With six unemployed workers for every available job, it is now common to see long lines every time an employer advertises a few job openings. In working-class neighborhoods, workers are losing their homes, with five foreclosures filed every minute.

In the face of the Great Recession, Obama can barely conceal his indifference and contempt for those being devastated by the economic crisis.

“Employment,” he remarked casually last week, is a “lagging economic indicator.”

For the White House and its coterie of Wall Street advisors, the overriding concern is extending the stock market rally and protecting the wealth of the financial aristocracy.

The White House has rejected out of hand any measures that would quickly put the unemployed to work—such as a government-funded public works program.

Instead, the White House is discussing yet another windfall for big business in the form of a tax credit for companies that hire new employees.

Nor has the president proposed any measures to provide emergency relief to workers facing foreclosure, the shutoff of utilities or the loss of health care.

What are the priorities of this government?

When it comes to the financial aristocracy, there is no limit to the resources the administration will provide.

Trillions from the public treasury have been handed to the bankers and traders whose swindling and profiteering precipitated the economic crisis.

Assured that they are “too big to fail,” the major banks and investment houses have resumed their gambling, this time with taxpayer money, and are preparing to hand out record year-end bonuses.

To pay for the resulting explosion in the federal deficit, the administration has embarked on a program of austerity and attacks on basic entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

With its attack on GM and Chrysler workers, the White House spearheaded a drive to permanently reduce the wages and benefits of workers and boost the profitability of US corporations.

While it bails out Wall Street and attacks the working class at home, the Obama administration wages imperialist war abroad to seize the energy resources of the Middle East and Central Asia.

These are not just the priorities of an individual, but of the social class that Obama and both the Democrats and Republicans represent.

The financial oligarchy that rules America is intent on making the working class pay for the bankruptcy of its system—capitalism.

After years of being told by the defenders of the profit system that unemployment and poverty are essentially personal problems, events such as the lineup in Detroit are showing that these are social problems, bound up with the irrational and unequal way society is organized.

Under the capitalist system, the wealthy enrich themselves by impoverishing the vast majority of the people on the planet.

The current global economic crisis is a demonstration of the failure of the capitalist system.

It must be replaced by a system whose priorities are determined by social needs, not the personal enrichment of a parasitic elite.

It must be a system based on social equality and the democratic control of economic life by working people, who comprise the vast majority. It must be replaced, in other words, by socialism.

As the first anniversary of Obama’s election approaches, disappointment with the Democratic president is increasingly turning into anger and bitterness towards the entire political system.

There is a growing realization that workers were sold a bill of goods by the candidate of “change you can believe in,” and that this administration defends the interests of the rich and the super-rich just as ruthlessly as its Republican predecessor.

But if workers are to stop the corporate-government assault, they must take matters into their own hands. A Socialist party would call for the organization of factory, workplace and neighborhood committees to fight plant closings, layoffs and cuts in social services and oppose all evictions and foreclosures.

Such struggles must be organized independently of the trade union apparatuses, such as the United Auto Workers. These junior partners of the corporations concentrate their efforts on suppressing working class struggle.

The fight to defend the most basic social needs—jobs, housing, health care, education—is above all a political struggle, which can be resolved only by the working class breaking with and opposing Obama and both parties of big business and advancing its own social and class interests.

If the needs of society are to take precedence over the selfish and destructive interests of the ruling elite, then the working class must take political and economic power into its own hands.

Only in this way can the grip of the financial aristocracy be broken and the wealth created by working people be used to end poverty and raise the material and cultural level of society as a whole.

A Socialist party would call for the confiscation of the trillions squandered on the bonuses and pay packages of the Wall Street executives and traders and the setting up of a public fund to address the social crisis confronting working people.

The money should be used to guarantee full income, medical benefits and housing to the unemployed until they resume work. We call for a ban on all foreclosures, evictions and utility shutoffs.

A multi-trillion-dollar program of public works must be launched to hire the unemployed, rebuild the cities and repair the social infrastructure.

The jobless should be hired to construct new schools, hospitals, parks, museums and public transportation systems.

The major levers of the economy—basic industry, finance, telecommunications—must be taken out of private hands and placed under the public control of working people so that economic decision-making is carried out democratically in the interests of ordinary people, rather than the wealthy elite.

The events over the last year send a signal that workers in the US, like their counterparts throughout the world, are entering a new period of class struggle.

The coming battles must be prepared and provided with a new socialist perspective and leadership.

tags: socialism  capitalism  unemployment  poverty