemployment benefits, cutting food stamps or welfare benefits. All of these are paid for by our tax dollars which would be coming back to our state and into the hands guaranteed to spend them immediately and put them in circulation in local economies. Unlike the huge federal expenditures bailing out banks and funding private contracts for too wildly unpopular wars which the vast number of us regular people have opposed.

The dilemma is that November 2nd at this point offers no real options for economic sense at the top. We have to go vote but if it was ever clear that voting is not enough, this year is proof. Not one of them is addressing the real crisis and even as millionaires it is their crisis too.

Grace Ross is a former gubernatorial candidate and new author. If you want more economic reality, her book Main St. $marts tells the economic story form the view point of Main St. and the solutions we already sense we need.