The Three Words That Define 2012: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

At the end of the day, in most years, Americans are pragmatists. I say most years because it's not always certain that pragmatists win the day. For example, one definition of a pragmatist is that if something doesn't work, you try something else. A classic example in the last thirty years is trickle down economics, which argues that if you give more money to the rich, they'll create more jobs. Reagan tried trickle down economics in the 1980s. No matter what you think of Reagan, trickle down doesn't work. It never has. But, for some reason, Republicans keep trying it. They try trickle down economics this way, that way and every which way—and it still doesn't work.

Whoever becomes the Republican nominee is virtually guaranteed to try trickle down economics if elected. Cutting taxes and doing cute favors for the wealthiest Americans is more important to Republican politicians and lobbyists in Washington than creating jobs. That is a fact. One only has to look at their record. No doubt business as usual Republicans will put a good spin on it and tell a good story but it'll be trickle down economics. Trickle down sounds a lot better than what Republican economics really is: protecting the wealthiest Americans at all costs, regardless of how much it hurts our country, our democracy and millions of our fellow Americans.

Of course, there have always been four kinds of wealthy people: the kind who really know what they're doing (Jobs, Gates), the kind who inherit wealth (Paris Hilton as well as oil, lumber and tobacco heirs), the kind who are basically crooks in business suits surrounded by lawyers (Michael Milken and Bernie Madoff), or those who sort of stumble into it (Sarah Palin and any number of failed CEOs given golden parachutes of millions of dollars despite a dismal bottom line). Keep in mind that the first kind knows how to make money and doesn't need help creating wealth. And keep in mind that most wealthy people of the other three types usually don't help the economy much.

There's also a special fifth category that achieves wealth initially through the other routes mentioned but that guarantee wealth for themselves and their heirs through any number of devices that can only be defined as protecting privilege. They pay a lot of money to state legislatures and Congress to guarantee their wealth, and year after year the payoffs for their "investments" are lucrative. As just one example, one of the most lucrative scams during the Bush years was very low taxes on stock market, real estate and commodities speculations. Sorry, but speculation, to a large extent, is simply a legal way of skimming billions of dollars from tens of millions of Americans without actually producing healthy economic activity. (There is some need for prices to find their level but the massive gyrations of the markets have become a hindrance rather than a help to the economy. Count me in as one of those who think all such transaction should include a very modest tax).

Does anyone really doubt that Republicans are dominated by the 1%? Does anyone doubt that the 99% (which include tens of millions of ordinary Democrats, Republicans and independents) has legitimate reasons to be concerned about a power structure in this country that leaves so many people behind? Look, there are many responsible people among the 1%. We all know that. As some commentators point out, we're often talking about the .1% and generally those who abuse our economy to enrich themselves in ways that are unhealthy and unsustainable in the long term.

One of the things I personally have disliked over the last twenty years is the idea that many businesses seem to have that I am just a consumer, a human cow to be milked, bled and sometimes skewered. But I'm not a consumer. I'm an American. I'm sure millions of people feel the same way.

I know, I know, "consumer" is a word that sometimes has to be used in economics to explain how things work. I accept that on a certain level. But the politicians, aggressive sales people and the bottom line corporate takeover artists make a huge mistake of forgetting that consumers are Americans. People who lose their homes or jobs because of big biz financial shenanigans are usually decent people who have been treated as if they don't exist. Nothing is more disgusting to me than a corporation that buys a company with a good reputation and bleeds every dime out of that corporation and forgets the consumers, employees and the community and then, to add insult to injury, sells a product no longer worthy of the company's reputation. That is not the kind of capitalism that made America great.

Nick Hanauer is technically a member of the 1% and has written an article suggesting that taxes need to be raised to ensure that consumers, the real job creators, have money to spend:

Since 1980, the share of the nation’s income for fat cats like me in the top 0.1 percent has increased a shocking 400 percent, while the share for the bottom 50 percent of Americans has declined 33 percent.

(snip)

[But]...there can never be enough superrich Americans to power a great economy. The annual earnings of people like me are hundreds, if not thousands, of times greater than those of the average American, but we don’t buy hundreds or thousands of times more stuff. My family owns three cars, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men.

(snip)

If the average American family still got the same share of income they earned in 1980, they would have an astounding $13,000 more in their pockets a year. It’s worth pausing to consider what our economy would be like today if middle-class consumers had that additional income to spend.

Raising taxes on wealthy Americans is only one step that needs to be taken. Much will have to happen to move our country in the right direction. Americans are unlikely to have that extra $13,000 any time soon. Mistakes have been made. Not enough has been spent on scientific research, one of the key activities that has always stimulated our economy. Not enough has been done to fix bridges, streets, hospitals and schools. Too many jobs have been sent overseas.

