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In public squares across the country, Occupy protesters honor Rev. Martin Luther King’s memory on this holiday devoted to him. Their tribute is more meaningful and enduring than the granite monument that President Obama dedicated to Rev. King in Washington, D.C. last year.

That’s because the Occupiers are pressing for a cause – economic justice – that Rev. King had embraced in the months before his assassination in 1968. And they’re pursuing it with the technique he advocated – nonviolent protest.

Rev. King’s final crusade, his Poor People’s Campaign, and the Occupiers’ championing the nation’s 99 percent are remarkable in their similarities. It’s tragic that in the 44 years since Rev. King launched his campaign for an economic Bill of Rights that the nation’s poor and middle class have lurched backward instead of forward. It’s hopeful, however, that a whole new generation of idealists has taken up the dream of economic justice.

In the year before Rev. King was gunned down, he persuaded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to join him in a movement devoted to securing for all citizens the basic needs that would enable them to pursue the American Dream, to pursue happiness. He believed every able-bodied person should have access to a job with a living wage. And he believed every American should have decent housing and affordable health care. Without economic security, he said, no man is free.

Rev. King’s dream has its roots in the progressive movement, containing key elements of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s proposed Economic Bill of Rights. Roosevelt, the beloved president who gave the country Social Security, pushed the Economic Bill of Rights in the waning days of the war. (more…)

David Woolner
Senior Fellow, Hyde Park Resident Historian, Roosevelt Institute.

With unemployment still hovering at over 9 percent nationwide, and with some economists and historians arguing that the present economic crisis should not be referred to as the “Great Recession,” but as the “Great Depression II,” a good deal of anticipation has arisen over what President Obama will propose in his message to Congress on Thursday. Despite widespread Republican opposition to further government spending, many economists and business leaders — not to mention liberal members of the Democratic Party — argue that what the country desperately needs is another stimulus package. A jobs program could provide hope and relief to the millions of long-term unemployed, restore confidence, and stem the U.S. economy’s steady slide back into recession. Even the ever demure Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, has indicated that “putting people back to work” must be made a priority if the country wishes to avoid long-term damage to the economy. (more…)

Robert Creamer

By Robert Creamer
Political organizer, strategist and author

Republicans have proposed legislation that would cap federal spending at 20.6% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — just below the average of the last forty years. Sounds reasonable, right?

Only if you like the idea of another Great Depression.

Over the last forty years federal spending has averaged about 20.7% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), so Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) has proposed the “altogether reasonable” idea that Federal spending should be capped at 20.6%. To exceed this cap, a two-thirds majority of the House and Senate would be necessary. Unfortunately, this proposal has been endorsed by several Senate Democrats.

But — as the events of the last two years should have made clear to everyone — this reasonable- sounding proposal is actually a prescription for economic suicide. Had it been in effect when the recklessness of the Wall Street banks collapsed the economy in 2008, the Great Recession would have nose dived into another Great Depression.

As most economists will confirm, the major factor that saved us from another depression was the very fact that Federal spending as a percentage of GDP substantially increased in 2009 and 2010 — to about 24.7% of GDP.

When the bottom fell out of the economy, the GDP shrunk. The level of spending by consumers and businesses — and demand for American exports — also declined. As a result, millions of people lost their jobs and had less money to spend, so there was even less demand and more people were laid off. That downward economic cycle can only be broken when some actor has the ability to increase economic demand and break the downward spiral. (more…)

Robert Borosage

By Robert L. Borosage
Co-Director Campaign for America’s Future

How does America dig out of the hole we are in? Surely the focus must be on first principles, how do we recreate an economy that works for working people? With the right talking about a return to the principles of the Constitution, it is worth remembering how Americans thought about first principles coming out of the last great economic calamity.

Today is the 67th anniversary of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s historic 1944 State of the Union address that put forth an Economic Bill of Rights for all Americans. (Michael Moore presented to modern audiences in his Capitalism: A Love Story)

Roosevelt spoke as the Great War was drawing to a close. Attention was turning to the transition to peace, with widespread fears about whether the economy would revert to the depression that only the mobilization for war brought to an end. An entire nation had mobilized and sacrificed for war, what would peacetime bring?

