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If I’d been asleep for the last decade and woke up to ABC This Week’s interview of Presidential economic advisor Austan Goolgbee, I would assume that Mitt Romney won the 2008 election, that he was predictably following Republican dogma about how to recover from a severe financial collapse and recession and that intelligent media folks like Christiane Amanpour were realizing those standard GOP policies aren’t working.
Goolsbee correctly told us that a smart economist wouldn’t get overly excited about one month’s jobs and growth numbers but would instead look at the overall trend. Of course what he wouldn’t want to concede is that GDP grew at a meager annual rate of 1.8 percent over the first three months of 2011 and so far was predicted to grow at only 2.8 percent for the next three. And the overall trend for job growth was still not enough to make a serious dent in unemployment unless you believe taking 5-10 years to get back to full employment is okay.
So Goolsbee was in denial from the opening moment because he didn’t have a decent story to tell even in his own framework. When Amanpour asked him what the Administration could or should be doing to improve conditions, he ticked off items you’d expect to hear from a typical GOP Presidential adviser: we’ve got to get the debt under control; we have a White House effort to identify and get rid of governmental regulations that are preventing the private sector from growing the economy; we should pass “free trade” agreements backed by the Chamber of Commerce; and we should leverage limited public dollars to release billions in private funding for investments.
Goolsbee’s bottom line: “It’s now up to the private sector.” That’s exactly what you’d expect from President Romney’s economic adviser.
It took Paul Krugman and Chrystia Freeland, over the absurd denials by Martin Regalia of the Chamber of Commerce, to remind ABC’s audience that business confidence and concerns about taxes and regulations aren’t the problem: business polls repeatedly show businesses aren’t expanding/hiring much because the demand for their products is weak. Demand is weak because the recession and the housing market crash depleted consumers’ wealth and they’re worried about losing their homes and jobs. You don’t need a degree in economics to grasp the logic of that. When private spending is still depressed, only government spending is keeping the economy afloat, and the stimulus is phasing out.
Goolsbee pointed to Joe Biden’s talks, but it’s blindingly obvious the Biden effort is counter-productive. Democrats should be demanding it be refocused on jobs or shut down.
Regalia’s main talking point, completely unsupported by theory, logic or facts, is that the economy would boom if only the government would “get out of the way.” It’s a wonderful myth if you’re fronting for Wall Street, trying to defang the puny financial regulations from Dodd-Frank, and think the greatest threat to Wall Street’s continued looting is Elizabeth Warren. But we should remember the “get out of the way” mantra the next time Wall Street self immolates, tanks the economy and a former Goldman Sachs CEO become Treasury Secretary gets on his knees to beg Nancy Pelosi to bail out every major Western bank on the planet.
I’m sure I imagined all this. The country wouldn’t possibly be dumb enough to elect an unprincipled moral chameleon like Mitt Romney President. And we’d never put up with someone as defensive and unconvincing as Goolsbee was today, though we’d wonder how the voters got taken.
No, that couldn’t be real, so when I really wake up, I’ll let you know what the adviser for the actual Democratic President said today about the sagging economy and the undefensible unemployment numbers.
More: DeLong, citing Mark Thoma, asks, “where is Plan B?”
76 Comments
You can see it coming from a mile away. “One-from-column A-and-one-from-column B” Barry will split the difference with Romney (and Ryan). The large battle that should be fought — about how it’s government’s responsibility (indeed, it’s opportunity) to act to create jobs — will not be fought. Rather the small (and faulty) battle that will be fought is who can cut spending more wisely.
Pissing away forever the greatest opportunity to forward progressive causes — which REQUIRE spending — in our lifetimes.
Massive fail — or betrayal, take your pick.
Obama is nothing more than a moderate Republican.
Regalia’s main talking point, completely unsupported by theory, logic or facts, is that the economy would boom if only the government would “get out of the way.”
Yes thats the problem after 8 years of Bush and his spectacular job growth/s Government regulation is still the problem/s
Just what job killing regulations has Obama ever created or any government regulation?
I read politics a bunch but I missed that maybe Austan or anyone here can provide examples of such regulations and numbers of job losses as a result of those regulations?
I won’t hold my breath:)
But we should remember the “get out of the way” mantra the next time Wall Street self immolates, tanks the economy and a former Goldman Sachs CEO become Treasury Secretary gets on his knees to beg Nancy Pelosi to bail out every major Western bank on the planet.
Not regulating the banks and the housing industry caused this collapse of our economy. If you want to rewrite history it helps if you have a story that someone other than childish 30%ers can believe.
