Editorial: An uneasy summer

On the first day of summer, June 21, the Winn-Dixie grocery chain, located primarily in the Southeast, announced that 22,000 workers would end up on the street and over 300 stores will be darkened.

Earlier this month GM took a meat cleaver to 25,000 jobs, 22 percent of their workforce.

Railroad workers and telecommunications workers are not buying new cars as their jobs fall into the shaky category.

For the second year in a row, no hamlet, town or city has money for youth jobs.

This is summertime. ‘Livin’ is supposed to be easy.

Reports have surfaced that the Bush administration plans to tinker with the formula that tracks U.S. jobs. Is the jobs crisis to the point that the Bush administration wants to change the numbers? “Change the numbers, change the reality,” they figure.

Before Bush’s number zapper strikes, the AFL-CIO reports that as of March, 13.6 million workers were out of work, a figure roughly equivalent to every man, woman and child in the state of Pennsylvania.

There is no measure of the statistics of pain. From homelessness to bankruptcies, pain and insecurity have increased in the first five months of the Bush second term.

The Republican tax cut to the super-rich has paid off — for them. And skyrocketing worker productivity has paid off — for corporations. In 2004, according to Forbes, CEO’s at the top 500 corporations saw their bank accounts increase by 54 percent, from $3.3 billion to $5.1 billion.

Bush’s economic policy of “free trade,” shipping jobs overseas, tax cuts to the corporate rich and rejection of investment in building the U.S. results in “the 500” doing great and the rest — the 130 million U.S. working-class people — feeling “uneasy,” to put it mildly.

Capitalism is designed to produce individual profits, not create democratic prosperity, and every U.S. government grapples with its contradictions. But this brand of Republican rule pours gasoline on every fire by bringing in the corporations to call the shots for maximum profit.

With unemployment ratcheting up just like gasoline prices, calls for impeachment are not in the wilderness. And neither are demands for public ownership, wage increases, guaranteed full employment and a shorter workweek.