From Robert Reich’s blog as published on Truth-out we have the article The White House Needs a Real Jobs Plan.  The article starts with the following remarks:

Today the President met with business leaders on his “jobs and competitiveness council,” who suggested more public-private partnerships to train workers, less government red-tape in obtaining permits, and more jobs in travel and tourism, among other things. The President then toured a manufacturing plant in North Carolina, and made an eloquent speech about the need for more jobs.

Fluff.

Doesn’t the White House get it? The President has to have a bold jobs plan, with specifics. Why not exempt the first $20,000 of income from payroll taxes for the next year? Why not a new WPA for the long-term unemployed, and a Civilian Conservation Corps for the legions of young jobless Americans? Why not allow people to declare bankruptcy on their primary residences, and thereby reorganize their mortgage debt?

Or a hundred other ways to boost demand.

Fluff won’t get us anywhere. In fact, it creates a policy vacuum that will be filled by Republicans intent on convincing Americans that cutting federal spending and reducing taxes on the rich will create jobs.

Most Americans are smart enough to see through this. But if the Republican snake oil is the only remedy being offered, some people will buy it. And if the President and Democrats on Capitol Hill continue to obsess about reaching an agreement to raise the debt limit, they risk making the snake oil seem like a legitimate cure.

As indicated by the above excerpts from the article, it’s not like there aren’t many voices and many proposals for an alternative to what the Republicans are proposing.  For the President to add his voice to the promotion of the alternatives, he first has to know about the alternatives, and then he has to remember that a politician’s primary job is to educate the public on policy matters.

As I have tried to make it clear to Democratic politicians before, you cannot beat something with nothing.  Rather than merely explain what is wrong with the Republican plan, the Democrats have to come up with an obviously better plan.  If they have an obviously better plan, they don’t even have to talk about the Republican’s plan.  Staying positive was a lesson that Obama taught us all in his campaign for the Presidency.

As for the President and Democrats on Capitol Hill continuing to obsess about reaching an agreement to raise the debt limit, the President should instead think of coming out with a statement harking back to my satirical post Obama Vows To Veto Tax Cut For The Wealthy. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to come up with the appropriate statement of conscience.

The following snippet comes from an interview I first heard on a local public radio station:

TRANSCRIPT:

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, I want to go to a very different issue in the last 30 seconds: the government adding formaldehyde to a list of known carcinogens despite years of lobbying from the chemical industry. This report coming out now, just months after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration warned that a hair-care product, Brazilian Blowout Acai Professional Smoothing Solution, contained unacceptable levels of formaldehyde. The government also saying Friday, styrene, which is used in boats, bathtubs and in disposable foam plastic cups and plates, may cause cancer. One of the chief lobbyists against formaldehyde being put on this list were the Koch brothers. Could I get a quick reply from you?

RALPH NADER: The carcinogen aspects, long known, finally recognized by the Food and Drug Administration, opposed by these right-wing lobbyists, the Koch brothers, who, you know, $37 billion worth of money, they’re going to put a lot of it in the campaign. So this will put more spotlight on the Koch brothers, and deservedly so.

The transcript (and a video clip) come from the article Ralph Nader: Koch Brothers Led Fight to Defend Formaldehyde Despite Carcinogenic Evidence on Truth-out.org.

Some people have told me that I should not look a gift horse in the mouth when I see David H. Koch having a cancer research center at MIT named after him because of the money he gave.  Is their a case of irony deprivation running riot through our nation?  Does supporting cancer prevention research balance the selling and promotion of  cancer causing agents to the public?  Would we be better off had the Koch brothers paid their taxes instead of evading them, made less money promoting and selling cancer products, and allowing the NIH to fund the cancer research instead of the Koch brothers funding the research?

If a firefighter commits arson and then heroically helps put out the fire, should we celebrate the heroism even if we know about the arson?  Might we want to disparage the arsonist firefighter in order to concentrate our celebrating on the firefighters who do not also set fires?

As a student at MIT, I did hear the argument from other students that law enforcement should go easy on MIT grads because of all they will contribute to society.  I don’t buy it. Fortunately, I never heard that argument from any of the faculty (who were already making their contributions to society).  Maybe the faculty should have actively argued against that idea rather than merely refraining from promoting it.

In the article Gridlocking the Lives of the Jobless by E.J. Dionne, Jr., he states the following:

For the moment, Republicans have no interest in moving the nation’s debate toward investments in job creation because they gain twice over from keeping Washington mired in discussions on the deficit. It’s a brute fact that Republicans benefit if the economy stays sluggish. And despite their role in ballooning the deficit during the Bush years, they will always outbid Democrats on spending cuts.

So is there any way out for those looking to Washington? The recent disappointing jobs numbers have at least had the salutary effect of reminding Democrats that they cannot agree to anything that further slows the recovery. “The first principle has to be ‘do no harm,’” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, a key House Democratic negotiator in the deficit talks. “There is a danger of making things worse if you adopt very deep cuts in the short term.”

To this article I responded with the following comment:

Yesterday I received an email from Biden saying that he has a plan to take idle government real-estate and stop wasting money on it.  Does that mean that he is going to put this real-estate on the market where there is already a glut of real estate?

Today I hear that the Veep is aiming toward a bipartisan deal to cut $1 trillion in spending.

Meanwhile corporations are withholding $2 trillion of their cash from investing in new plants, equipment, and jobs.  Why? Because there is not enough demand (i.e. spending) in the economy to warrant further investment.

