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Obama Economic Plan: Create Made-in-America Jobs |
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President-elect Barack Obama today laid out some of the details of his economic recovery plan. While the current President focuses on giving the Medal of Freedom to the leader of a country that has the highest number of trade union murders in the world and on spending nearly $600,000 on new china for the White House days before leaving office, Obama is moving to clean up the Bush economic mess. Giving the Democratic radio address this morning, Obama said:
Our first job is to put people back to work and get our economy working again. This is an extraordinary challenge.
Obama said his plan was in part crafted by economist Jared Bernstein, an ally of the labor movement at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and now economic advisor to Vice President-elect Joe Biden.
We’ll create nearly half a million jobs by investing in clean energy–by committing to double the production of alternative energy in the next three years, and by modernizing more than 75 percent of federal buildings and improving the energy efficiency of two million American homes. These made-in-America jobs building solar panels and wind turbines, developing fuel-efficient cars and new energy technologies pay well, and they can’t be outsourced.
“Made-in-America jobs.” What sweet words after eight years of an administration bent on giving endless corporate incentives to move U.S. jobs overseas. Here’s more from Obama’s radio address:
- Put nearly 400,000 people to work by repairing our infrastructure–our crumbling roads, bridges and schools.
- Build the new infrastructure we need to succeed in this century, investing in science and technology, and laying down miles of new broadband lines so that businesses across our nation can compete with their counterparts around the world.
- Work to achieve bipartisan extensions of unemployment insurance and health care coverage; a $1,000 tax cut for 95 percent of working families; and assistance to help states avoid harmful budget cuts in essential services like police, fire, education and health care.
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The high cost of fuel this past year did serious damage to our economy and society. After a brief reprieve gas prices are inching back up again. Our nation should not allow other nations to have such power over us and our economy . We have so much available to us in the way of technology and free sources of energy. WE seriously need to get on with becoming an energy independent nation. We are spending billions upon billions in bail out dollars. Why not spend some of those billions in getting alternative energy projects set up. We could create clean cheap energy, millions of badly needed new green jobs and lessen our dependence on foreign oil all in one fell swoop. I just read an eye opening book by Jeff Wilson called The Manhattan Project of 2009. It would cost the equivalent of 60 cents per gallon to drive and charge an electric car.If all gasoline cars, trucks, and SUV’s instead had plug-in electric drive trains, the amount of electricity needed to replace gasoline is about equal to the estimated wind energy potential of the state of North Dakota. Why don’t we use some of the billions in bail out money to bail us out of our dependence on foreign oil? This past year the high cost of fuel so seriously damaged our economy and society that the ripple effects will be felt for years to come. http://www.themanhattanprojectof2009.com
Building Bridges: Your Community and Labor Report
National Edition
Produced by Ken Nash and Mimi Rosenberg
******************************
Rethinking the Infrastructure Stimulus
with
Stanley Aronowitz, Prof. of sociology, cultural studies,
& urban education, CUNY Graduate Center, NYC
Prof. Aronowitz instructs that the economic crisis is buried
deep within the structure of capitalism and that that even
traditional stimulus packages leave much to desire. There is
common agreement in the liberal community that tax rebates
are ineffective, but Aronowitz also urges us to also consider
that outsourcing infrastructure to the private sector that can
be done directly by government wastes valuable resources in
private sector profits and that labor intensive investment also
produces more jobs for the buck.
********************************************
A Secretary for Labor?