Beg to differ. O is a radically right R, masked to be moderate in deceptive rhetoric. He’s an evil man.
I haven’t run the vid yet so everybody looks as they are above. who is that woman in thew purple dress? she looks ill.
Yep, ronnie-ray-gunn and uncle milton freidmens long lost son.
Mitt’s plan to create jobs hire a bunch of illegal workers to cut his lawn because they work cheap then fire them as soon as soon as the press finds out.
Then hire them back again later never mind the press found out about that. Americans should just learn to work for less wages seems to be Mitt’s job creating plan.
Mitt opposing illegal immigration in pubic but screwing my people by hiring them for low wages will cost you the Hispanic vote.
If you run and the Dems make an issue of your record I think we can put even Texas into play:)
This is not a betrayal. He (Obama) was touting up Reagan during the campaign. He was telling his dumbass supporters that he wanted to re-negotiate NAFTA and then telling the Canadian PM’s advisors it was all bullshit to shore up his political base support.
No first-term Senator barely out of the Illinois state legislator, with one national air-time speech at the 2004 convention amasses a Presidential war chest of $400 million dollars unless he has been bought and paid for by corporate America.
And don’t tell me that Hillary Clinton would have squandered this opportunity like Obama has! That too is bullshit. She is more FDR than she is given credit for!
Hey Beltway Jagoffs:
Put on your thinking caps and try to keep up.
You can’t use the terms “jobless” and “recovery” together in a sentence…
Now what part of that statement do you not understand?
Where are the GOP trolls defending Mitt their frontrunner heck any of the GOPersa or even Sarah? Where are the GOP trolls defending Ryan’s budget?
Are their some causes to obviously unpopular for even Rahm and Rove to send the trolls in?
Heck Ron Paul is the only GOPer who’s supporters show last GOP primary season
we had some trolls attacking us on the big issues and defending their candidates.
When was the last time we had a troll defending the GOP rather than attacking our ideas?
I smell retreat:)
o/t but IMPORTANT!
TOMORROW is the deadline for comments to the State Department against the Canada-US Tar Sands Pipeline — go here to submit your comment:
http://www.keystonepipeline-xl.state.gov/clientsite/keystonexl.nsf/CommentFset?OpenFrameSet
What still bothers me greatly is that a job is not a job. What sort of job are these people getting? Are they minimum wage service jobs? Or are they “good” jobs? Some how, I am thinking that they are minimum wage ones since obviously the economy is floundering.
People need to have money in their pocket and comfortable that things aren’t about to go horrible for them to be willing to spend it. Rightfully so, people either don’t have any money, or they are too afraid to spend it.
Minimum wage jobs are not the answer.
The woman on the panel next to Krugman is Freeland, from Reuters,one of the better Econ reporters
Republican, and thoroughly neoliberal, yes. Moderate, no. I see Obama now as hopelessly over his head: he’s a mediocre conventionalist with a gift of gab and a clever political sense who campaigned his way into a position he has no talent for. He’s just completely out of his depth.
Amanpour is turning into david gregory. First it is 250,00 a month to make a difference. Second, last month’s jobs were covered mostly by McDonalds, literally. Third she said nothing about 99ers.
A subject that goolsbee cannot cope with. He and jared bernstein repeatedly fumbled questions about the long term unemployed. They are now trying to adjust full employment up from 5%, 7 or 8%.
His last appearance on Jon Stewart was equally pathetic when he tried to ‘win the future’.
His denial about’jobless recovery’, was equally pathetic given the mcdonald’s factor.
We are totally fucked.
The fact is the kleptocracy have the 1% factor in they are the ones who can afford, to starve out the middle class by NOT providing jobs, lowering wages and hours so that we are all part time, with out benefits, waiting for a voucher.
Ratigan said that something like 30,000 of them were the McDogfood jobs; dunno if it’s true, he may have been bitter-snarking, but plenty were.
Did you see Hilda Solis on CNBC the other day? Stuck like a deer in the headlights, with absolutely nothing to talk about except practically beg business to create some jobs. Beyond pathetic; I felt sorry for her.
http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000025230
Even the manufacturing jobs that ar being created are at wages well below what they used to be. Probably Not enough to rebuild the middle class.
when people talk about inflation happening, it’s not the core inflation that includes rising labor costs. Workers depend on some inflation, and were not seeing that type. We see rising fuel costs that simply transfer wealth from the population to energy companies, part of whose income is sheltered or off shored. I suspect rising energy costs are mostly offsetting the payroll tax cut. And it was predictable. In this economy, whatever stimulus effect we hoped for was taken by those in a position to extract the rents.
yellowsnapdragon left this link from the NY Daily News on my diary yesterday saying that
Without “strike through,” I can’t effectively make the point:
What’s Mitt Romeney’s name doing in the above quote; please insert “Obama’.