So now both Republicans and Democrats are going to solve the lack of spending in the economy by cutting spending.  I suppose they might also cut taxes to raise tax revenue.

We need a law to make English at least one of the languages spoken in this country.  I mean dictionary English, not political double speak.

For Obama to change the direction of the national conversation on the economy, he first has to know where the new direction is.

I just got an email from the Vice President with the title, “There’s a new sheriff in town”.  It starts off with:

Did you know that the government spends millions to maintain buildings that have sat vacant for years? Or that your tax dollars pay to needlessly ship copies of the Federal Register to thousands of government offices across the country even though the same information is available online?

Vilifying government is what Republicans do.  Do we really need the Obama administration to pile on?  And what is Biden proposing to do about these empty buildings, put them on the real estate market during a real estate bust?  That ought to bring real estate prices back up, note heavy sarcasm.

Here is the response I emailed back to the Vice President:

I didn’t vote for your team to out Republican the Republicans.

While cutting waste is very laudable, there are far bigger and more important issues that your team is ignoring.

The Republicans are proposing to solve the lack of product demand in the economy and the $2 trillion of corporate wealth that is sitting idle waiting for this demand to appear, by cutting taxes, regulation and spending. Cutting spending when corporations are sitting back, waiting to see more spending is so ridiculous the Republicans ought to be laughed off the stage of serious policy proposers.

This idea is so obviously counter-productive that your team should be shouting this from the rooftops. The mainstream media certainly doesn’t show enough knowledge of economics to do the job for you.

If your team won’t stand up for reason in economic policy, then I can see the inevitable consequences. The debate will be settled before you even raise your voices. All that will be left to argue is how much of the wrong policy to have.

I never expected that you would be able to push through all the correct legislation through Congress. I did expect your team to know what that policy is, to stand up for it, and to make sure these ideas were vigorously stated in the country’s marketplace of ideas.

Your team has been a close to utter failure in this regard.

Instead your team has come up with the silly phrase, “Winning the future.”

If you expect campaign donations from me, you are going to have to sharpen your game considerably starting this instant.

And let’s not start any more wars for oil such as the one you just started in Libya. Your so called humanitarian justification for trying to grab Libyan oil for US oil companies is so transparent, to be laughable. The dignity of the office is not upheld with laughable arguments.

In the accompanying post Spitzer Schools Coulter: “Your story would be nice if it were true, but it’s not.”

There is commentary on this video on LOL! Elliot Spitzer SCHOOLS Ann Coulter on what “Reality is”.

The Commentary: Boeing gets corporate welfare in S.C. by Issac Bailey in The Myrtle Beach Sun, adds a little perspective on the NLRB dispute with Boeing,

But there is an overlooked aspect of the dispute. According to an analysis by The (Charleston) Post & Courier, Boeing is being given a package of incentives worth more than $900 million – at least $150 million more than Boeing has said it would spend to build the plant – this while education and other important programs are being cut, undermining the state’s ability to compete over the long haul.

That essentially means South Carolina taxpayers are building the plant and giving Boeing maybe a couple hundred million dollars on top of it. Question for all those who claim to love the free market: If Boeing is such a great deal, why aren’t market forces enough to help the company make a profit without the public’s help? And if it isn’t such a great deal why should the public be on the hook if the rosy predictions about annual economic impact are never realized?

…

They also claimed that right-to-work states – states that actively crush union formation – are “outperforming forced-unionism states.”

This is what they didn’t mention: South Carolina, one of the country’s strongest right-to-work states, has among the nation’s lowest wages and highest unemployment rates, worst rates of health insurance and millions of workers who are afraid every day of losing their jobs if they decide to use their free speech rights in ways the boss might not like, with little recourse.

In this video Lawrence O’Donnell explains just how poor Donald Trump is.

The article 10 stories more important than Weinergate by David Sirota is subtitled:

From record greenhouse gas emissions to the failed War on Drugs, here are the real scandals the media ignored

The Salon article In a pure coincidence, Gaddafi impeded U.S. oil interests before the war, Glenn Greenwald ties this coincidence to several factors.

But now, in a pure coincidence, there is hope on the horizon for these Western oil companies, thanks to the war profoundly humanitarian action being waged by the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner and his nation’s closest Western allies

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The reason — the only reason — we know about any of this is because WikiLeaks (and, allegedly, Bradley Manning) disclosed to the world the diplomatic cables which detail these conflicts.

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Is there anything easier to understand than why U.S. Government officials are so eager to punish WikiLeaks and deter future transparency projects of this sort?

This article makes reference to an article in The Washington Post,  Conflict in Libya: U.S. oil companies sit on sidelines as Gaddafi maintains hold

As I have asked in previous posts, “Is there some higher power than the President of The United States. that makes President Obama behave this way?”

From the article Study: Students who resist change see teachers as biased,

Now a study has concluded that this sort of bias does not actually exist and that the students who perceive it — whether coming from the left or from the right — are those who are most resistant to change in their own lives and attitudes. In contrast, students who are open to new ideas, no matter what their political persuasion, show little perception of faculty bias.

I wonder where that puts me. I started out as resisting change, but came to appreciate it around sophomore year.  If you read this blog, you will probably surmise that now that I am old and crotchety,  I am back to resisting.  However, now that I am older and wiser, I can sometimes rise above my initial resistance.