with
Thea Lee, Director of Policy, AFL-CIO
Jubilant is the word that comes to mind for the reaction of the
labor community to the selection by President Elect Barack
Obama of Rep. Hilda Solis to become the new Secretary of
Labor. The daughter of immigrants, from a union family,
Representative Solis has been described as having a resume
a mile long concerning the rights of workers, women, and the
environment.To provide us with greater insight about that the
new Labor Secretary and the work cut out for her, protecting,
and extending workers rights in the economy, stopping the
hemorrhaging jobs, and growing the economy we’re joined by
Thea Lee, Director of Policy of the AFL-CIO
.**************************************
To Download or listen to this 27:59 minute program,
go to
http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/31086
or
http://www.archive.org/details/BuildingBridgesNationalRethinkingInfrastructureStimulusASecretaryFor
for more information contact Ken Nash - knash@igc.org
Building Bridges is regularly broadcast live over WBAI,
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A Sustainable US Economic Plan
Sustainable Land Development: Building a Bridge to a New Global Culture
http://www.sldtonline.com/content/view/580/1/
Amid all the bad news and demands being placed on the President-elect Obama transition team, Sustainable Land Development International (SLDI) offers a reason to hope for the future by formally submitting its offer of assistance to help boost the team’s economic recovery plan and policy agenda – and save the country billions in the process - http://www.sldi.org/Pressreleases/pressrelease122308.html
SLDI, a developer-led and cooperatively-owned technology and information resource association, is now fully positioned to transform the industry that creates the very infrastructure of our civilization. Sustainable development starts with our global infrastructure. If it is unsustainable, ultimately nothing else can be. Featured products and services include green building technology, clean energy technology, ecosystem restoration, carbon sequestration technology, soil enhancement technology, water purification and retention technology, sustainable land development best practices systems and certification programs.
Your participation and comments are welcome.
Terry Mock
Executive Director
Sustainable Land Development International
http://www.SLDI.org
http://www.SLDTonline.com
http://www.SURmag.com
http://www.LDBreakthroughs.com
SLDI Newsletter - http://www.sldi.org/newService/SLDIJan2009.html
Promoting and enabling land development worldwide that balances the needs of people, planet & profit - for today and future generations.
Words are cheap. Lying and deceptive words are typical when spoken by an experienced politician such as Obama.
Obama, a Harvard educated lawyer trained in argument and rhetoric, is being put to good use. Obama is the “happy face” facade to deflect the increasing outrage of working people. We are all being impoverished and destroyed by the war and economic policies that forever enrich Wall Street, bankers, corporate executives, military contractors, and the wealthiest ruling elite at the expense of public education, public health, and living standards of the people.
The disasterous foreign and domestic policies blamed on Bush, but actually supported by both Democratic and Republican parties, are to be continued under Obama.
Obama’s stimulus plan: Another windfall for big business
9 January 2009
Barry Grey
:In his first major policy speech since winning the presidential election, Barack Obama on Thursday pushed for speedy passage of his economic stimulus plan, painting a dire picture of the consequences should it fail to be rapidly implemented.”
…
“On the contrary, Obama’s proposed solution—the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan—will allocate hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds, the bulk of which will flow into the coffers of the very banks and corporations that reaped massive profits from the policies that precipitated the crash of 2008.
…
The “recovery” Obama envisages will, in fact, do little to relieve the distress and suffering of working class families.,,,,
….
In other words, even if Obama’s plan is enacted immediately and in full, unemployment will continue to soar for the foreseeable future.
..
There is no way out of the social disaster that is enveloping working people within the framework of the existing economic and political system. The economic crisis in the US is part of a global failure of the capitalist system. The only answer is a socialist program, including the nationalization of the major corporations and banks and their transformation into public institutions under the democratic control of the working class. The control and management of the economy must be taken out of private hands so that economic life can be organized and developed to meet social needs, not private profit.”
(Read the entire article here:)
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/pers-j09.shtml
Re: “Stimulus Package” - an article by Paul Krugman
January 6, 2009, 9:26 am
Stimulus arithmetic (wonkish but important)
Bit by bit we’re getting information on the Obama stimulus plan, enough to start making back-of-the-envelope estimates of impact. The bottom line is this: we’re probably looking at a plan that will shave less than 2 percentage points off the average unemployment rate for the next two years, and possibly quite a lot less. This raises real concerns about whether the incoming administration is lowballing its plans in an attempt to get bipartisan consensus.
In the extended entry, a look at my calculations.
