This morning, Republican John McCain’s lofty rhetoric hit a nasty wall called reality.  The August jobs report confirmed that 6.1 percent of Americans are unemployed – raising job losses for the year to 605,000, 84,000 last month alone.

Besides a few stale campaign promises, McCain spent most of his time giving a speech that showed how far down working families are on his list of priorities.  He ignored what the worsening recession is doing to working people and how the continuing decline in housing prices, a global credit crisis and a spike in the costs of energy and food – conditions he and his advisers helped create – are burdening families.

The only mention of the economy came when McCain promised job retraining while berating Obama for trying to bring back good jobs.  McCain’s understanding of the issue is flawed. Our country is hemorrhaging jobs and it’s not only the manufacturing jobs he appears to regard with disdain: since Bush took office, 525,000 white-collar jobs have gone overseas. Up to 14 million U.S. jobs are vulnerable to offshoring over the next 10 years.  Moreover, most of the jobs that have been created are low-paying jobs that don’t cover the bills. If we suspend reality for a second to assume that McCain will fund job retraining (something he has voted against repeatedly in the past), he is still missing the fundamental truth:  job retraining – something far more complicated than McCain implies – simply won’t cut it.

If McCain was serious about helping the workers he described last night, here’s what he should have said:

Our economy is fundamentally flawed and needs a major revamping. We need to restructure our economy to encourage corporations to keep jobs in the United States, not give tax breaks for those who ship them overseas. In the short term, Congress and the president should pass a second economic stimulus, one that extends unemployment benefits and focuses aid on cities and states.  Instead, McCain said he’d cut government spending, suggesting, as his record shows, that he doesn’t support making a major investment to create good jobs by rebuilding crumbling schools, roads, bridges and water systems – and by ensuring that America’s highly skilled workers are employed to develop alternative energy sources.

We must also address the underlying structural imbalances in the economy. We need to restore our nation’s competitiveness and reduce our unsustainable trade deficit.  We should reform our financial institutions and ineffective regulations to ensure the integrity of our capital markets.  And we must give workers the freedom to form unions and bargain collectively to address the imbalance between workers and corporations which is responsible for the stagnation of wages and rising economic insecurity.

Working people need real change, not a line in a speech that promises business as usual.

Contact: Alison Omens 202-637-5018