Hitler was evil. Obama is just a tool of an evil system.
WELL SAID, I couldn’t agree more, except with the offered alternative conclusion at the end. You’re way too nice, it was betrayal from the start.
The enviro impacts of extracting more tar sand carbon, via toxic effects on water table, then shipping across US to be refined and eventually burned with insufficient mitigation, are terrible.
I suspect Canada will develop its tar sands no matter what, because the price of oil will make it profitable to do so. If not shipped through, refined in, burned in, the US, it would be somewhere else. The only presumed benefit is whether t he US captures part of the rent.
Mebbe so, Scarecrow; but did you read this little treat she wrote?
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2011/01/the-rise-of-the-new-global-elite/8343/
I didn’t have to. That’s the point.
Dear Scarecrow,
Thanks to a response you gave me in an earlier thread, I have a clearer idea of what should have been done to give us a more robust recovery.
The stimulus bill should have been much larger with a second phase started in 2010. As it was, the stimulus bill stemmed the massive bleeding of jobs, but didn’t start a robust recovery. Further, just as the private sector began to add jobs, the public sector (state and local governments) began shedding them in large numbers. This would have a contracting effect on demand. Public employees would lose homes to foreclosure, further depressing the housing market and having negative effects on confidence. Public employees would add to the unemployment numbers and have less money to spend to boost the private sector.
Thus, Phase II of the stimulus bill should have been grants to state and local governments to keep police, teachers and others on the payroll. These governments’ revenue streams were badly hurt by the recession, but unions have been the scapegoats.
Also, COLAs for social security recipients have been cancelled for three straight years now and should have instead been part of the president’s economic package to stimulate the economy.
Thanks for watching and boiling it down. I can’t stomach these shows anymore.
“so when I really wake up…” Boy, are you in for a rude un-awakening.
They are all neo-liberal neocon regressive Reaganites. They have no originality. Ugh.
Nonpartisanliberal . . . Agree with lots of that. The SS COLAs werent cancelled, though. It’s just that the index they use for the SS COLA didn’t show any increase because what it measures didn’t go up. Some pro SS economists have suggested that the COLA for SS should be adjusted to better reflect the actual costs faced by the elderly, which are somewhat different from the general population. That would have led to slight increases from the COLA.
Not yet, but I’ve seen her on several panels, and she often plays the role Krugman plays. here, she was supportive of him, and it took both of them to keep up with the CoC Guys talking points. Non stop.
Bill Maher calls this “Obama hyperbole disease.”
Like many liberals, I am disappointed in a number of things Obama has done. But, to label him as “evil”, is to engage in rhetoric beyond where political disappointment or disagreement should go.
As far as Obama being a “radically right R”, the record simply does not support that. He is a middle of the road Democrat.
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/29/how-liberal-is-president-obama/?ref=natesilver
How would you like to be Secretary of Labor under this asshole?
Yes, he’s a very evil man and Goolsbee, a Skull & Bones member, was advising his campaign before he was ever elected. A careful look at his backroom cabal before the election should have been enough to warn people off him, but no one was looking, or if they did, their discoveries were kept hush-hush.
A man who uses the rhetoric and cadences of Martin Luther King to pull the wool over working and working-poor people even as he kneels in obeisance to bankers is evil; a man who says he will restore the damaged constitution to its previous condition and who then further eviscerates the rights contained within that document by authorizing the murder of American citizens and by allowing a member of the armed forced to be kept in solitary confinement subjected to CIA and Nazi techniques of mind control is evil; a man who can lie without skipping a beat and while looking you right in the eye with no compunction is evil.
A middle of the road Democrat? Maybe if we’re talking about the Democratic party that emerged in the mid-80s courtesy of the Democratic Leadership Council and its neo-liberal shills, Clinton, Gore, Gephardt, Daschle, Dodd, et al. No self-respecting Democrat from the days of the Second Reconstruction would be caught dead in the same room with this sociopath.
Yeah. I never understood that one either.
Nothing has been more damaging to the progressive — indeed, the democratic — cause than telling the American people that the federal government can do nothing about excessively high and wasteful unemployment. Or that there is a fiscal crisis that demands cuts to Medicare.
