Politics Plus

While Congress continues to bail out Wall Street, Main Street continues to suffer.  We need jobs!

If you’re looking for a job right now, your prospects are terrible. There are six times as many Americans seeking work as there are job openings, and the average duration of unemployment — the time the average job-seeker has spent looking for work — is more than six months, the highest level since the 1930s.

You might think, then, that doing something about the employment situation would be a top policy priority. But now that total financial collapse has been averted, all the urgency seems to have vanished from policy discussion, replaced by a strange passivity. There’s a pervasive sense in Washington that nothing more can or should be done, that we should just wait for the economic recovery to trickle down to workers.

This is wrong and unacceptable.

Yes, the recession is probably over in a technical sense, but that doesn’t mean that full employment is just around the corner. Historically, financial crises have typically been followed not just by severe recessions but by anemic recoveries; it’s usually years before unemployment declines to anything like normal levels. And all indications are that the aftermath of the latest financial crisis is following the usual script. The Federal Reserve, for example, expects unemployment, currently 10.2 percent, to stay above 8 percent — a number that would have been considered disastrous not long ago — until sometime in 2012.

And the damage from sustained high unemployment will last much longer. The long-term unemployed can lose their skills, and even when the economy recovers they tend to have difficulty finding a job, because they’re regarded as poor risks by potential employers. Meanwhile, students who graduate into a poor labor market start their careers at a huge disadvantage — and pay a price in lower earnings for their whole working lives. Failure to act on unemployment isn’t just cruel, it’s short-sighted.

So it’s time for an emergency jobs program.

How is a jobs program different from a second stimulus? It’s a matter of priorities. The 2009 Obama stimulus bill was focused on restoring economic growth. It was, in effect, based on the belief that if you build G.D.P., the jobs will come. That strategy might have worked if the stimulus had been big enough — but it wasn’t. And as a matter of political reality, it’s hard to see how the administration could pass a second stimulus big enough to make up for the original shortfall.

So our best hope now is for a somewhat cheaper program that generates more jobs for the buck. Such a program should shy away from measures, like general tax cuts, that at best lead only indirectly to job creation, with many possible disconnects along the way. Instead, it should consist of measures that more or less directly save or add jobs.

One such measure would be another round of aid to beleaguered state and local governments, which have seen their tax receipts plunge and which, unlike the federal government, can’t borrow to cover a temporary shortfall. More aid would help avoid both a drastic worsening of public services (especially education) and the elimination of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Meanwhile, the federal government could provide jobs by … providing jobs. It’s time for at least a small-scale version of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, one that would offer relatively low-paying (but much better than nothing) public-service employment. There would be accusations that the government was creating make-work jobs, but the W.P.A. left many solid achievements in its wake. And the key point is that direct public employment can create a lot of jobs at relatively low cost. In a proposal to be released today, the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, argues that spending $40 billion a year for three years on public-service employment would create a million jobs, which sounds about right.

Finally, we can offer businesses direct incentives for employment… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <NY Times>

I have little to add.  We’ve been waiting for wealth to trickle down since 1980.  It hasn’t.  It won’t.  It gushed up and will continue to so so until we correct the insane injustice that the bottom 40% of Americans own only 0.2% of the wealth.  Therefore, to pay for Krugman’s jobs programs we need to restore the progressive income tax structure gutted by Reagan, Bush I, Crawford Caligula, and the GOP.

On many occasions you have heard me rail against teabaggers, rabid right pundits and GOP leaders for their hate speech and threats of violence.  I have said that, although to them it may be only political rhetoric, there are deranged folks out there hanging on every word they say, who are likely to translate their speech into action.  Here is an example of one such person:

Following a pipe bomb explosion Monday night, police and federal law enforcement officials are trying to figure why a Center Avenue man turned his apartment into a bomb factory.

Police said no charges have been filed against Mark Campano, 56. Police found 30 completed pipe bombs in his apartment along with components to make more, plus 17 guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

Campano is in an Akron hospital with injuries received when one of the bombs exploded.

As police and federal authorities puzzle over Campano’s past and what he planned to do with the bombs, a former neighbor said Campano often railed against the government.

Barbara Vachon lived next door to Campano at the Center Park Place Apartments for several years and said he was a big reason she moved.

"He was always trying to get me and another neighbor to listen to anti-government tapes and watch anti-government videos," said Vachon. "I would never watch them. He was some kind of radical, and he didn’t believe in the government."

