Robert Reich: President Obama laid out the problem correctly and effectively. He explained why jobs and growth must be the nation’s first priority now — not the federal deficit.
Jobs: A Grand Bargain
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Brent Budowsky: Great presidents know the difference between empty public gimmicks and game-changing public policy. They demand creative ideas, not mediocrity or defeatism, from those who advise them.
Obama’s Jobs Plan: Will He Offer Policy Miniatures or Give ‘em Hell?
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Robert Reich: The winner of the 2012 presidential election will be the person who comes off as the toughest fighter for average Americans. Earth to Obama: Remember Harry (Give ‘em Hell) Truman.
Obama’s Jobs Speech: Prepare to Be Underwhelmed
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Joseph Palermo: President Obama’s much anticipated speech outlining his jobs agenda for the 2012 election year will sound a lot like a tiny mouse trying to make a loud roar. Instead of clarity, we’ll get hedging; instead of “bold,” we’ll get wishy-washy.
Can Labor Confront Obama Over Jobs?
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Shamus Cooke: Hefty splits in the labor movement have already emerged on whether to support Obama’s reelection, based on his complete lack of action on creating jobs combined with his false promises in the 2008 election.
The Right to a Job
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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.
Obama’s Bold Jobs Bill (Maybe)
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Robert Reich: A bold jobs plan is also good politics. With more than 25 million Americans looking for full-time jobs, the wages of people with jobs falling, and an economy on the verge of a double dip, the President has to come out fighting on the side of average people.
Forget Rick Perry – Mitt Romney Is Perfect for the GOP
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Tina Dupuy: For the last 30 years at least, the Republicans have been relentlessly, uniformly hawkish – but mostly with other peoples’ children. This disconnect was made evident in the ’08 election when soldiers donated money to candidate Barack Obama 6-1 over Senator John McCain.
Democrats Must Push Back
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Norman Solomon: Call me old-fashioned, but I believe in the vital lessons of the New Deal. Many millions of good jobs must be created — and that will require well-funded federal jobs programs on a large scale.
Why S&P Has No Business Downgrading the U.S.
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Robert Reich: S&P’s intrusion into American politics is also ironic because, as I pointed out recently, much of our current debt is directly or indirectly due to S&P’s failures (along with the failures of the two other major credit-rating agencies — Fitch and Moody’s) to do their jobs before the financial meltdown.
Save the Nation
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Brent Budowsky: The president and congressional leaders should bring a new player to sit at this jobs-and-deficit table on behalf of all who love and serve the nation: Former Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell.
The Debt Ceiling Crisis: Let’s Get Personal
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Walter Brasch: Since you like hunting, and they like hunting, your banker friends will let you buy all the guns and ammunition you want. But, they can’t help you on your health bills, or even lower the insurance premiums and co-pays. And, they can’t do much for that inflated mortgage payment. Or to help you find another job.
Why Obama Can’t Pivot to Jobs
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Robert Reich: The nation and Oba,ma remain hostage to the ideology of right-wing Republicans who won’t let the government spend more money. Yet if the government can’t spend more – at least this year and next, until the pump is primed and the economy is growing again – we won’t see job growth. And without job growth, the economy will remain anemic.
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.
Jobs Crisis Is About People’s Lives, Not the Next Election
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Carl Bloice: If one out of ten people seeking work can’t find any, it follows that the average person has a friend, relative or neighbor amongst them. All she or he has to do is look out the window or answer the phone to be scared.
Cut the Crap and Create Jobs
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Brent Budowsky: While the Republican Party at the national and state level is doing everything it can to destroy jobs, the Democratic Party is failing to fight for jobs with the intensity that Democrats have historically done.
Should Your Job Kill You?
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Diane Lefer: Given our economic woes and high unemployment, the importance of advocacy groups and community organizations becomes very clear. Without support and backup, workers are less likely to demand their rights and risk retaliation at the very time when employers want to cut corners
Mandatory E-Verify Will Not Magically Solve Immigration Woes
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Michele Waslin: Immigration restrictionists argue that imposing a mandatory employment verification system will ensure that unauthorized workers are not able to get jobs in the U.S. and will choose to leave, leaving millions of jobs wide open for unemployed U.S. citizens. Of course, this ignores the facts.
Thank You Daddy
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Sharon Kyle: This picture of my parents was taken in August 2004. They were dancing at my daughter’s wedding. They look like a happy couple but at the time, my father was living in Maryland and my mother, California. They hadn’t been married since the 1970′s.
This Jobs Crisis Is Obama’s Kryptonite
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David Love: Obama can solve this whole thing tomorrow if he just calls for a new New Deal program already. But will he have the courage? Time will tell, but the President, like this sad nation, is short on time.
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.
Obama Needs Demand-Side Solutions
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Robert Reich: Businesses are reluctant to spend more and create more jobs because there aren’t enough consumers out there able and willing to buy what businesses have to sell.
American jobs NOW
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Brent Budowsky: Joblessness plagues the land. The president still refuses to champion policies worthy of the great change president I worked so hard to elect.
Jobs: An Angry Dissent
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Brent Budowsky: Never before in American history has unemployment been so high, yet neither the president nor Congress pushes for a major jobs bill.
Inside Job
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Tom Degan: What is incredible about this very important film is that a few of the perpetrators of this incalculable theft arrogantly sat down with the makers of the film for interviews that are as jaw-dropping as they are outrageous.
The Real News on Jobs
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Robert Reich: Conservative economists have it wrong. The underlying problem isn’t that so many Americans have priced themselves out of the global/high-tech labor market. It’s that they’re getting a smaller and smaller share of the pie.
Shock Wave Coming
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Brent Budowsky: The economic and political shock wave will be momentous as budget politics will increase joblessness and reveal with brutality that Washington is out of touch with heartland America and dominated by special interests that voters deplore.
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Where Have All the Jobs Gone?
Judith Stein: If President Obama wants the United States to manufacture again, he must change foreign and domestic priorities. The United States is more committed to maintaining its open market than to providing jobs for Americans.