Roosevelt argued that the sacrifices made in war demanded a strategy not only for “a lasting peace,” but for “an American standard of living higher than ever before known” — and one that was as widely shared as the wartime sacrifices were:

We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people — whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth — is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure. (more…)

Les Leopold

By Les Leopold
Author, “The Looting of America”

“Thus the real reason for Thanksgiving, deleted from the official story, is: Socialism does not work; the one and only source of abundance is free markets, and we thank God we live in a country where we can have them.” ~ “The Great Thanksgiving Host,” The Ludwig Von Mises Institute - a Tea Party favorite re-write of American History.

Just think, only two years ago Wall Street’s billionaires were on their knees begging for help. Their reckless financial games had crashed the economy. Every firm on Wall Street teetered on the edge of collapse. Without trillions of dollars of government bailouts and asset guarantees, they were finished — kaput. (Please see The Looting of America for the blow by blow on how the “abundance” of financial markets failed.)

But then… a reprieve! The billionaires were bailed out. Congress passed the mildest financial reforms possible. The biggest banks — the survivors — came out of the recession even bigger than before. Wall Street got richer again, and bonuses are now back to near-record levels. Sure, they have to pay back TARP money. Big deal. The profits and bonuses that money leveraged is theirs to keep as if nothing had happened. Is this a great country or what?

But while things are booming on Wall Street, the rest of our economy is in serious trouble. It won’t take much to push us into another downward deflationary spiral, sending unemployment even higher. (Already, year-to-year core inflation has hit its lowest level since this statistic was first recorded back in 1957.) We need 22 million new jobs to get back to full-employment and it’s ludicrous to believe that the private sector can create them on its own in the next decade. But Federal job creation is unthinkable with Congress in gridlock. Meanwhile the states are engaged in a massive anti-stimulus program as they cut back spending in response to crumbling revenues. It seems that the only institution left with a modicum of will and means to prime the economic pump is the Federal Reserve, with a plan called QE2 (a second round of quantitative easing, which means pumping more money into the financial sector.) (more…)

Les Leopold

By Les Leopold
Author, “The Looting of America”

If future job creation reaches about 208,000 jobs per month, the average monthly job creation for the best year for job creation in the 2000s, it will take almost 140 months (about 11.5 years) to reach pre-recession employment levels. In a more optimistic scenario with 321,000 jobs created per month, the average monthly job creation for the best year in the 1990s, it will take 59 months (almost 5 years). ~Michael Greenstone, Adam Looney The Long Road Back to Full Employment: How the Great Recession Compares to Previous U.S. Recessions, The Brookings Institution

This may be the first time in American history that the super-rich are experiencing an economic boom while the rest of us are coping with serious economic difficulties. Even during the depths of the Great Depression there was some equality of suffering. Of course, the wealthy weren’t exactly standing in bread lines wondering if they’d ever work again. But the rich and the poor both felt the crisis. This time around, it’s a Tale of Two Cities: the super-rich are doing just fine, thanks to taxpayer largess, even as the rest of us are staggering through the highest sustained unemployment level since 1937.

Our Wall Street billionaires easily weathered the financial storm that they themselves created. It’s as if nothing had happened. The financial reforms Congress passed are weak. The biggest banks actually are bigger. And Wall Street profits and bonuses are approaching record highs. That’s in stark contrast with the fact that more than 29 million Americans are without work or have been forced into part-time jobs.

With the Republican landslide, the super-rich have nothing to fear from Congress. No need to worry about tax increases or tighter regulations now. The hedge funds will be able to hang on to their 15 percent tax rate (by claiming their earnings as capital gains) while raking in $900,000 an hour (not a typo). Meanwhile the pressure mounts to cut social spending — because, of course, we’ve got to combat the large deficits we racked up by giving tax breaks to the rich, bailing out Wall Street, and dealing with the financial crash that Wall Street created. (We get a deficit commission instead of a jobs commission?)

