Herb Engstrom: At this time of TEA Party hysteria, Fox News mendacity, and GOP hypocrisy a government guarantee of universal employment might seem like a radical idea, although it seemed not to be so to Franklin Roosevelt.
Inflation — Fighting the Last War
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Steven Conn: For thirty years inflation has not been a serious threat to the American economy, yet politicians and pundits continually fret about it. The never-ending worry about inflation is like fighting the last war rather than the current one. What’s needed today is a war on unemployment and wage stagnation, not inflation.
Blacks and Obama
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Sharon Kyle: Even though blacks in America are suffering more than most during this economic crisis, they are least likely to complain that the Obama administration policies are not benefiting them.
Vicious Cycles: Why Washington Is About to Make the Jobs Crisis Worse
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Robert Reich: The only way out of the vicious economic cycle is for government to adopt an expansionary fiscal policy — spending more in the short term in order to make up for the shortfall in consumer demand.
Don’t Let Doom Merchants Obscure True European Picture
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Steven Hill: Fearful headlines hide success stories such as Poland, which show Europe is taking the right steps to economic recovery.
At What Point Does the GOP Become a Hate Group?
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David Love: There is no question, based on the evidence, that the GOP is that peculiar institution in which people thrive, based on an alternate set of facts, divorced from reality.
The Swamp of Washington and the Morass of the Economy
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Robert Reich: If the Democrats remain silent, the vacuum will be filled by the Republican snake oil of federal spending cuts and cut taxes on big corporations and the wealthy.
Grover Norquist and the American Dream
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Robert Illes: Grover Norquist, toady of America’s wealthy business class who few but political wonks have heard of, heads the so called “Club for Growth” which requires every Republican who wants to keep his or her government job to promise not to raise taxes.
What Will It Take to Bring Obama Home?
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David A. Love: Part of the problem is Obama’s quixotic journey to the political center. There is nothing in the middle of the road but yellow lines and road kill, and you’d better believe it. Although his campaign rhetoric was progressive, this president chooses to govern from the middle.
Double Dip Here We Come
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Republicans, for their part, worry that if they tell it like it is Americans will want government to do more rather than less. They’d rather not talk about jobs and wages, and put the focus instead on deficit reduction (or spread the lie that by reducing the deficit we’ll get more jobs and higher wages).
Who Says Republicans Have No New Ideas?
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Robert Reich: Republicans haven’t come up with a single new idea in almost 60 years. Herbert Hoover was the last Republican president to introduce a new Republican theme back in 1952 at the Republican National Convention. Since then they’ve repeated the message. Of course, Herbert Hoover, you may remember, didn’t have a sterling record when it came to the economy. As president, he presided over the Great Crash of 1929 and ushered in the Great Depression.
Author Spotlight: Jerry Drucker
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Dick Price: “I was a child of the Great Depression. It never occurred to me our strong and vital nation could fall and fail as it has today,” he says. “I was brought up to have a sense of justice and truth as a basis of our country’s governance. That belief has been shattered, particularly in the past decade.”
What Is To Be Done About the State of Our Union?
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Lydia Howell: Nine months after taking office, Obama began slamming the Democratic Party’s liberal/progressive base for daring to notice, much less criticize, his corporate-friendly policies and center-right positions. In the wake of his Simpson-Bowles Deficit Commission, Obama will likely make a sober call for national sacrifice.
The Forgotten Jobless and Our Future
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Mark Vorpahl: As in the 1930s, today we must organize in a way that creates unity between the employed and unemployed. To start, we can organize the largest possible union-led demonstrations to realize this unity in the streets.
The Migrant Hotel: Where Deportees Find Shelter in Mexicali
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David Bacon: Last year, almost 400,000 people were deported from the United States. That’s the largest wave of deportations in U.S. history, even larger than the notorious “Operation Wetback” of the 1950s, or the mass deportations during the Great Depression.
I’ll Be Seeing You
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Brad Parker: I dedicate my public life to the future for all of our children but when I look around I still hear that song. In all things new I see all things that came before and seem so much dearer to me now. When you are gone I will still be seeing you in everything and everywhere.
The Winter of Labor’s Discontent
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Berry Craig: But it’s getting harder for me to defend Obama when my union brothers and sisters — who also voted and worked for him — say he’s all but surrendered to the GOP. I’m disappointed in the president. They’re downright mad.
Wage Theft: Thou Shalt Not Steal From Your Workers
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David Love: Scrooge arrived just in time for the holidays, with Social Darwinism, bootstraps, slashing and cutting as a prescription for all our woes.
The American Jobs Emergency Requires Action
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Robert Reich: Not only do we need extended unemployment benefits. We need a new WPA, modeled after the WPA of the Great Depression, to put jobless Americans to work. We need a national infrastructure bank to rebuild our crumbling highways and water and sewer systems, thereby putting additional people back to work.
Stupid Politics From a Smart Administration
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Joseph Palermo: The whole tenor of the next two years is going to feel like George W. Bush never left office. The GOP will have de facto control over the nation’s politics and agenda. If President Obama goes down the Clinton path of triangulating against his progressive base (as seems likely) then he deserves to be a one-term president.
The Republican Recipe for An Anemic Economy Through Election Day 2012
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Robert Reich: The real message from voters was “Fix this stinking economy.” But Republicans have no intention of doing so. With Republicans in control of the House, forget spending increases or tax cuts to stimulate the economy.
Our Holocaustic Global Empire: Wars, Famines, Slavery
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Gary Corseri: Each of the 16 authors in this collection of contemporary essays and articles about our New-World-Order socio-political-economic mess are digging at the roots of evil; each exposes another layer of lies, frauds, half-truths, myths or cover-ups about the way our global system actually operates.
What Obama and the Democrats Have Not Done
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Stanley I. Kutler: For the past year, the media, reflecting disenchantment with Barack Obama, their very own rock star, have “predicted” huge Democratic losses for 2010. Like blackbirds who fly off the line (as Eugene McCarthy once said), the media follows in lockstep.
A Winnable Jobs and Just Cause Campaign
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Craig Williams: One way for the Democrats to approach a jobs campaign would be invest or launch a grassroots effort in districts where Republicans hold the Congressional seat.
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