To: President Obama
From: The Looting of America
Re: Speech you should give to prevent a Republican sweep next fall.
"My fellow-Americans,
We face a true national emergency. More than 30 million Americans are without jobs or are working part-time because there are no full-time jobs to be found. The official 10.2 percent unemployment rate hides the true extent of the problem. The real jobless rate is at least 17.5 percent, the highest since the Great Depression. This is unacceptable. No nation and no President can allow this to continue.
After one year on the job, I had hoped my economic program would have put more people to work. Obviously, it hasn't done nearly enough. Yes, the stock market is up, GDP is growing and Wall Street is making record profits again. But the only true measure of economic health is employment. Our people are truly hurting.
Therefore, I am proposing the following emergency actions:
First, I am creating a National Teachers' Corps that will add one million new teachers by September 1. Each job will cost us about $50,000 so the total bill is $50 billion for this badly needed program. We will target these jobs for recent college graduates who are unemployed. I'm sure that our school districts will find room for them immediately.
Second, I call for a Charitable Non-Profit Jobs Creation Program to provide each non-profit organization in this country with a $100,000 grant if they hire two new employees within the next two months. We have approximately 500,000 charitable non-profits so this program would create 1 million jobs for $50 billion. Charitable non-profits will have no problem creating these badly needed positions.
Third, I will create an Energy Civilian Conservation Corps to weatherize every business and home in the country. Because these jobs would require additional supplies they are more costly: For 500,000 jobs it will cost $50 billion. However, this program is financially sensible in face of rising oil prices and the costs of ongoing global warming.
These three programs would put 2.5 million of our unemployed to work in a matter of months at a cost of $150 billion. And this doesn't include the multiplier effect that would follow and would lead to another million jobs as the newly employed earn and spend their incomes.
But how do we pay for it?
I know you are worried about debts and deficits. You don't want us to become even more indebted to foreign powers. Nor do you want us to pass on these debts to our children. And you do not want to see your taxes rise, either. Neither do I.
But some of us are much more able to afford to contribute. Those of us who have made hundreds of millions of dollars, even billions, have more than enough to repay this great nation for all that it has provided. This is the time for those with phenomenal wealth to help put America back to work.
Therefore I propose:
It is time to put our people to work. No more trickle-down. No more billionaire bailouts. We need real jobs, right now and this emergency plan will do it.
The era of "greed is good" must end. This is the time for shared sacrifice toward shared gain. This is the time to pull together for the common good. Let us join together to put America back to work."
Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It, Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.
Follow Les Leopold on Twitter: www.twitter.com/les_leopold
Further, I'd add that all for-profit corporations should now have to disclose all their finances with the transparancey all nonprofits must do in order to maintain their tax exempt status. The saying is sunlight is the best disinfectant.
The wing-nuts decrying every government program as socialist, communist, fascism is pure lunacy. But then again so is actually instituting socialism to save capitalism.
Do not assume that those who are rich got that way because people wanted what they are selling. Many got rich because they had the power to steal the increased economic productivity of the past 20 years from workers.
Earnings have not gone into the pockets of those who earned it. Perhaps you should think of those increased taxes not as stealing, but as a return of earnings to the people who actually earned them.
We espouse keeping every dollar one makes as "earned",
cutting peoples wages below the level of the living standard,
tax breaks for the extremely wealthy,
bailout money for the incredibly wealthy,
lower taxes for the rich and increases on everyone else,
lending money to banks at 0% interest,
credit card rates of 30%,
a phony housing bubble where the Fed inflated the value of housing to create imaginary economy because Bush couldn't create a job if he wanted to,
borrowed against it with China and now the worth of your home is the equity you took out of it and so is the American economy
Any company can overcharge for their services (banks, telecom, health, education...) because it can sell the overpriced commodity because we are a nation of chiselers who believe we are entitled to huge tax breaks from the government when things go bad for their business, ships jobs over seas, hide earnings in tax shelters off shore and repeatedly cut back on the nature of those services while ever increasing their costs.
The biggest chiseler of all:
Goldman Sachs, people who sit around all day crunching numbers but basically figuring out how to pay themselves more for what little value they provide in return. Much like the presidency of George
Bush, another big chiseler.
We have polls that come out, seemingly, on a weekly basis used by the (media) as barometer to judge people's assessment of the president's job, when their (the people) primary source of information is from that same (media) that is only interested in conflict (the "enzyme" by which it lives and thrives) And then, they (the media) have the gall to recyle their contaminated info back to the people as if the polls represented the body politic's "sound judgement"!
Give me a break!!!
Tax companies a high penalty tax for outsourcing jobs. Along the same lines of what Joseph Joyal said below regarding NAFTA and GM making their cars here. Do that for outsourced engineers, programmers, QA, help desk personnel, etc.
If those companies wish to leave America, fine. Give tax breaks and help with SBA loans for those companies IN America that get started and take their place. They too, however, would be taxed a high penalty if they outsource jobs.
I bet you there will be people who would be willing to work within this system.
Obama has worked to protect the Goldman at the expense of the current majority (for what that's worth) and his second term.
Sad.
Southerners WANT A FEDERAL JOBS BILL.
Democrats are DOOMED unless this gets going NOW!
1. Strike one continued TARP. Yes really Virginia the banks will start lending when we pay all of them off.
2. Strike two stimulus. Yes Virginia 2 + 2 equals a bazillion jobs saved (oops on the 10.2% unemployment).
3. Strike three H1N1. Yes Virginia H1N1 is a national emergency and you have to be vaccinated, but you can't because the Government messed up.
You're out!
The crisis just prior to the election was a chance to steal money. It was a heist.
If, there are no jobs except for those going to war, that is a pretty pathetic place for the country and seems to be the direction in which we are headed. Trillions of dollars are being wasted on these endless wars and no one says anything. Eventually, the greed of this will sink the Empire.
He continues to 'coquette' with Goldman and the rest-
Thus far he has shown no leadership in the style of an FDR, Truman, Kennedy or Johnson.
Obama needs to show an FDR like determination and ebullience- his manner is too subtle and washed out to make any kind of impact on many.
The proposals Les makes are great ones, and one Obama should be following through on...I am deeply cynical about him even considering such intelligent and necessary solutions...
Les is right that Obama might as well just turn over the Congress to the Republicans if the job market continues to struggle...yes, I know, it takes some time for jobs to come back...but the American people are an impatient lot, and their tolerance for waiting is not too good right now.