In the end, what Americans need are more jobs, not more budget cuts that do nothing more than cut jobs. For two years, Republicans have been complaining about the economy and for two years they have hardly lifted a finger to create jobs. Not in Washington. And not in state capital after state capital. Already, at the election approaches, Republican politicians, Republican pundits and even Republican think tanks are changing their rhetoric to tell Americans what they want to hear. But keep in mind that to date the only thing Republicans have done is cut jobs and ignore the poor and even the middle class. The recession started in early 2007. Where have the Republicans been? At least Democrats have been trying. They would have accomplished a great deal more if not for Republican obstructionists in Washington and in state capitals.

Nick Hanauer is a member of the 1% but not exactly in the sense that has been discussed in recent weeks. The 1% (or .01%) that everybody is talking about are people like Mitt Romney (who's comfortable making $10,000 bets) and Newt Gingrich (who pretends he's not a lobbyist). One was born into the 1% and is making it clearer day by day what his values really are. And the other became wealthy by shilling for the 1% for the last 30 years.

At the end of the day, we need to reelect President Obama and put more Democrats in Washington. But we also need two parties in this country. The Republicans in the GOP leadership need to become pragmatic again.

Fossilized Leaders Mislead Americans About Fossil Fuels

Most Republican leaders and a few wayward Democrats fail to recognize several straightforward facts:

1. Fossil fuels are no longer cheap.

2. Besides fossil fuels no longer being cheap, if we take away subsidies from fossil fuels, Americans would really feel the cost.

3. But it gets worse. If we include the total costs of the damage that fossil fuel development and burning has on our country, and also the planet, the real cost of fossil fuels is in fact prohibitive. Our children and grandchildren will be paying the costs for generations to feed today's dangerous hunger for high profits by the fat cats in the fossil fuel industry.

4. If the United States began tomorrow on a massive alternative energy program, it would probably be decades before the United States would stop producing coal, natural gas, and oil. Why? Because it will take time to build up the alternative energy infrastructure. It takes time to build the factories, hire the people, train them as the technology changes, mine rare earth metals essential to alternative energy and again hire the people who will do the mining.

5. Jobs in the fossil fuel industries will take years to disappear. Why? Because as alternative energy grows, the jobs that will be lost are not the ones here at home but the ones overseas. The first thing that alternative energy will do is make the U.S. more energy secure and less dependent on the volatile politics of international oil.

6. And this is the most important: while fossil fuels are becoming more expensive, alternative energy is becoming less expensive.

Mary of The Left Coaster points out that high technology companies are increasingly turning to alternative energy. The trend towards alternative energy, despite the political fossils in Washington, is underway.

Paul Krugman in a recent column in The New York Times points out that that the costs of alternative is dropping. It's economics folks. It's capitalism the way its supposed to work.

For all the noise that Republicans make on Fox News, on the Rush Limbaugh comedy hour, and in Congress, they no longer much care about the kind of capitalism that made America great. Keep in mind this isn't the first time our country has lost its way. We lost our way in the 1890s and we lost our way at the end of the 1920s. When capitalism no longer works for a majority of Americans, something has gone very wrong.

Republicans, the ones who run the Republican Party, are the party of bankers and the wealthy. They have lost sight of why Americans usually like capitalism. Usually, and it certainly hasn't happened lately, capitalism is at its best when people pay less and less for more. Lately, for perhaps 30 years, or more, Americans have been paying more and more for less. Capitalism as today's conservative Republicans define it has failed.

Think of it: the cost of alternative energy is generally falling. Solar panels are cheaper. Windmills are cheaper. Batteries are cheaper. The price of alternative energy will continue to fall for many years to come. That's capitalism at its best. But the cost of most of other things, the real cost, including fossil fuels, are climbing—and the money that pours into the pockets of the top 1% gets larger and larger while jobs get sent to foreign countries. That is not capitalism at its best. If our democracy is to remain relevant, Washington needs to focus a great deal less on the privileges and wealth of the top 1%, and a great deal more on the creation of more jobs, productive jobs, jobs that ensure a future for a large majority of Americans.

Tea Party Tories vs. Republican Pragmatists

The Plain Dealer carries a Washington Post article that briefly mentions one of the most despicable acts I've ever seen by the U.S. House of Representatives:

The Republican-controlled House voted Tuesday night to slice federal spending by $6 trillion and require a constitutional balanced budget amendment to be sent to the states in exchange for averting a threatened Aug. 2 government default.

The 234-190 vote marked the power of deeply conservative first-term Republicans...

In Washington, there are very few Republican pragmatists left. Over the years, I have often disagreed with Republican pragmatists, but—this has to be said bluntly—at least they're not nuts like the tea party Tories. Of course, there are different kinds of Republican pragmatists. Some are moderates, some are conservative. But they're not totally nuts.