No middle-of-the-road democratic leader has EVER said those things. You are moving the goal posts again, OG.
They don’t want to rebuild the middle class. You know what they want? A giant army of unemployed people who are well-educated and who understand what they are told to do. We’re all gonna be maids and gardeners and grease-trap cleaner-outters, but the boss won’t have to worry about his instructions not being understood.
That’s why the push to get the illegals out of the country, so there will be jobs, shitty jobs maybe, but jobs, available for the former members of the middle class who would rise up en masse if there was no work for them after they’ve been downsized and they’re faced with mortgage payments and outrageously expensive college tuition payments.
Because, let’s face it, our kids are going to so much better out there with a degree in sociology or English Lit, or political science, or what passes for history. We’re done, not only as a nation, but as a society. The last decade has been like a series of Emile Zola novels.
And even in this area Obama lied. In order to get SS recipients to vote Democrat in 2010, he said each recipient should get $250 to make up for the missing COLAs. I’m still waiting.
Just finished it. I infer you’re not in agreement. Seems spot on to me.
So Reaganomics isn’t working out for Obama also. Who could have ever predicted this nightmare? 30 years are they’ve got major Corporation paying no taxes and the wealthiest on avg only paying 18%. While engaged in four wars being paid for by loans.
Zounds; it’s so clear she wants to be one of them, but the section on Philanthrocapitalism was gagging enough but this was a jaw-dropper for me:
And, ultimately, that is the dilemma: America really does need many of its plutocrats. We benefit from the goods they produce and the jobs they create. And even if a growing portion of those jobs are overseas, it is better to be the home of these innovators—native and immigrant alike—than not. In today’s hypercompetitive global environment, we need a creative, dynamic super-elite more than ever.
There is also the simple fact that someone will have to pay for the improved public education and social safety net the American middle class will need in order to navigate the wrenching transformations of the global economy. (That’s not to mention the small matter of the budget deficit.) Inevitably, a lot of that money will have to come from the wealthy—after all, as the bank robbers say, that’s where the money is.
It is not much of a surprise that the plutocrats themselves oppose such analysis and consider themselves singled out, unfairly maligned, or even punished for their success. Self-interest, after all, is the mother of rationalization, and—as we have seen—many of the plutocracy’s rationalizations have more than a bit of truth to them: as a class, they are generally more hardworking and meritocratic than their forebears; their philanthropic efforts are innovative and important; and the recent losses of the American middle class have in many cases entailed gains for the rest of the world.
Kinda like this one did. ;o(
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/05/AR2010080506682.html
Nothing was hush hush. It’s just most of us were call ray-cist, ignorant Appalachian hillbillies when we pointed out very obvious signs that Obama was a rightie’s dream candidate. The signs were there but half the party wanted to go over a cliff and were very disgruntled that some of us weren’t up for cliff jumping sans bungee.
(signs I pointed out but was ignored on included Obama campaigning with someone who said gay was a disease, his history of voting present on choice for political coverage, his economic teams position that spending money for first stimulus on programs like Oil for Seniors were a bad idea and instead everyone should get a blank check, his position that universal care would mean making poor people choose between rent and health care, his position that Reagan was a transformational President he would most wish to emulate…)
If you are a willing tool, does that make you Joseph Goebbels?
Obama’s not an evil man, but he’s certainly not a middle of the road Democrat. He’s simply a politician, period. And politicians always do what they deem is in their interest, damn the country. For those of you who thought Obama was a savior, you were duped.
Obama’s a student of Reagan, and it shows in his governing style and policy proposals (he warned us in 2008 with his interview with the Las Vegas paper). As a matter of fact, so has every president been since Reagan, including Clinton. Remember it was the Clinton administration who passed the policies that allowed Wall Street to run wild. Bush simply appointed industry hacks who sat on their hands and allowed them the freedom from regulation to fulfill their greedy aims.
No, Obama is not evil, he’s simply a man of the machine. He believes in Milton Friedman’s economic policy. He believes in the American economic theory of the past 30 years. He’s simply a product of the system, and he’s not strong nor brave enough, nor posseses the imagination and creativity to challenge the conventional wisdom of Washington.
Austan Goolsbee defended the Economic Plan of every Republican President and every Republican Presidential nominee since Herbert Hoover.
I thnk Congress passed this for one year but Tea-GOP wouldn’t renew of the second. Pelosi and friends did propose it, IIRC.