But the real mystery is how quiet progressives are. We seem constitutionally incapable of facing the enormity of the employment crisis.

As far as I can tell, most liberal advocacy groups are carrying on as if the economy hadn’t crashed at all. It’s like we’re all stuck in our remote silos — each working on our own separate issues. We have no shared vision, shared programs or shared will to tackle the broader unemployment crisis. We hope the economy will somehow resurrect itself so that we can go on fighting for our favorite cause without any further interruptions.

Meanwhile, the right, especially the Tea Party, definitely is in crisis mode, and they have a plan. In my opinion they have misidentified the crisis – big government and debt – and have the wrong plan — cut taxes and government spending. But they have a vision, they have passion, and they’re not afraid to challenge not only the Democrats, but the Republicans. They’ve hit on a clever theory to explain the jobs crisis, one that can’t be disproved by facts: It’s caused by big government’s interference in the economy. The solution: slice government spending and regulations so that free enterprise can prosper. And if unemployment still remains high after budget cuts–well, then we just didn’t cut enough. It’s a perfect Catch 22.

And the rest of us are saying… what? What do environmentalists propose to do about the jobs crisis? What is the women’s movement’s economic program? What do progressives involved in healthcare or education think we should do to create the 22 million new jobs we need to get back to full employment?

Yes, there’s a lot of positive discussion about rebuilding our economy through green jobs and renewable energy. But the scale of these proposals is far too small to put much of a dent in the unemployment numbers. Are we all too afraid to say what’s really needed?

We need hundreds of billions of dollars of public investment, right now, paid by taxes on the super-rich.

Why are progressives so timid? Part of the answer lies in our permanent attachment to the Democratic Party. It seems that we can’t ever imagine a time when it would be appropriate to abandon or at least openly fight with the Dems — even those who abandoned us long ago. What will we do as the remaining Blue Dogs move even further to the right, joining with the Republicans on deficit reduction, gutting health care reform, outlawing abortions and stonewalling on climate change? One thing is certain — the Democratic Party is in no mood to lay out a bold national proposal to create the millions of new jobs we need. Most are tacking to the “center” to avoid the fate of Russ Feingold, the very best of the bunch.

What would a massive job creation program look like?

Let’s start with a no-brainer: We hire an army of at least one million installers to weatherize every home and business in the country. Hiring all these workers –at decent wages –through tens of thousands of local contractors will probably add another 400,000 jobs (in addition to the original million) as these re-employed workers spend their earnings. Households and businesses will save on their energy bills, and we’ll reduce global warming emissions. The budget crisis facing state governments will ease as tax dollars start pouring in and unemployment insurance claims plummet. We’ll trigger an economic upswing that’s also good for the environment.

Next, we should fund free higher education at all public colleges and universities, a social good that will also open up the job market by drawing people from the workforce into the educational system. A hiring and construction boom on campuses all over the country will generate a flood of jobs for our millions of unemployed construction workers. This is precisely how the GI Bill of Rights averted what could have been a staggering unemployment crisis after WWII — a time when millions of returning veterans were coming back home in search of work. Through the GI bill, three million instead went to school. Congressional studies show that the GI Bill returned almost $7 dollars of economic growth for every dollar invested — probably the best investment the federal government ever made.

We should also invest massively in alternative energy research, in rebuilding and enhancing our infrastructure, and in meeting a myriad of other needs in our communities. Ask every town in the country to come up with ten projects that need doing right now, and then have the federal government fund them. The ripple effect would wake up our slumbering economy.

Oh, but won’t all this cost a fortune? Aren’t we already tapped out from Wall Street bailouts and the half-assed stimulus program (not to mention two wars)?

Good question — it gets us to the best part of our in-your-face program. We need to make those who crushed our economy, and whom we so generously bailed out, foot the bill. The American people, I believe, would support a windfall tax on financial profits and bonuses and eliminating tax loopholes on hedge funds to fund the jobs we so desperately need.

Time for a Jobs Party?