There were conservative pragmatists during the Reagan era who listened to the conservative radicals of the era but refused to throw millions of poor and middle class Americans under the bus. The conservative pragmatists did damage but at least the damage was limited.

There were moderate Republican pragmatists during the 1960s. Some of them were courageous. Despite putting rules in place for this and limitations on that, they helped pass important legislation of the era that ultimately benefited a large majority of Americans.

For those of us who were paying attention, there were certainly radical conservatives in the 1960s who were totally nuts. Some followed an angry George Wallace. Some were members of the ridiculous and much caricatured John Birch Society (I have previously written how John Birch members would hand out dimes on Halloween along with right wing leaflets for children to give their parents).

To repeat the above, on July 19th, 2011, the nuttiness of the tea party Tories manifested itself in a vote in the House to cut the US budget by $6,000,000,000,000. Pardon the zeroes, but to simplify, and repeat once more, that's $6 trillion dollars 'trimmed' from the US budget. Right wing Republicans in recent years have found all kinds of cute ways to make something unreasonable sound just fine. Cutting $6 trillion is not fine. There are two issues here. The first one, which is actually the more critical issue in the long run, is that such a budget cut would increase the power of the super wealthy and decrease the power and well being of everyone else. It would continue the erosion of democracy that we have seen in the last ten years.

The second issue is the one that hits home if voters bother to think about it. Cutting the budget that severely means putting a lot of people out of work.

If you don't have money for teachers, you put a lot of teachers out of work.

If you don't have money for law enforcement, you put a lot of police officers, agents and investigators out of work.

If you don't have money for fire trucks and overtime during fire season, that's a lot of fire fighters out of work and lot of property destruction.

If you don't have money for highways, you put a lot of highway workers out of work and you pay a lot of money and repairs for tires and vehicles.

If you don't have money for research, you put scientists and engineers out of work who are needed to make the US competitive.

If you cut down the number of people in the military, you put tens of thousands of soldiers on the street without a job because the budget for helping them get the necessary education, health care and housing is too pitiful to do them much good, since all of the above people would also be out of work.

Since early 2007, when Bush was still president and failing to mind the store as banks and financiers ran amuck, most Americans have experienced economic troubles that our country has not experienced since the 1930s. Those troubles will continue if Republicans keep cutting jobs at the state and federal level. Private industry cannot absorb the number of people who would be out of work if the tea party Tories at the state and national level continue to have their way.

In the end, the tea party folks are phonies. They have far more in common with Kenneth Lay, Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump than they do with average Americans. The tea party folks don't care about you and I. They care about the wealthy, the privileged, and the well-connected. Real American patriots in 1776 were fighting against the rigged and gamed system that the British Tories were pulling on Americans with the substantial help of George III. A rigged and gamed system is exactly what tea party Republicans want more of.

The Senate, with the help of the White House, appears to be leading the way to a less onerous bill (with a crucial nod from some pragmatic Republicans), though that bill is not likely to help us move forward through what is likely to be a difficult period in the next few years. But it is preferable to the bill tea party radicals want to pass. 'Preferable,' but largely useless in terms of what our country needs.

In the end, thanks to the tantrums of the tea party radicals, we're in trouble. There is no way for our economy to continue to move forward without serious attention to our infrastructure and considerable reform of business as usual.

Tea party folks are business as usual Republicans. They make noise, but at the end of the day, they shovel billions into the pockets of those who need it the least and those who continue to ship American jobs to other countries such as China. We cannot solve our economic future by leaving it to corporations that make useless toys, finance costly scams, or treat Americans as easily manipulated cash cows, while leaving millions of people out of work.

Under Bush, Economic Inequality Growing

George W. Bush and his Republican friends are the real elitists of the political world: there is nothing they won't do for their very wealthy contributors and their entourage.

Paul Krugman normally writes in The New York Times but he has an article in The Rolling Stone that is a clear, concise description of how Republicans over the years, and particularly under Bush, have turned their backs on America's middle class (Republicans, as a rule, have ignored poor Americans for generations):

... The reason most Americans think the economy is fair to poor is simple: For most Americans, it really is fair to poor. Wages have failed to keep up with rising prices. Even in 2005, a year in which the economy grew quite fast, the income of most non-elderly families lagged behind inflation. The number of Americans in poverty has risen even in the face of an official economic recovery, as has the number of Americans without health insurance. Most Americans are little, if any, better off than they were last year and definitely worse off than they were in 2000.