Did anyone see CNN w/Alice Revlin? you think the Week was poor at leastr PK and CF were on the show…Revlin said we must Medicare now…no one challenged her…digusting@
They don’t want them well-educated either. They want to privatize education so corporate educators can teach the serfs only what they want them to know.
Voted Present something like 137 times in the Illinois Senate. When he was asked about it during the 2008 campaign, he said something to the effect that if he had known it was going to cause such an uproar…………
Thanks Scarecrow, I appreciate that you shared your take on the show. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I don’t want to subject myself to blood pressure spikes by watching Goolsbee so I don’t even turn on the television to see Obama’s pet monkey perform. Like Obama and the rest of them (including those from the other side of the aisle) Goolsbee is a master spinner. I’m surprised he didn’t come off better today though. Usually, like Obama, he comes off as very likeable and “sensible” and thoroughly “democratic”. One would never suspect that both Goolsbee AND Obama are hardline supporters of Milton Friedman’s harsh economic neo-liberal ideology for the rich–which, in my opinion is at the heart of the economic crisis–not only in the USA but the world.
Until we replace it with an economic ideology that works for the majority–NOTHING of any significance will change.
BUT HERE IS THE CLINCHER: Friedman’s neo-liberal economics works great for the rich and they are the ones in control of BOTH parties.
excellent point LOL Talk about setting yourself up for failure.
Sadly eurogirl70, we’re unlikely to ever get the opportunity to find out if Hillary is more FDR than Obama (or Bill). I’d like to think she is but we won’t find out while she’s working for Barry.
I feel sorry for her too because she has ZERO support from Obama and his administration of regurgitated corporate Wall Street Centrist DLC Clintonites left over from the 1990′s.
Obama is an ass when it comes to supporting labor. He is THE WORST–at least on a par with Bush and Bill Clinton when it comes to TOTAL disregard and disrespect of labor and the working people.
Oh he will go around and make a few speeches to brag to the car manufacturers about how he “saved” the car industry, but what Obama did for them, he didn’t do for labor, he did for the corporate CEOs and Wall Street. Labor made HUGE concessions for those “deals”.
If he gave a damn about labor he would have sent his Secretary of Labor to Wisconsin on day one when Scott Walker and the Republicans started up their BS.
OBAMA NEVER SENT A REPRESENTATIVE TO WISCONSIN OVER THIS VERY SERIOUS LABOR ISSUE. NEVER. At the end of it all, as a “wrap” they had some kind of an online “discussion” that lasted about half and hour with Biden and Solis answering questions.
When he was in Brazil earlier this spring, he had breakfast with the CEO of Coca Cola (convicted international criminals) and some other executives who rode on his coat tail down there.
Did he meet with labor? Not that I heard.
When Hu visited the USA Obama met with Hu and several CEOs of large US corporations. Was labor invited? H no.
LOL it’s the part where the rich are putting our share from the profits of production into their pockets.
Barack Obama is to the right of Mitt Romney and if Romney gets the nomination, for the first time in my life I’ll vote for a republican.
Obama, Geithner, and Goolsbee are neoliberals.
Neoliberals are uber capitalists. They are unalterably opposed to any government regulation and they are obsessed with ending social security, Medicare, Medicaid, any social safety net of any sort.
Obama, Geithner, and Goolsbee are going to use the deficit as an excuse to “get government out of the way” and end social security, Medicare, Medicaid, any social safety net of any sort. They won’t end them in one fell swoop. Instead, they will slowly starve them of money and enact legislation that finally kills them so that no one under the age of 55 will ever benefit from them. That’s the plan, plain and simple. Keep the crises coming and use them as an excuse to impose their agenda.
Creating jobs is not and never will be on their agenda. They only care about keeping the rich happy. They don’t give a damn about the unemployed, underemployed, sick, and uninsured. Instead of creating jobs, they strategize on how to lie and effectively conceal their intentions.
This is why we should fight them every step of the way and never ever compromise. They are the greatest threat we face and infinitely more dangerous than any terrorist or terrorist organization.
“Goolsbee AND Obama are hardline supporters of Milton Friedman’s harsh economic neo-liberal ideology for the rich–which, in my opinion is at the heart of the economic crisis–not only in the USA but the world.”
This statement is the absolute truth and we must keep speaking it until it finally sinks in. Obama and Goolsbee (and Geithner) are the enemy and we must oppose them with every fiber of our being or they will destroy us.
Apparently Obama’s plan is to send Goolsbee out to the talk shows to tell people he’s going to fix this thing by cutting taxes, reviewing wasteful regulations and getting rid of red tape, and putting in place more “free trade” agreements. Remind me again why President Romney would be more awful than this?
