Sunday’s New York Times announced that soon-to-be U.S. president Obama’s “Recovery plans expand as outlook dims.”
Obama upped his goal for jobs to be created during the first two years of his administration from 2.5 million to 3 million.
All this for the bargain price of only $800 billion, a mere drop in the bucket compared to the $8.5 trillion—almost 60 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product—that the federal government has committed to recent financial bailouts.
But Obama’s ambitious 3 million job goal will not offset the 2 million jobs lost this year plus the 4 million projected losses in 2009.
And that is not counting all those people who are underemployed or who stopped looking, along with the millions of mostly African and Mexican people falsely locked up or otherwise tied up in the colonial prison system in this country.
Imprisoning African people has been the number one economic stimulus plan for white America for the past 25 years.
Obama is going to attempt to stimulate the economy and save the dying capitalist system by pouring government money into infrastructure, energy, health, education and support for the poor and unemployed.
Comparisons with Depression-era president Franklin Roosevelt are flying and optimism is growing, but here are 3 reasons why Obama’s economic plan won’t work.
1. Roosevelt’s New Deal didn’t work either. What brought the U.S. out of its economic crisis of the 1930s and into the mass prosperity of the 60s and 70s was not the New Deal. It was the fact that the U.S. emerged from the Second Imperialist War as the leader of world capitalism.
After 1945 the U.S. now controlled all the resources and near slave labor coming from nations that had been colonized by the British and French for the past hundred years. Stolen wealth of a capitalist system built on slavery and genocide flowed into the U.S. and the dollar became the world reserve currency.
2. FDR’s New Deal was carried out at the expense of the majority of the African community.
Roosevelt’s social programs such as welfare were for white people only. White farmers were paid a government subsidy to not plant crops, leading to thousands of African share croppers being pushed off farms.
The establishment of minimum wage caused the layoffs of black workers. Racist unions were bolstered keeping African people out. Social security excluded agriculture and domestic service, jobs held by 75 percent of the African community.
What would the New Deal have cost if it included African people? While it is not likely that Obama would be able to blatantly exclude the black community from his plan, he has completely denied the crushing poverty and martial law in African communities and the oppression coming out the legacy of enslavement in this country.
Obama has not even addressed the unjust, two-tiered, Jim Crow U.S. prison system that holds two and a half million mostly poor, mostly African people. With his myth of a “post-racial America” Obama covers over the fact that the majority of the U.S. poor are and long have been African and oppressed people.
Unless Obama’s recovery plan consciously goes about “leveling the playing field,” it will never benefit African people in this country to the same extent that it will the white population.
3. If Obama is serious about trying to rescue capitalism from its current crisis he would demand that Wall Street bankers be brought to trial for their criminal acts in defrauding U.S. citizens. He would call for complete transparency and force the bankers to open up their books and disclose all of their “toxic assets” that now remain hidden.
Of course Obama is not going to do that. Instead, he enlisted into his cabinet and team the same old criminals who helped create this crisis. Obama’s chief economic advisor is Robert Rubin, the Citigroup Director who is being sued for the same kind of fraud that Bernard Madoff just got exposed for!
Obama’s Secretary of Treasury will be Timothy Geithner, the head of the New York Federal Reserve bank who facilitated the fraud being carried out on Wall Street in the past several years. Please! And what about Wall Street insider Mary Shapiro who will be head of the SEC?
(See: Government bailout hits $8.5 trillion by Kathleen Pender, SFGate.com
Bad Deal: How FDR made life worse for African Americans
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