Will any of this pass in the near future? Of course not. But it’ll never happen if we don’t propose what is really needed.

We have no prayer of tackling the jobs crisis until we articulate a clear-cut agenda and start pressing for it. And we can’t do it alone. We need a sustained, organized voice independent of the Democratic Party that focuses clearly on the jobs crisis. In fact, we should take a cold hard look at creating a Jobs Party. Maybe, one day, it would become a third party that would truly vie for power. But at the very least it could create the same kind of chaos among the Democrats as the Tea Party is creating among the Republicans. Wouldn’t it be nice to see Democratic officials, fearing primary fights, tripping all over themselves to proclaim their allegiance to the Jobs Party agenda?

Right now, the only conversation we’re hearing on jobs is a boring rerun of failed neo-liberalism – cut taxes on the super-rich, deregulate big business and pray for rain. Instead, we need to force politicians to engage in a much more aggressive national conversation about jobs. How are we are going to create the 22 million new jobs to get us back near full-employment?

Will it really take eleven years or more, as the Brookings Institution study (cited above) suggests, for us to get these jobs back? That’s up to us. A Jobs Party with moxie could speed up the timetable during this new era of joblessness.

Maybe all this sound fanciful and unrealistic. But let’s remind ourselves of how fast the world is changing. Did anyone believe that President Obama could go from being America’s darling to chopped liver in less than two years? Did anyone believe that a Tea Party would become a “credible” force among more than 40 percent of the electorate by pushing an agenda that died with Barry Goldwater a generation ago?

Actually, the most fanciful path of all might be hoping we can muddle through indefinitely with the Democrats while ignoring the employment crisis as we plug away, day after day, inside our issue silos.

Come on — let’s say what we really believe in before we forget how.

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Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009. He is working on a new book, “How to Earn $900,000 an Hour: The Rise of Wall Street Billionaires and the New Class War,” which is to be published in 2011.

***

This piece was first published on The Huffington Post.

Dean Baker

By Dean Baker
Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Little brothers exist to be abused by their older siblings. The United Kingdom has willingly played the role of abused sibling for the United States for decades.

When our president wanted to launch a hare-brained invasion of Iraq, no one was more outspoken in his support than Prime Minister Tony Blair. Who is our closest ally in our Vietnam-style occupation of Afghanistan? Yep, it’s the Brits again. And now the new Conservative-Liberal government is taking the lead in trying to use government austerity to restore prosperity.

Those of us who oppose austerity in the United States are delighted. The U.K. is jumping out front to lay off public sector workers, raise taxes, and cut government programs and supports across the board. It is doing this at a time when the economy has nearly 8 percent unemployment and considerably excess capacity in almost every sector of its economy.

This drive to austerity comes at a time when the short-term rate set by the Bank of England is 0.5 percent and the rate on 10-year bonds is just 3.0 percent. The timing is also perfectly wrong in that most of the U.K.’s major trading partners are also suffering from weak economies and therefore unlikely to provide strong export markets. Nor are they likely to tolerate a substantial devaluation of the pound against their currency. (more…)

Robert Creamer

By Robert Creamer
Political organizer, strategist and author

Last week’s employment report served to reinforce the utter bankruptcy of Republican economic policy — and the absolute necessity of remembering the lessons of the last century of economic history.

The private sector job market is slowly stumbling out of the economic ditch into which it was steered by the policies of the Bush Administration. Sixty-four thousand private sector jobs were created by the economy last month — well short of what is necessary to allow the job market to achieve lift-off velocities and long-term sustained growth — but a least a positive number.

But that growth was entirely offset by the loss of 159,000 government jobs. Some of them were temporary census jobs. But the bulk — including the loss of 26,000 teachers — came from layoffs caused by the fiscal crunch of state and local governments. State and local governments cut jobs at the fastest rate in almost 30 years. The loss in jobs would have been even more massive if Democrats in Congress had not passed a bill to aid state and local government before they adjourned for the August recess. That bill was passed over virtually unanimous Republican opposition.

