How to Lower the Unemployment rate from 9 percent to 5.5 percent

[FayeforCure]

Yesterday, the Commission on Wartime Contracting released its final report.


The Commission reported that between $31 billion and $62 billion of the tax money spent on contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan has been wasted.  It also said that between $10 billion and $19 billion of what contractors billed and received was fraudulent.  In fact, $360 million of our tax dollars went straight to... the Taliban.


Wow.  Who could have imagined that?


Well... me.


When I saw that the Bush administration was doing nothing about fraud in Iraq, I revived a law going back to the Civil War that allowed whistleblowers to bring lawsuits in the name of the U.S. government.  I filed case after case, which were promptly greeted by the Bush administration with gag orders -- gag orders that they kept in place for years.  They didn't want any more bad news coming out of Iraq.


So I went on CNN, spoke to the New York Times and the Washington Post, and told America whatever I could say without violating those gag orders.  And when the Bush administration finally let one case out from under those gag orders -- and declined to prosecute it -- I took that case to trial, and won a $14 million judgment.  It was the third-largest judgment for whistleblowers in the 143-year history of that law.


Those contractors built bases without hooking up the plumbing.  A general testified that when he went there, he felt like throwing up.


The Wall Street Journal reported in a front-page article that I was "waging a one-man war against contractor fraud in Iraq."  The national organization Taxpayers Against Fraud named me "Lawyer of the Year."  And people started to think, "what is going on over there?"


In Congress, I spoke out against the wars, and I voted against the wars.  I wrote and introduced The War is Making You Poor Act, HR 5353.  My bill pointed out that you could:

1) Require the Pentagon to fund the wars from its own budget of over $500 billion, not supplemental appropriations;

2) Take all the money that would save and eliminate taxes on everyone's first $35,000 of income, $70,000 for married couples; and

3) Still have over $10 billion a year left over, to cut the federal deficit.

OpenCongress's unscientific poll showed 91% in favor of HR 5353.


After I left Congress in January, I took up the work against contractor fraud in Iraq again.  And I won an $8.7 million settlement from DynCorp and the Sandi Group.  The defendants paid our attorney's fees last Friday.


Here's some simple arithmetic.  We've budgeted $159.3 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this year, through next month.  (The true cost is much more, but let's leave that aside.)  That's:


$159,300,000,000.00.


You could take all that money and create 5,310,000 jobs here in America paying $30,000 a year, rebuilding our bridges, our roads, our schools, instead of the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.  That would immediately lower the unemployment rate from 9 percent to 5.5 percent, and get money flowing in our communities again.


Now, that's a job program.  I'll put that up against whatever President Obama proposes next week.


The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have killed more than 8,000 Americans, and who-knows-how-many Iraqis and Afghans.  War has destroyed our economy, just as the war in Afghanistan destroyed the Soviet economy.  According to the calculations of Nobel Prize-winner Professor Joseph Stiglitz, the war in Iraq alone has cost us around 8% of our $50 trillion national net worth, all of the wealth that America built up over two centuries.  Over $13,000 for every single American, young and old.


We've taken our inheritance, and dumped it into a wood chipper.


My father served in the U.S. Army during World War II.  He told me once that one of the most common questions that men of his generation heard was, "What did you do in the war?"  Maybe our children will ask us, "what did you do against the war?"


That's a question I can answer.


Courage,


Alan Grayson

[Pottsburg]

Labor dept reports today no new jobs added in August.  It's no getting any less difficult out there people.  Now that the prez is back from vacation/spending a ton of taxpayers dollars we will see his second attempt at a jobs plan.

[Ocklawaha]

Labor dept reports today no new jobs added in August.  It's no getting any less difficult out there people.  Now that the prez is back from vacation/spending a ton of taxpayers dollars we will see his second attempt at a jobs plan.

So um, you'd say that anyone that currently has a job should surrender their vacation days until the economy recovers?

OCKLAWAHA

[Garden guy]

Labor dept reports today no new jobs added in August.  It's no getting any less difficult out there people.  Now that the prez is back from vacation/spending a ton of taxpayers dollars we will see his second attempt at a jobs plan.

Will you call the republican donothing obstructionist congress to get off of the vacation that they have been taking since the day they lost the presidency?

[JeffreyS]

Bush should have been fired and Obama should be fired for spending the lives and money they have on Iraq and Afghanistan.  We could punish wrong doing without sacrificing our brave men and women or spending our social safety nets away.

Obama should have called the troops home in his inauguration speech.  At some point Iraq and Afghanistan have to sink or swim on their own.  That points was about two months into each of the operations. At that point they had learned not to draw the USA into a conflict.   

[civil42806]

Labor dept reports today no new jobs added in August.  It's no getting any less difficult out there people.  Now that the prez is back from vacation/spending a ton of taxpayers dollars we will see his second attempt at a jobs plan.

Will you call the republican donothing obstructionist congress to get off of the vacation that they have been taking since the day they lost the presidency?

Ummmmm actually Obama had both the house and senate in his control from his election until the mid terms

[buckethead]

Bush should have been fired and Obama should be fired for spending the lives and money they have on Iraq and Afghanistan.  We could punish wrong doing without sacrificing our brave men and women or spending our social safety nets away.