She said there were other warnings.

"There were a few times I heard minor explosions from outside the apartment building, and he would scream that he had hurt himself," she said. "I never knew what he was up to."

Vachon said Campano seemed to be most active at night.

"There was a steady stream of creepy visitors going in and out of his apartment," she said.

The Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms is also investigating the case.

"We don’t know what his intention was, but what he had in that apartment could cause real damage," said Cuyahoga Falls Sgt. Gary Merton Jr. "We expected to find a meth lab after we heard about the explosion, but our guys were surprised at what they found."… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Cleveland.com>

Now, I’m not saying that this fellow is a Republican.  Nor am I saying that he is a teabagger, although he does seem to share their values.  I am saying only that he is a nut-case, and that when people like him hear the kind of rhetoric the GOP Reich with their Faux Noise and teabagger minions have been spewing, they do thinks like making pipe bombs.  Fortunately, this one shared not only teabagger values, but also teabagger IQ, and consequently, he blew himself up before he could have put whatever plot he might have had into action.

The US has a long ugly history of supporting corrupt dictatorships in Latin America, a practice that has resulted in strong anti-American feelings in many of those nations.  Early in his Presidency, I was proud of Obama’s behavior toward that region, but lately he has taken a more Republican stance.

…it is a relatively obscure backwater, Honduras, that has provided the Obama administration with its first test in Latin America.

The ouster of Manuel Zelaya, the Honduran populist president, five months ago propelled the deeply impoverished country onto President Obama’s packed agenda. The question now is whether his administration’s support for the presidential election being held there on Sunday will be seen as a stamp of approval for a coup or, as senior administration members maintain, the beginning of the end of the crisis.

Most countries in the region see it as the former. Haunted by ghosts of authoritarian governments not long in the grave, countries like Brazil, Argentina and Chile have argued that an election held by an illegal government is, by definition, illegal.

They worry that if Mr. Obama appears to set aside that principle in Honduras, where the United States has long been a power broker, what would Washington do if democracy were threatened in a more powerful country where it wields less influence?

Last week, Marco Aurélio García, a senior adviser to the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said his country “continues to have great hopes” for good relations with the United States. But, he added, “the truth is so far we have a strong sense of disappointment.”

While there have been other issues — new United States bases planned for Colombia and a slow movement toward engagement with Cuba — much of the disappointment stems from the administration’s handling of the crisis that began June 28 when Honduran troops detained Mr. Zelaya and forced him into exile.

Mr. Obama was one of the first to condemn the coup and call for Mr. Zelaya to be restored. Rather than impose a strategy for handling the crisis, the White House collaborated with the rest of the region in support of negotiations between Mr. Zelaya and the conservative leaders of Honduras’s de facto government.

Since then, the United States policy toward Honduras has been marked by mixed signals and vague objectives. The State Department was pulled in one direction by Democrats, who supported Mr. Zelaya, and another by Republicans, who sought to weaken the administration’s resolve to reinstate him.

The administration suspended some $30 million in assistance to Honduras, but continued the bulk of its aid — worth hundreds of millions of dollars — saying it did not want to punish the majority of Hondurans living in poverty.

The United States was slow to criticize human rights abuses by the de facto government, but swift to scold Mr. Zelaya for political stunts that culminated with his sneaking back into Honduras, where he remains camped inside the Brazilian Embassy.

The move that seems to have most undermined Mr. Obama’s clout came last month when the administration reversed course by signaling that it would accept the outcome of Sunday’s elections whether or not Mr. Zelaya was restored to power.

Latin American governments accused the administration of putting pragmatism over principle and of siding with Honduran military officers and business interests whose goal was to use the elections to legitimize the coup… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <NY Times>

The opponents of the coup are right.  An election by an illegal government is by definition illegal.  The sad fact is that the only thing that will matter in tomorrow’s election is who counts the votes, so the outcome is a foregone conclusion, just as it was in the election of Hamid Karzai.  I would not support a military intervention on Zelaya’s behalf.  We have no troops that are not deployed or slated for deployment.  I would, however, support the immediate suspension of all aid to Honduras until the rightful government is restored.  I would also support a boycott of all trade with Honduras to prevent US corporations from profiting from the coup.  When all the facts are in, and we can follow the money, I believe we will learn that without US corporate financing, the coup could not have taken place.

If you have a few minutes, please look at the other three articles for today.  Any one of them could have been the lead article.