But how is this possible? The economic pie is getting bigger -- how can it be true that most Americans are getting smaller slices? The answer, of course, is that a few people are getting much, much bigger slices. Although wages have stagnated since Bush took office, corporate profits have doubled. The gap between the nation's CEOs and average workers is now ten times greater than it was a generation ago. And while Bush's tax cuts shaved only a few hundred dollars off the tax bills of most Americans, they saved the richest one percent more than $44,000 on average. In fact, once all of Bush's tax cuts take effect, it is estimated that those with incomes of more than $200,000 a year -- the richest five percent of the population -- will pocket almost half of the money. Those who make less than $75,000 a year -- eighty percent of America -- will receive barely a quarter of the cuts. In the Bush era, economic inequality is on the rise.

(snip)

America has never been an egalitarian society, but during the New Deal and the Second World War, government policies and organized labor combined to create a broad and solid middle class. The economic historians Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo call what happened between 1933 and 1945 the Great Compression: The rich got dramatically poorer while workers got considerably richer. Americans found themselves sharing broadly similar lifestyles in a way not seen since before the Civil War.

But in the 1970s, inequality began increasing again -- slowly at first, then more and more rapidly. ...

A democracy like America belongs to everyone. The United States and our government is not the property of the very wealthy. For almost thirty years,we have seen an economic con job that makes life harder and harder for average Americans despite a growing economy. As Republicans have drifted farther and farther to the right, the real strength of our country, a broad middle class, is growing more stressed. It's time to think more clearly about where our nation is going.

The Environment: If We Value It, the Jobs Will Come

Given how much our economy depends on energy, the more energy we buy from other countries, particularly in the form of oil, the less good it does our country. Of course, our economy is so large, we can't completely avoid buying energy for some time to come (from Canada, for example), but we need to understand that the more energy we buy from others, the more jobs it takes away from Americans.

And it adds an additional burden to us when a considerable amount of the money we spend on energy goes overseas and eventually ends up being spent by others for things that are not in our interest. Finally, the more oil we buy, the more it puts our environment at risk.

The greatest opportunity for creating our own energy is right here at home. We can create a considerable amount of energy through such things as windpower and solar cells. But the biggest improvement in our energy situation will eventually come from greater efficiency and conservation; in the long run, efficiency and conservation are worth several Saudi Arabias. And they will create jobs. They will also go a long ways towards improving our environment.

Now I'm not a great fan of Wal-Mart, but Frank Greve of the McClatchy Washington Bureau uses Wal-Mart to introduce his story on the green movement that's gaining momentum in the construction field:

In addition to the Wal-Mart's legion of skylights, for example, the store's foundation is made of ground-up chunks of runway recycled from Denver's old Stapleton International Airport. Porous paving in its parking lot soaks up and filters polluted storm-water runoff. Huge north-facing windows provide most of the store's interior light. Used motor oil from the tire and lube shop helps heat the store, as does old vegetable oil from the deli.

According to Don Moseley, senior Wal-Mart engineer for environmental innovation, these and other efforts "are good for the environment and good for our business."

That's the mantra of the so-called green building movement that's sweeping the nation.

Kudos to Wal-Mart if their green movement continues. Otherwise, I'm sure Greve's story will please Wal-Mart during this busy shopping season and McClatchy will be more than happy to receive all those Wal-Mart ads. Greve's story goes on to talk in general about how the construction of large buildings are going green—and creating jobs:

Scores of colleges and universities - including Emory, Pennsylvania State, the University of Florida, the University of South Carolina and the University of California-Merced - also have taken the pledge. Harvard University alone has 12 green buildings.

Scads of students at architecture and interior design schools share the green zeal. "It's hugely, hugely, unbelievably popular," said Sylvie Sugg, 21, an interior design student at the Art Institute of Colorado in Denver. "Green is so big now that people shouldn't go into design if they don't like it."

The job market for grads with green credentials varies widely from city to city, reflecting the trend's ongoing spread from West to East. In general, green grads do well, according to Kira Gould, the incoming chair of the American Institute of Architects' environment committee. "I see a lot of firms looking for expertise in green buildings at all levels," she said.

The key to the movement is a new set of standards that's far more demanding, environmentally speaking, than local building codes. The movement invites innovation because it's based on environment-protecting performance standards, not rules. That leaves it up to architects, builders and designers to decide how best to reduce energy and water consumption, for example, or workers' dependence on cars.

Flexibility, whether it's the construction of buildings or putting in place windmills, ethanol plants, solar panels or any other of a wide range of innovations, is going to be the key. As an example, it might make sense to emphasize wind power in North Dakota, solar farms in Arizona and retrofitting Chicago with better insulation in its buildings. States and local communities will have to work out what combinations work best and the federal government can help most with research, resources, networking, red tape cutting and flexible nonbinding guidelines. Whether at the local, state or federal level, this will all create jobs and much of it, if not all, will be paid for by the savings from not sending our dollars chasing increasingly scarcer resources overseas.