Democrats and particularly President Obama have been taking a lot of heat over the stimulus bill. Now, a lot of people that complain about the stimulus so loudly try to attribute the TARP bailout somehow to Obama too. Despite the fact that Obama was not President when the economy crashed and the banks were bailed out suddenly it is all his doing.

Congressman DeFazio said yesterday: We think it is time, maybe, that we turn our focus to Main Street ... Unfortunately, the President has an adviser from Wall Street, Larry Summers, and a Treasury Secretary from Wall Street, Timmy Geithner, who don't like that idea. They want to keep the TARP money either to continue to bail out Wall Street...or to pay down the deficit. That's absurd... "[Obama] is being failed by his economic team ... We may have to sacrifice just two more jobs to get millions back for Americans.

What is needed is immediate action, not idle chatter. We already know what works: federal stimulus money channeled directly towards job creation, a public works campaign to help rebuild the U.S. crumbling infrastructure, full funding for education and social services, and more. -- Instead, Obama will invite the corporate elite to the White House to hear their advice on how to create jobs, as they continue slashing them by the thousands. The conservative Washington Post reports: “President Obama plans to bring together CEOs, small business owners and financial experts to sound out ideas for continuing to expand the economy and create jobs” (November 16, 2009). - Labor leaders have also been invited to the meeting. --- --- Allow us to save the busy President some time — it is obvious what the summit participants will suggest and why. Corporations will propose that taxes remain low for themselves and their very wealthy shareholders, while keeping regulations equally low. Both of these measures would save money for corporations, while encouraging billionaires to play more on the stock market — their solution to creating jobs. Unions, on the other hand, will demand a new and improved stimulus package. This, of course, is the only answer for workers. -- What is needed is immediate action, not idle chatter. We already know what works: federal stimulus money channeled directly towards job creation, a public works campaign to help rebuild the U.S. crumbling infrastructure, full funding for education and social services, and more. -- Instead, Obama will invite the corporate elite to the White House to hear their advice on how to create jobs, as they continue slashing them by the thousands. The conservative Washington Post reports: “President Obama plans to bring together CEOs, small business owners and financial experts to sound out ideas for continuing to expand the economy and create jobs” (November 16, 2009). Labor leaders have also been invited to the meeting. --- --- Allow us to save the busy President some time — it is obvious what the summit participants will suggest and why. Corporations will propose that taxes remain low for themselves and their very wealthy shareholders, while keeping regulations equally low. Both of these measures would save money for corporations, while encouraging billionaires to play more on the stock market — their solution to creating jobs. Unions, on the other hand, will demand a new and improved stimulus package. This, of course, is the only answer for workers. The first stimulus bill was an abysmal failure because it was far too small, while much of the money was dedicated to tax breaks. Obama is correct that it saved jobs from being destroyed and that it gave desperate states some financial relief. But the aid was far too small to be truly effective, regardless of Obama’s constant boasting about it. A new stimulus package must be much larger, and wholly dedicated to creating jobs, not merely “saving” them. The current situation in the U.S. is one of complete social failure; there is immense work that needs to be done — in infrastructure especially — while there exists millions of workers available to do the job. But nothing happens. This points to an obvious failure in the market, and thus demands serious state intervention. -- But state intervention cannot be the type that Obama has promoted thus far, especially bank bailouts and corporate-style health care. --- Instead of aiding the super-wealthy, it should be demanded that Obama drastically switch gears to curing the unemployment pandemic.

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke has given Americans a glimpse of the ugly truth about their future job prospects. Simply put, companies have found that they can shed workers and rely on technological advances and overseas factories to operate with a lot fewer U.S. employees.

How can the stock market hit new highs at the same time unemployment is hitting new highs? Simple. The market is up because corporate earnings are up. Corporate earnings are up because companies are cutting costs. And the biggest single cost they’re cutting is their payrolls. So they let people go and, presto, their balance sheets look better and their stock prices rise. In the old-fashioned kind of recession decades ago, big companies laid off people with the expectation of rehiring them when the economy turned up. Then a few recessions back, companies started laying off people for good, never rehiring them even when the economy recovered. In the Great Recession of 2008-2009, companies are going a step further. They’re using this sharp downturn to cut payrolls even below where they were when times were good. Outsourcing abroad, setting up shop in China and elsewhere, contracting out, replacing people with software and automated machines – they're doing whatever it takes to get payrolls down so earnings bounce up.---

President Obama says he wants to "rebalance" the economic relationship between China and the U.S. as part of his plan to restart the American jobs machine. "We cannot go back," he said in September, "to an era where the Chinese . . . just are selling everything to us, we're taking out a bunch of credit-card debt or home equity loans, but we're not selling anything to them." He hopes that hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers will make up for the inability of American consumers to return to debt-binge spending. This is wishful thinking. True, the Chinese market is huge and growing fast. By 2009, China was second only to the U.S. in computer sales, with a larger proportion of first-time buyers. It already had more cell-phone users. And excluding SUVs, last year Chinese consumers bought as many cars as Americans (as recently as 2006, Americans bought twice as many). Even as the U.S. government was bailing out General Motors and Chrysler, the two firms' sales in China were soaring; GM's sales there are almost 50% higher this year than last. Proctor & Gamble is so well-established in China that many Chinese think its products (such as green-tea-flavored Crest toothpaste) are Chinese brands.

