By David Swanson

Ohio may be trailing Michigan and a few other states in official unemployment statistics, but in all of these states the truth is worse than we're told, and it's visible. Unemployment rates do not include those who've given up looking for work, those with an insufficient part-time job, those who have figured out that they would pay more for childcare than they would earn working, those in prison, or those working for less than a living wage.

On a book tour in Ohio, I've met people underworked, overworked, and underpaid. I've seen shut down factories and every other sort of building. This is a depression. There are huge areas with nothing new built and nothing old properly maintained. But there are people actively engaged in struggling for economic justice and every other kind of justice, for themselves and for the rest of the world. And that is inspiring.

By Dave Lindorff

It is refreshing to hear the new head of the AFL-CIO, former
mineworker and Mineworkers President Richard Trumka, get mad at
sell-out Democrats and make a threat not to “support” them next year.

As Trumka pointed out in a talk to the Center for American Progress
this week, for years, Democratic politicians, and the Democrats as a
Party, have counted on the labor movement to get out the vote of its
membership on Election Day, only to turn on workers after getting to
Washington, on the issues that really matter, like jobs-killing free
trade agreements, the gutting of bankruptcy law and credit law
protections, and, most recently, the undermining of needed labor law
reform.

Trumka, quoting from a famous Florence Reece mineworkers song popularized by Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger, said that going
forward, Democrats will have to make it clear to labor “Which side are
you on?”

By Dave Lindorff

Bill Clinton was the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party
and to progressives since that racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson won the
presidency and dragged the US into the utterly pointless and incredibly
bloody First World War.

Clinton, by posing as a progressive, confused and undermined, and
ultimately betrayed the liberal/progressive wing of the party,
shattering what was left of the New Deal coalition and leaving the
American left adrift and riven by the conflict between those who
thought the Democratic Party was the only viable vehicle for
progressive reform and those who thought it was hopelessly in the grip
of corporate interests.

Barack Obama offers the hope of bringing that era of debilitating confusion to an end.

By Dave Lindorff

OMG! Those protesters showing up at Democratic “town meetings” to
promote the president’s health care “reform” program are being bused in
from out of town?

Scandal! Que horrible! (Gasp)

But wait! That’s exactly what we on the left always did when we
held demonstrations—at least if we could. Who in the trade union
movement hasn’t called on fellow workers in other unions to join them
in rallies during struggles with an employer, or asked them to join
sparse picket-lines? Who hasn’t pulled out the stops trying to get
people from other cities to attend a local protest?

By Dave Lindorff

The Democrats in Congress have sold out their supporters in the
labor movement by giving up the so-called “card-check” feature of the
embattled Employee Free Choice Act, which makes the “reform”
legislation that has been billed as labor’s “number one issue” much
less of a reform. Instead of being hammered into line on this issue by
party leaders and by President Obama, who has long pledged to back
EFCA, conservative Democrats in the House and Senate were allowed to
join Republicans in opposing the measure, leading to its replacement
with a vague plan to require quicker secret-ballot elections in
union-organizing drives.

By Dave Lindorff

Reports are starting to appear suggesting that laid-off or
underemployed Americans, and the long-term unemployed, are losing
patience with the Obama administration’s and Congress’ economic
stimulus plan, which thus far has not done anything to arrest the
growth of unemployment, now at close to 20 percent of the US workforce,
at least as unemployment used to honestly be counted in the 1970s and
early 1980s.

While millions of jobs have been lost since the beginning of this
year alone, the number of jobs that have been created as a result of
the Obama administration’s signature $780-billion stimulus spending
package is under 150,000—a far cry from the 3.5 million that were
promised when the bill was being put before Congress.

By Dave Lindorff

My bank, a small regional institution that was not involved in sub-prime lending, and that was not a recipient of any TARP bailout money, cut off my home equity line of credit two weeks ago. They did it abruptly, with no notice—I only discovered it had happened when I tried to get a $500 advance from it to cover a payment I was making on my credit card. When I asked what was going on, the local branch manager informed me that “we are closing out a lot of credit lines while we reassess the value of houses in this region, which have been falling.”

By Dave Lindorff

Just imagine for a moment that you are a retired contractor,
struggling to get by on your pathetically shriveled 401(k). when your
ne-er-do-well child suddenly comes to you saying he’s got this idea to
start buying derelict homes and rehabbing them for resale. He asks you
to stake him with a $100,000 loan (about half of what you’ve got left
in your retirement fund), promising to repay you when he sells his
first couple of houses. You know the kid’s flat busted and has been
laid off from his job as a dishwasher, so you want to help, but you’ve
also seen his carpentry skills: The doghouse he build in high school
fell apart on a windy day, and his own house has a leaking roof, needs
repainting, and all the plumbing leaks. You’ve also seen his business
skills: He plays the Lotto excessively, hasn’t saved a penny, and buys
most of his supplies at the local 7-Eleven.