The starting point for this discussion is Okun’s Law, the relationship between changes in real GDP and changes in the unemployment rate. Estimates of the Okun’s Law coefficient range from 2 to 3. I’ll use 2, which is an optimistic estimate for current purposes: it says that you have to raise real GDP by 2 percent from what it would otherwise have been to reduce the unemployment rate 1 percentage point from what it would otherwise have been. Since GDP is roughly $15 trillion, this means that you have to raise GDP by $300 billion per year to reduce unemployment by 1 percentage point.
Now, what we’re hearing about the Obama plan is that it calls for $775 billion over two years, with $300 billion in tax cuts and the rest in spending. Call that $150 billion per year in tax cuts, $240 billion each year in spending.
How much do tax cuts and spending raise GDP? The widely cited estimates of Mark Zandi of Economy.com indicate a multiplier of around 1.5 for spending, with widely varying estimates for tax cuts. Payroll tax cuts, which make up about half the Obama proposal, are pretty good, with a multiplier of 1.29; business tax cuts, which make up the rest, are much less effective.
In particular, letting businesses get refunds on past taxes based on current losses, which is reportedly a key feature of the plan, looks an awful lot like a lump-sum transfer with no incentive effects.
Let’s be generous and assume that the overall multiplier on tax cuts is 1. Then the per-year effect of the plan on GDP is 150 x 1 + 240 x 1.5 = $510 billion. Since it takes $300 billion to reduce the unemployment rate by 1 percentage point, this is shaving 1.7 points off what unemployment would otherwise have been.
Finally, compare this with the economic outlook. “Full employment” clearly means an unemployment rate near 5 — the CBO says 5.2 for the NAIRU, which seems high to me. Unemployment is currently about 7 percent, and heading much higher; Obama himself says that absent stimulus it could go into double digits. Suppose that we’re looking at an economy that, absent stimulus, would have an average unemployment rate of 9 percent over the next two years; this plan would cut that to 7.3 percent, which would be a help but could easily be spun by critics as a failure.
And that gets us to politics. This really does look like a plan that falls well short of what advocates of strong stimulus were hoping for — and it seems as if that was done in order to win Republican votes. Yet even if the plan gets the hoped-for 80 votes in the Senate, which seems doubtful, responsibility for the plan’s perceived failure, if it’s spun that way, will be placed on Democrats.
I see the following scenario: a weak stimulus plan, perhaps even weaker than what we’re talking about now, is crafted to win those extra GOP votes. The plan limits the rise in unemployment, but things are still pretty bad, with the rate peaking at something like 9 percent and coming down only slowly. And then Mitch McConnell says “See, government spending doesn’t work.”
Let’s hope I’ve got this wrong.
Comment: Do Main Street Americans really care whether or not an effective stimulus package passes in the Senate with 80 votes, or by one vote? Of course not! Same for the House.
A threatened GOP filibuster if the Party of the Corporatists does not succeed in getting gifts to its benefactors included in the package means what to you and me? Let them filibuster! Filibusters eventually end. Poverty and unemployment, however, both pose disastrous consequences for those of us who actually turn the wheels in our nation.
Flood the offices of Congress with messages demanding a bold, innovative, sufficiently-large stimulus package - one that will provide sorely needed relief to working class America.
We voted for CHANGE! Let’s don’t let anyone invalidate our votes with GOP or Blue Dog Democrat business as usual pandering to the already rich and powerful.
It’s our time for economic and social justice. Seize the moment! It may not pass this way again for eons!
Labor should take the lead in this struggle. Weak-kneed compromises will only exacerbate the problem!
Americans need to be hired for all of these so-called new jobs Obama plans to create! Every step possible needs to be taken so that illegal aliens and any non-american person will not be hired. What is the wage scare for these jobs–that is what I am curious about! Also, about giving employers $3,000 tax credit for each new job–will there be some kind of guideline–like the jobs have to be full-time–at least 40 hours a week! wages, wages, wages! Surely minimum wage, sub-poverty jobs won’t count, right? The minimum wage to be increased substantially needs to be addressed NOW also!!!!!