One of the ruling-class myths surrounding the unprecedented bailout of the banking system in 2008 and 2009 is: Like it or not, trillions of dollars of the people’s money had to be forked over to the 1 percent; after all, they are the “job creators.”
So, having been rescued, the largest banks are now sitting on top of $1.6 trillion in “excess reserves” (a giant hoard of cash collecting dust in bank vaults). How is all that “job creation” by the “job creators” going?
According to figures released by the Labor Department on Aug. 17, unemployment rates rose in 44 states in the month of July and remained unchanged in another four. (What would we do without those entrepreneurial “job creators”?)
Not even the two states that recorded a drop in their unemployment rates, Idaho and Rhode Island, can be considered a silver lining in this enormous dark cloud.
Both states actually shed jobs in July, but an even greater number of people “dropped out of the labor force.”
Thousands of the long-term unemployed, that is workers who have been without work for more than six months, in both states have become so discouraged that they have simply stopped looking for work, giving up any hope of finding a job. According to the aberrations of the U.S. ruling class, these human beings are no longer counted as being unemployed. So while the real number of unemployed in Idaho and Rhode Island increased in July, on paper, it decreased.
Coinciding with the Labor Department’s announcement that unemployment rates had crept up nearly everywhere in the United States during the month of July, the White House and Congress quietly finished closing the coffin on the Federal-State Extended Benefits program, which provided 20 extra weeks of emergency aid to long-term unemployed workers once other state and federal insurance had run out.
By mid-August, the Extended Benefits program was ended in the last of 34 states plus the District of Columbia, with more than a half-a-million workers losing aid.
If that was not enough, another federal unemployment insurance program, the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program, is set to expire for most states at the end of the year, yanking the rug out from underneath nearly 2.4 million more workers for whom it is impossible to find a job.
All of this illustrates that under the capitalist system the government is not an objective mediator between the capitalist class on the one hand and the working class on the other. But that the capitalist government answers to the banks and the super rich, and intervenes in their interests.
