STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Tuesday, 7 January 2014

[Demeter]

17. Obama’s fraudulent defense of the unemployed

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/01/06/lead-j06.html

As Congress reassembles following the holiday break, the White House and the Democratic Party are seeking to perpetrate a political fraud on the American people. Having overseen the Christmas expiration of extended jobless benefits for 1.3 million long-term unemployed people, the White House is now presenting its call for Congress to restore the benefits for a paltry three months as a crusade against inequality.

“Just a few days after Christmas, more than one million of our fellow Americans lost a vital economic lifeline—the temporary insurance that helps folks make ends meet while they look for a job,” President Obama said in his weekly address Saturday. Blaming Republicans for letting the benefits expire, he declared, “So when Congress comes back to work this week, their first order of business should be making this right."

The claim that blame for the expiration of federal jobless benefits rests entirely, or even primarily, with the Republicans is a shameless lie. Notwithstanding Republican opposition to the benefits program, the failure to extend it past its December 28 deadline is, in the first instance, the result of a calculated policy carried out by the White House and congressional Democrats. By agreeing to a budget deal last month that excluded an extension of the benefits, the Democrats ensured that the program would lapse before the new year.

On December 7, White House spokesman Jay Carney made clear that the administration would not make the extension of jobless benefits a precondition for the budget deal then being negotiated by House and Senate Democrats and Republicans. The Democratic leadership immediately fell into line. House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi, who only hours before had said the Democrats would not vote for any budget that did not include funding for long-term jobless benefits, turned around and said such a provision did not “have to be part of the budget.”...The following week, the Democratic-controlled Senate chose to allocate 30 hours to debate a nomination to the Washington DC Circuit Court instead of voting on a jobless benefits extension. Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, sets the agenda for the body....Now, leading Democrats are hinting that they are preparing for the measure to be blocked in a Senate vote on January 6. “We will come back at this issue,” said Senator Charles Schumer (Democrat of New York).

Democratic strategists have told the press they intend to keep the issue of extended jobless benefits on the agenda as long as possible, believing it will give them an advantage in this year's midterm elections. William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former Clinton administration advisor, told the Washington Post: “Those are issues with histories. The public support is pretty clear.”....The Democratic Party's cynical references to social inequality are part of an effort to rehabilitate the public image of the Obama administration amid growing popular anger over its right-wing social policies, its illegal domestic spying programs, and its foreign policy of militarism and war. This campaign is being coordinated with the trade union bureaucracy, which staged protests last month calling for an increase in the minimum wage. All of this once again underscores the social character of the Obama administration, which is nothing but an agency of the banks, the corporations, and the military-intelligence apparatus, supported by an upper-middle class layer of trade union officials and their political allies who seek to give its right-wing policies a “progressive” veneer.