How about a program modeled on the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression only with a more specific focus: converting our power grid to clean energy to break the backs of oil and power companies that blackmail our economy, and in the case of oil, demand our tax dollars and the lives of our troops to increase their assets?

"Mr. Obama announced this week that he would convene a jobs summit at the White House next month to explore ways of putting Americans back to work. It remains to be seen whether the summit will yield anything substantial. But it’s fair to wonder why the president and his party have not been focused like fanatics on job creation from the first day he took office."

Consider, for a moment, a tale of two countries: the United States, where stocks are up, G.D.P. is rising, but the terrible employment situation just keeps getting worse; and Germany, which took a hit to its G.D.P. when world trade collapsed, but has been remarkably successful at avoiding mass job losses. Here in America, we don’t really have a jobs policy: we have a G.D.P. policy -- that by stimulating overall spending we can make G.D.P. grow faster, and this will induce companies to stop firing and resume hiring. The alternative would be policies that address the job issue more directly [like] New-Deal-style employment programs -- perhaps politically impossible now. Alternatively, or in addition, we could have policies that support private-sector employment. And that’s what the Germans have done. Since [a large enough conventional stimulus] doesn’t seem to be in the cards, we need to talk about cheaper alternatives that address the job problem directly: an employment tax credit; the German-style job-sharing subsidy. The point is that we need to start doing something more than, and different from, what we’re already doing. And the experience of other countries suggests that it’s time for a policy that explicitly and directly targets job creation.

Having suppressed wages for decades, now employers are suppressing jobs. Workers are not only making do with less -- they're working harder than ever, and there are no new hires, because fewer people seem to get the job done just fine. In fact they're productivity's up. And the personal costs are off the books. Call me crazy, but the spoils are pretty nifty: fewer workers, lower wages, a more terrified workforce. From a winners' point of view, what's not to like? The proof of no peace is in the fact that the president and congress keep talking about recovery and jobs bouncing back...but there's no real structural change on the table, no new economic tools, no regulation -- certainly no reparations -- in sight. The losers are weak and the winners are stronger than ever.

Absent public job creation, it is likely that the economy will not fully recover. The official unemployment rate stands at 9.8 percent. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics acknowledges that the adjusted unemployment rate -- including part-timers looking for full-time work, and those who don’t look for work because they don’t think work is out there -- is as high as 17 percent. This means that one in six Americans does not have a job. Among certain subgroups -- notably older Americans and blacks -- the unemployment rate exceeds Depression-era unemployment.

Wars reduce the GDP, destroy jobs, reduce productively, and increase the trade deficit! If wars are 'bad' for the economy, then how are they sold so easily? The quick response: they are sold with focus group tested bullshit!

Remember those Republican boasts that they would turn health care into President Obama’s Waterloo? Well, exit polls suggest that to the extent that health care was an issue in Tuesday’s elections, it worked in Democrats’ favor. But while health care won’t be Mr. Obama’s Waterloo, economic policy is starting to look like his Anzio. There was a national element to the election. Voters across America are in a bad mood, largely because of the still-grim economic situation. This bodes ill for the Democrats in the midterm elections next year — not because voters will reject their agenda, but because all indications are that a year from now unemployment will still be painfully high. Which brings me to the Anzio analogy.The World War II battle of Anzio was a classic example of the perils of being too cautious. The stimulus bill fell far short of what many economists considered appropriate. And more is needed. Yes, the economy grew fairly fast in the third quarter — but not fast enough to make significant progress on jobs. If the Democrats lose badly in the midterms, the talking heads will say that Mr. Obama tried to do too much, this is a center-right nation, and so on. But the truth is that Mr. Obama put his agenda at risk by doing too little. The fateful decision, early this year, to go for economic half-measures may haunt Democrats for years to come.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) promised to pump millions into projects promoting green jobs and energy efficiency. Though much of the money has yet to be spent (only 12 percent of the money allocated has been used), early projects are demonstrating the returns that green investments will have. Take the City of Portland’s Clean Energy Works program, whose goal is to retrofit Portland homes to be more energy efficient while creating green jobs and raising home values. In the next two years, 500 homes will be retrofitted—part of a pilot program that, pending approval by the state government in Salem, will expand to cover 100,000 homes.---