22.09.2004

Brother, can you spare a dime?

Martin Schreader looks at the impact of the economy on the US elections

In presidential elections, the health of the economy is always a central issue and point of contention between the two main candidates.

When economic times are good, the incumbent candidate almost always takes credit for its success; when times are bad, that same incumbent either blames his predecessor or otherwise passes the blame to someone else.

This latter scenario is what eventually led to the now famous quote by Ronald Reagan: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” The Clinton team in 1992 put it more succinctly: “It’s the economy, stupid!”

Whether inquisitive or direct, it does not matter. When it comes to elections, the state of the economy is a primary motivation for millions of voters. This year is no exception. The US economy began to slow quickly in the middle of 2000, as the business cycle began to dip downward. The September 11 2001 attack on the World Trade Center accelerated this fall, but did not cause it.

Close to four million manufacturing jobs have disappeared over the last four years, and millions more in the service and agricultural industries have also found themselves desperately seeking any means of survival. And yet the Bush regime, its supporters and media mouthpieces talk about a ‘recovery’. Is it any wonder that so many workers in the US are asking, ‘What recovery?!’

If you go by the statistics released by the government, you might think this country was in the midst of a wonderful renaissance, following a short and relatively harmless downturn. Certainly, this is what the Bush-Cheney campaign would like every American voter to think. However, the monthly and quarterly figures released by the federal number-crunchers are almost useless. According to the federal government, unemployment continues to hover between five and six percent - roughly about 10 million people.

Not bad for a capitalist country coming out of a recession, eh?

Unfortunately, all is not as it seems. To use a colloquialism that has become common in the last few years, the labour statistics released by the government have been ‘Enron-ed’. The official statistics leave out millions of working people who do not fit Washington’s definition of ‘unemployed’.
For example, people who have been out of work for more than six months or have simply stopped looking for work are not counted. People who are only working part time (about 20 hours a week) are counted the same as someone who is working full time or more; people who have more than one full-time job are counted for each.

While it is difficult to get a fully accurate count on the number of unemployed and underemployed, estimates by unions and labour advocacy groups put the unemployment rate at somewhere around 30% nationally, with the numbers being higher among youth, African Americans and in the inner cities.
It gets worse. Recently, the US labour department reclassified millions of traditionally service sector jobs as ‘manufacturing’. Most of the jobs that were reclassified were low-wage, non-union jobs in such vast manufacturing facilities as ... McDonalds. That’s right - a burger flipper at the local ‘Mickey D’s’, on the minimum wage of $5.15 an hour (about £2.88) and receiving no health coverage or union protection, is now considered a part of the same industrial classification as a steelworker or coal miner. It adds a whole new meaning to ‘cooking the books’.

Perhaps the vilest element of this has been how Washington has tinkered with the way inflation is calculated. With hundreds of thousands of workers’ pay cheques tied to cost of living adjustments, these recalculations have done nothing but robbed working people of even more of the wealth they create.

Inflation is calculated based on a ‘basket’ of staple items that the government considers universal purchases. What has happened, though, is that the capitalists who offer up the items that go into the ‘basket’ have reduced the sizes of their staple items or have globalised their production process, leading to both lost jobs and lost ability to afford these products.

Even though the government puts inflation at between two and three percent, ‘real’ inflation has been between five and eight percent, with some basic items’ cost rising by upwards of 10% over just the last two years. The end result of all this has been a very real and absolute erosion of the living standards of working people across the country.

The new generation of young workers, able to vote for the first time this year, has already been told they will likely not see a standard of living like that their parents enjoy. Few people like to say it, but it is nonetheless true: the US is in the grips of an economic depression. In spite of all the media and government hype, working people know that the talk about ‘recovery’ is a lie. All they have to do is look around their neighbourhoods and workplaces to see that.

This November, working people will go to the polls and, unfortunately, many of them will vote for the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, in a vain attempt to return to where they were prior to 2000. The reality, however, will be that they will be casting their votes for a candidate who, in spite of his campaign rhetoric, supports the same free trade agenda that Bush puts forward.

Perhaps it would be worthwhile to greet whoever is installed as president in January 2001 with a shantytown, similar to the ‘Hooverville’ that workers during the ‘great depression’ set up to bring attention to their plight in the early 1930s, complete with doing updated renditions of the classic tune, ‘Brother, can you spare a dime?’

Well, maybe that should be ‘Brother, can you spare a dollar?’, since a dime is pretty much worthless today - even as a measure of the differences between the two main candidates.