Portside

There are many steps that we can take to end that state of affairs, but the most important is to put jobs back on the agenda.

The biggest issue . . . is that this is a budget that will continue to impose a drag on the economy . . . While the stimulus approved by Congress boosted growth and added between 2-3 million jobs, the steep deficit reduction of the last three years has slowed the economy, costing millions of jobs. With the housing bubble gone, we are missing close to $1 trillion in annual demand and no mechanism in the private sector that will cause it to replace this demand on its own.

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Capitalists defend their "right" to hire and fire as an unquestioned "entitlement". Yet it surely should be challenged on grounds of its undemocratic nature and its perverse social results. Employing people in socially useful work is more humane, more productive and less costly. Yet a private profit-driven capitalist system yields the endless unemployment, spiking repeatedly. Except, of course, capitalists want it because it keeps them at top of capitalist society.

"Our state's policies and practices are being weighed on the scales of justice," the letter states. "They, and all of us who stand on the sidelines and watch them go into effect without raising our voices, are judged on the criteria established in our faith traditions and the principles in our documents which first constituted our nation and state. No matter which measure of human decency is used, our moral profile is a scandal.