The Republicans have traditionally offered four major elixirs as their prescriptions for economic growth:

1) Cut taxes — especially for the wealthy. In fact, of course, tax breaks for the rich are mainly about giving more money to the Republicans’ major constituency — the wealthiest of our citizens. The fig leaf they have used to cover this self-serving policy used to be described as “supply-side” economics: the idea that if you give the wealthy and big corporations more money they will automatically invest it in new economic ventures that generate jobs.

Of course this proposition completely ignores actual economic history. The Bush tax cut policy was in place for much of the last decade. But his administration created a net increase of zero new private sector jobs — zero. In fact, of course, it is still in place today — due to expire at the end of the year, unless Republicans have their way — and it has done absolutely nothing to create new jobs. In fact, just the opposite. (more…)

Les Leopold

By Les Leopold
Author, “The Looting of America”

As thousands of demonstrators marched in European capitals on Wednesday to protest recent austerity measures, officials in Brussels proposed stiffening sanctions for governments that fail to cut their budget deficits and debt swiftly enough. (“Workers In Europe Protest Austerity Measures”, New York Times, 9/30/2010)

Oh, do the super-rich hate the sound of “class struggle.” Dare to utter the words and they’ll reach for their red-baiting paint guns and spray you silly with invective. It’s un-American. It’s socialistic. It’s an insult to democracy and freedom.

But try as they might, they can’t paint over the reality, which the new Fortune 400 listings make so clear: Wall Street billionaires have more money than they’ll ever be able to use–at a time when more than 29 million of us don’t have that most basic necessity, a full-time job. A hidden class war got us to this point. It’s not hidden anymore.

Once upon a time there was a tangible connection between the plutocrats and the rest of us. Carnegie, Mellon and Rockefeller built sprawling enterprises that employed tens of thousands of workers (even if they did treat them brutally). But today’s billionaire financiers, about 100 of whom are on the Fortune 400 list, have a tough time explaining how their money-making schemes produce any jobs at all. Very few of us have a clue about how they even make their money.

But we are clued in to the way our society is splitting apart. What’s good for the Wall Street tycoons is not good for America. The wealthy may loathe hearing about “class struggle,” but we’re in the middle of one — and it’s a doozy. (more…)

Robert Creamer

By Robert Creamer
Political organizer, strategist and author

This Saturday, a broad coalition of progressive organizations will hold a massive One Nation Working Together rally — actually kind of a revival — aimed at allowing progressives to emerge from a defensive crouch, stand up straight and mobilize our forces to do battle in the decisive midterm elections.

Due to a navigational error, the U.S. 4th Infantry Division landed on the wrong inlet on Utah Beach in Normandy on D-Day in 1944. For hours the were disoriented and pinned down by German defenders. Then the only general to accompany the amphibious assault, General Ted Roosevelt (son of President Teddy Roosevelt), personally rallied his troops from the beach, over the seawall and established a beachhead that was critical to the successful invasion of France that ultimately ended World War II.

Saturday’s rally is aimed at energizing thousands of latter-day General Ted Roosevelts who can fan out across America and do the same for the progressive forces that can be successful on Nov. 2 if — together — we stand up straight, take the offensive and refuse to be pinned down by constant attacks from the right.

The president’s speech to 27,000 in Madison, Wisconsin, last Monday night fired up all present. It was a great start. But this weekend’s rally organizers plan to communicate one central message to the thousands of activists who will gather in Washington Saturday: The President and other Democratic political leaders are not the only ones responsible for rallying our forces. We are all the generals who will rally our troops off this beach. It’s up to us to take the leadership to prevent the Big Business, Wall Street-dominated, Tea-Party Republicans from reclaiming right-wing domination of American politics.

For forty years the right was on the offensive in America. At least when Bill Clinton was president, Democrats had a team on the field, but in so many respects the right-wing offensive continued until their crushing defeat in November 2008.

For the last 18 months, the progressive forces have once again been on the offense. But the entrenched corporate interests didn’t roll over and play dead. They fought tooth and nail — they lied, they bit, they poked eyes — and did everything in their power to stop change. (more…)