Oh, and he’s sending out his advisors to tell people it’s NOT a jobless recovery. Apparently he’s borrowing the Apple strategy for 2012: telling people to “Think Different.”
So, are you suggesting that as long as the US gets part of the rent, it’s okay with you? If so, pathetic if you call yourself a progressive or if you give a shit about climate change or the environment.
Can’t see a Reply after your comment, so I’ll reply here. I didn’t get that impression from her article.
Well, you ignore the first sentence, and the words “only” and “presumably” in the second, so no, that’s not what I suggested or said.
Just looking for clarification….and I didn’t ignore anything, since you cast a hint of having it both ways.
You “presumably” ignored the words” suggesting” and “If so”…
But, thanks for clarifying.
So much crapola like all that the aforesaid Professors Krugman and Goolsbee come up with…The simple fact is that without establishing a return to Glass-Steagall (which Rep. Marcy Kaptur has promoted) all this is so much sound and fury signifying nothing but cfriminal speculators “too big to fail,” like the monotony of Poe’s The Bells…
Uh-huh. Whatever, don’t worry you can rally around her in 2016. Give me a break. What does she know about the plight of the working people? She’s just as rich and pampered as the rest of them. Obama has surrounded himself with people from the Clinton administration. She would have done the same. It is insane that you idiots will rally around her thinking she’ll be our “only hope” in 2016. I can see it now.
Never got a dime.
I’m waiting for the next financial meltdown. It’s right around the corner thanks to the failure/refusal of congress to implement real financial reform, specifically regulating derivatives.
Know what I think would be fair? A Tobin tax on large transactions with the proceeds going into Social Security and Medicare. If speculators are willing to gamble with money created from nothing, the people who actually worked and created things ought to be able to retire in comfort.
Or do I have to read Rawls again (ugh!)?
Hillary Clinton would have already attacked Iran, for no justifiable reason. She’s “Crash” MCCain with balls and a penis, and a corporate shill for Wal-Mart..
These are the people that Naomi Klein warns us about in “The Shock Doctrine”, but, of course, it can’t happen here.
Don’t forget the other piece of legislation that was instrumental in fostering the climate for the economic meltdown, the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, also signed into law by Clinton, along with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.
Moderate Democrats don’t worship at the altar of St. Ronnie. Obama referred to Reagan as a “stabilizing” force after the “turbulence of the 60″s”. You know, that despicable era when we fought for equality for all US citizens, and marched against illegal wars and racial injustice.
A progressive alternative to Romney’s reactionary economic plan:
A program for real change…
* Peace— end the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and shutdown the 800 U.S. military bases on foreign soil.
* A National Public Health Care System – ten million new jobs.
* A National Public Child Care System – three to five million new jobs.
* Works Progress Administration – three million new jobs.
* Civilian Conservation Corps – two million new jobs.
* Tax the hell out of the rich and cut the military budget by ending the wars to pay for it all which will create full employment.
* Enforce Affirmative Action; end discrimination.
* Raise the minimum wage to a real living wage
* What tax-payers subsidize in the way of businesses, tax-payers should own and reap the profits from.
* Moratorium on home foreclosures and evictions.
* Defend democracy by defending workers’ rights including the right to collective bargaining for improving the lives and livelihoods of working people.
* Roll-back and freeze the price of food, electricity, gas and heating fuels; not wages, benefits or pensions.
* Wall Street is our enemy.
How is Barack Obama’s Wall Street war economy working for you?
Let’s talk about the politics and economics of livelihood for a real change.
I agree – since he is too smart to believe the economy grows only because of the “confidence fairy”, the only other answer to why he does what he does is that he is radically right.
Makes a “less right” pol like Huntsman seems like a better Dem despite the R after his name.
“As far as Obama being a “radically right R”, the record simply does not support that. He is a middle of the road Democrat.”
This is correct only when you realize that the “moderates” of the Democratic Party now have the same political and economic philosophies of 1990′s Republicans. Obama’s health care plan is the same as Bob Dole’s plan from the 90′s – Nancy Pelosi even made a point of that. Tax cuts for millionaires, check, a “new normal” for unemployment levels, check, “trickle down economics” in all but name, check again. Hostility towards unions, check, a belief in privatization that borders on fetishness, check, unfettered presidential powers in a never ending war on “drugs” or “terror”, check, check again. Obama is no different philosophically than Newt Gingritch. How’s that for “change we can believe in?”
Welp, he just quit.
There goes another one.
That was quick.