Amid fallout over President Trump’s recent firing of the head of the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, for its most recent employment report and revision of two previous reports that showed weakened U.S. job creation, a basic fact of the system is worth stating. 

Capitalism requires unemployment as way to depress the wages of the employed, as Prabhat and Utsa Patnaik write in the current volume of the Monthly Review. Employers holding wages down is part of a systematic dynamic, the normal operation of a capitalist economy. Full employment is not. 

There have been periods of rapid employment growth in U.S. history. The mobilization for World War Two coming out of the Great Depression is one time that comes to mind. Previously unemployed Americans gained paychecks producing weapons of war. Such an example, however, is an exception to the rule of the unemployed depressing wage growth for the employed. 

It’s worth a mention that the tariff-friendly Smoot-Hawley Act of 1929-1930 harmed global and national trade and investment. Then, tariffs or taxes on imports failed to protect American jobs. The official unemployment rate rose to 25 percent, or every fourth worker in the labor force. Meanwhile, the new Trump tariff rates take effect. 

Assuming that most Americans seek stable employment that pays their living expenses, e.g, food, healthcare, rent and transit , a Princeton study suggests this desired outcome of voters for more economic equality is impossible to achieve under the current status quo of money and politics. Why? The policy preferences, economically and politically, of a moneyed upper class to maintain the economic status quo hold sway. What big money wants it gets, according to Martin Gilens.

The policy preferences of a working class majority take the proverbial back seat, despite and because of elections. That’s too much ice water for some to take. I understand. However, the U.S. polity operates on a one-dollar, one-vote equation. 

At the same time, it serves in my view no positive purpose to view elections under the power of moneyed interests as much more than a spectacle. This is a failed approach to progressive social policies. A look back to the high water marks of the 1930s and 1960s is instructive. Progressive policies emerge after or during periods of grassroots ferment in U.S. history. 

Meanwhile, ruling class interests, financial (speculation ) and industrial (production), prevail. That’s a baked in feature of the system of, by and for a moneyed elite, or oligarchy, in the current language usage. Describing the problem of American democracy is one thing. 

Solving this problem is another thing. It’s a longer term project. Part of that immense process is the involvement of more and more working people to build a countervailing force to those upholding the status quo. It’s based on war, directly or by proxy, e.g., Gaza and Ukraine, and worsening social inequality stateside. 

I don’t think that a majority of Americans want a continuation of this situation. The difficulty is that their voices via elections are muffled. Big money is the muffler, or silencer.