The leaders of Wall Street and big business may now have to wake up to a reality they've tried to avoid telling our leaders in Washington -- that the central economic problem of our time isn't the long-term budget deficit but the immediate deficit in aggregate demand.

The May jobs report is a disaster -- the weakest reading since September. The recovery has stalled. And while we're not in a double-dip recession yet, the odds of it are increasing.

According to JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, the recovery has stalled because of strict banking regulation. I'm not making this up.

President Obama's putative embrace of the false notion that businesses need more financial incentives in order to hire risks giving legitimacy to the same supply-side economic approach that has failed for the past thirty years.

The real economy is catching up with the financial economy, as it always does. Wall Street is built on smoke and mirrors, while the real economy is based on jobs and wages.

If the choice for salvaging the American economy is between Republican snake oil and the puff ball proposals of the president's CEO-laden jobs council, America will be in deeper and deeper trouble. And so will the president.

The ongoing war on workers' rights is an assault on the middle class, and it is undermining the American economy. The American economy can't get out of neutral until American workers have more money in their pockets to buy what they produce.