Stein to Obama: Don’t Deny Half America Sinking Into Poverty

Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein calls out the Obama administration that the transfer of wealth to the 1 percenters is still happening despite statistical spin over minimal incremental number shifts in jobs reports. Growing citizen impoverishment continues despite election pr-hype from both of the legacy parties.

Stein is offering a serious Green New Deal to loosen and eliminate the merciless grip of greed of the 1% dooming the balance of the 99% not there already, to a life of poverty. Stein accuses both Democrat and Republican leaderships of coaxing the citizenry to ignore the unignorable at its own peril.

Stein warns citizens to be especially wary of Obama spin today on the 2012 first quarter federal jobs report. After all, she points out, we are facing down three decades of “flatlined wages and purchasing power” for American workers as CEO incomes continued to obscenely shoot upwards. The “Stolen Decades” began in the 1980s and they are in no way ending under the present administration Stein declares.

We need to look for more than downticks in unemployment that are not significant when compared to the enormous economic losses that Americans have suffered in recent times. We are years away from getting back to the 5% unemployment rate we had before the recession, and even at that rate, things were falling apart for tens of millions Americans. The economy before the recession was transfering wealth from working people to the super rich. Now almost half of Americans are living in poverty or near poverty.?

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Whatever job numbers are released tomorrow, there is no cause for celebration of this administration’s policies. If elected, I will show Obama’s Wall Street advisors the door, and we'll bring in the kind of progressive economic team that advised Roosevelt with his original New Deal. We’ll return the wealth that was stolen from working people and invest in America’s future.

Stein chides the Obama administration for spinning so-called “signs of recovery” when they offer little hope to vast segments of the population such as the urban poor, especially people of color, facing mass unemployment and profound poverty. Election mode Obama is focused on "impression management" rather than implementing serious policy changes to support all of the desperate "non-elite" classes of America.

When you're dealing with the harsh reality of youth employment rates above 50% and major segments of the community trapped in a lifetime of crushing poverty, you don't want to hear your government officials brag about how well their economic policies are working. You want to hear about plans for decisive action. That's why I'm advocating for a Green New Deal that will provide all the jobs we need - full employment - in the hard-hit communities where we most need them.

We need major policy changes to bring economic security to the working people of America. The fundamental flaws of an economic policy dictated by Wall Street are apparent, even if they have sometimes been masked by periods of apparent growth that were actually financed by unsustainable credit card and housing debt. Wealth that should be invested in our local economy to create jobs is being put in the hands of the super rich who build factories abroad instead. Families disintegrate while the income of the richest few surges upward. This is changing America in a way that we must not accept.

With the loss of a generation’s worth of pension savings and home equity, middle class Americans who once though they had achieved security are staring into the abyss. And for years we told our children that a college education was the key to economic security. Today, an education is often is not enough. Students are coerced into accepting massive student loans they may never be able to repay given the poor job market they face upon graduation. And we're forcing young people to go to work for wages that are often half of those that their parents earned for the same job.

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Unemployment is a serious concern. Equally devastating has been the fact that stagnant wages are not letting people get ahead. Workers are dropping out of the middle class. Workers are not able to save for retirement. After adjusting for inflation, the federal minimum wage is $2.75 lower than it was 40 years ago. These have been the stolen decades for working people.

Green Party Jill Stein promises to put an end to the vast and enmeshed continuing theft of the 99% by the 1% in THIS decade! It is high time.

[cross-posted at correntewire and open salon]