Leading up to President Obama’s health care summit next week, we’re holding our biggest health care day of action ever—The Virtual March for Real Health Care Reform on February 24. Can you join the march today? Click here to sign up and we’ll send a fax to Sens. Kerry and Brown in your name: Click here to sign up for the Virtual March

Dear MoveOn member,

Next week could be our last big chance to push for real health care reform—and we need a massive show of support to make a major impression on lawmakers in Washington.

Here’s what’s happening: Thursday, President Obama is holding a bipartisan health care summit with Congress. With all of Washington and the news media focused on health care leading up to the summit, it’s a crucial opportunity to make clear that Americans want Congress to get health care done now.

So we’re organizing our biggest, movement-wide day of action for health care reform yet: a Virtual March for Real Health Care Reform on February 24th.

Together with progressive allies, we’re aiming to send a million messages to Congress demanding they stand up and finish health care reform. It’s going to be huge, historic, and fun.

Can you sign up today to join the Virtual March? It’s simple to sign up—and when you do, we’ll automatically send a fax in your name to Sens. Kerry and Brown. Click the link below—it’ll sign you up and send a fax in your name to your senators.

http://pol.moveon.org/virtualmarch10/

This is it. If you’ve never taken action on health care, now’s the time to jump in. And if you’ve taken action every time, we need you now more than ever.  To do this right, we need as many people as possible.

The March is shaping up to be huge. With allies from labor, progressive blogs, Health Care for America Now, and others, we’ll have the phones, fax machines, email inboxes, and Facebook walls of Congress flooded with messages of support for real reform.

And at the same time, hundreds of folks will also be marching through Washington, D.C. to Capitol Hill in honor of Melanie Shouse, a MoveOn Council leader in St. Louis who recently passed away from breast cancer—while still fighting her insurance company for coverage, and organizing tirelessly to pass real health care reform.¹ Together, we’ll send an unmistakable message to Congress.

Can you sign up today? Click here to join the Virtual March, and we’ll automatically send a fax to Sens. Kerry and Brown:

http://pol.moveon.org/virtualmarch10/

Thanks for all you do.

–Kat, Michael, Ilyse, Lenore, and the rest of the team

P.S. Can you also forward this email to five friends today? The more people involved in the Virtual March, the stronger the message to Washington that it’s time to finish health care reform—and finish it right.

Sources:

1. “March to the Finish Line for Melanie,” Health Care for America Now

http://melaniesmarch.com/

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PAID FOR BY MOVEON.ORG POLITICAL ACTION, http://pol.moveon.org/. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. This email was sent to Steven Greenberg on February 19, 2010..

Here is the movie.

This is the supplement to the graph in my original post Road To Recovery.

Follow this link to the posting of the movie and related text on Organizing For America.

Follow this link to see the website that reports on Massachusetts’ use of the Recovery Act money.

At the web site, I found a summary:

Over 25,000 jobs have been saved or created in Massachusetts because of Governor Patrick’s use of federal stimulus funds, including:

* Teachers
* Firefighters
* Police officers
* Construction workers
* Community health care workers

Among other projects, the Governor has also invested:

* Over $430 million in stimulus highway funds obligated to 84 projects.
* Over $800 million for 120 projects repairing municipal wastewater systems.

The Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported:

The state’s Web site reported that about 1,389 full-time equivalent jobs were created and about 3,333 full-time equivalent jobs were retained as a result of the legislation.

I wonder which web site they were reading.

I have made some very rough calculations to come to the conclusion that President Obama has saved 5 Million jobs since he got the The American Recovery And Reinvestment Act (ARRA) passed in February of 2009.

Here is how I came to that conclusion. I got the job loss data from January 2009 through February 2010 from the Bureau Of Labor Statistics. Had the job losses for the month before the ARRA act was passed continued through February 2010, the cumulative job losses would have been 9 million jobs. These are the jobs that would have been lost if the rate of job loss had not gotten any worse nor any better without Obama’s actions.

The actual cumulative job loss over that period has been 4 million jobs. So, crudely, we can estimate that Obama’s actions have saved 5 million jobs.

I show the data and my calculations below.

Data from Bureau Of Labor Statistics

Data extracted on: February 17, 2010 (8:45:11 PM)

Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National)

1-Month Net Change
Series Id: CES0000000001
Seasonally Adjusted
Super Sector: Total nonfarm
Industry: Total nonfarm
NAICS Code: –
Data Type: ALL EMPLOYEES, THOUSANDS

Year	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec	Annual
2007	194	104	239	92	149	55	-20	-71	52	86	128	70
2008	-10	-50	-33	-149	-231	-193	-210	-334	-458	-554	-728	-673
2009	-779	-726	-753	-582	-347	-504	-344	-211	-225	-224	64	-150(P)
2010	-20(P)
P : preliminary

The following table shows my calculations.

Data Source for Job Loss column is http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet?series_id=CES0000000001&output_view=net_1mth

For whatever reason, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette decided to publish a letter about these 5 million jobs.

Follow this link to read the 47 page report of the Council Of Economic Advisers, The Economic Impact Of The American Recovery And Reinvestment Act Of 2009 Second Quarterly Report January 13, 2010.

As part of the ARRA legislation the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) was charged with providing to Congress quarterly reports on the effects of the Recovery Act on overall economic activity, and on employment in particular.

Read the details at the above link so you can see what the report actually told the Congress instead of just hearing the sound bites you are likely to get from the politicians and the  news media.

There are fascinating details about exactly where the changes to the economy have occurred.

Follow this link to the page at Democracy For America where you can sign on as a citizen cosponsor to the letter from Senate Democrats to Senate leader Harry Reid.

Dear Leader Reid:

We respectfully ask that you bring for a vote before the full Senate a public health insurance option under budget reconciliation rules.

There are four fundamental reasons why we support this approach – its potential for billions of dollars in cost savings; the growing need to increase competition and lower costs for the consumer; the history of using reconciliation for significant pieces of health care legislation; and the continued public support for a public option.

You can read the rest of the letter at the Democracy For America web site.

Follow this link to a CNN opinion piece by Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School.

What a great suggestion for President Obama.  He can use the Eisenhower technique  to lose the next election but go down in history as being prophetic.

Maybe the headline means that President Obama can model Ike, but he would be a fool to do so.