Obama should have called the troops home in his inauguration speech.  At some point Iraq and Afghanistan have to sink or swim on their own.  That points was about two months into each of the operations. At that point they had learned not to draw the USA into a conflict.

Where would we get our Opium for all the opiates being peddled to our youth... errr.... being utilized properly by the medical profession and pharm inc?

[Pottsburg]

Labor dept reports today no new jobs added in August.  It's no getting any less difficult out there people.  Now that the prez is back from vacation/spending a ton of taxpayers dollars we will see his second attempt at a jobs plan.

Will you call the republican donothing obstructionist congress to get off of the vacation that they have been taking since the day they lost the presidency?

Ummmmm actually Obama had both the house and senate in his control from his election until the mid terms

+1  He had the house and congress under his wing until the midterm.  Don't you remember Nancy P and her famous line- You have to pass it to find out whats in it.  Obviously it did nothing for unemployment.  We were told that unemployment would drop when Obama passed the stimulus and we are still here at 9%.  They adjusted the numbers from the last 2 months. Employment numbers, instead of 46k jobs in June it was 20k, and instead of 117k in july they only created 85k. 

[Pottsburg]

Double dip coming!  Now what will we hear come next Thursday?  Im sure most of it will be aimed toward his reelection campaign. 

[chipwich]

Short of a +$1.5-2 Trillion dollar infrastructure and research plan to reshape the country, increase productivity and retrain the labor force, he might as well be just not say anything at all.

Both sides of the isle just don't seem to get it.  Our current economic problem was not just cuased by a housing boom gone bad.  It has been building up for decades.  Only a high increase in productivity can change it. 

Other countries can make basic goods better (Germany, Japan, S. Korea) and cheaper (China, India, Vietnam, Mexico) than we can.   The economy needs to be reshuffled so that we can do more with less, and create new products.

QE programs to ease money supply only work for a short period of time and tend to lead to asset bubbles, but the creation of new technology, more efficient energy sources, and technology can carry the economy to a new level.  The tech boom of the 90s made so much new technology possible, which in turn increased productivity, job growth and incomes.

The labor report today showed that average salaries feel in August as so did hours-worked per week.  These predicate future lay-offs. 
If you fix the labor problem, then you fix the demand problem.  If you fix the demand problem, then you in-turn fix the debt problem.  You can do this until you reach your countries economic capacity.  If you increase capacity through infrastructure and technologies, then you unchain your growth potential and can compete with almost any country on any level, making almost any good.  However, I  prefer our future factory workers work on advanced batteries and nano-techonoies, than lets say sewing socks or putting together toasters.

[twojacks]

no, the answer is not increaed productivity. that leads to less workers needed....not more.   America is the biggest consumer 0f cheap goods made in China, India, etc.   We need to think locally and if that means tweeking the trade agreements, that's what needs to be done.  Cheaper labor will only take us down the path to a third world country.  Bachman saying that anything less that $7.25/hour should not be off the table is insane.

[Garden guy]

I propose a trade war...end all imports in two years..then no imports for 10 years...then a fading in of new imports after we're making our own stuff...it's gotta change..we can't have socks for a dollar forever and expect everthing to grow. we have become the cheapest people...we want everthing for a dollar but we still want to be the powerhouse of the world....when will we learn that does'nt work....we've become the dollar store of the world...it's a radical idea but someones got to think forward.   

[FayeforCure]

Labor Day Reflection: Time for Americans to participate in power


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By Kevin Zeese - Posted on 04 September 2011


Three hundred million Americans can take control of the economy and country

By Kevin Zeese

The Roman philosopher and statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero said “Freedom is participation in power.” 

By that standard Americans are not free.  We do not participate in power. We do not even have power over our own economic lives, our elected “representatives” ignore us and listen to the moneyed interests sending the United States in the wrong direction on issue after issue.  The American people know better, would govern better and need to participate in power.

When you dispassionately review the reality of the U.S. economy, it is a depressing state of affairs that screams out for Americans to get up, stand up and shout: “we can do better than the political and economic elites.”  The opportunity to stand up is here: October2011.org.

This article focuses on the domestic policies that are destroying the most powerful economy in history, but war spending, which makes up more than half of discretionary federal spending, is one of the root causes of the economic collapse.  Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz writes: “Today, America is focused on unemployment and the deficit. Both threats to America’s future can, in no small measure, be traced to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

He and Linda Bilmes calculated America’s war costs three years ago conservative at $3 trillion to $5 trillion â€" these costs have escalated since then.

Domestically the brutal failure of government is evident in the way working Americans are treated.  The high levels of unemployment are not the only story; four decades of stagnant incomes and decreasing share of the gross domestic product going to workers are long term trends; the fragility of peoples’ personal finances, record foreclosure, high student debt and the lack of control over our economic lives all show the need for an economic transformation to a new, democratized economy.

Unemployment is persistently high. Roughly 31% of U.S. workers experienced unemployment or underemployment at some point in 2009.   President Obama has never put forth a real jobs program instead preferring to tinker with corporate tax breaks â€" a proven non-solution now resulting in zero job growth.  The official unemployment rate greatly underestimates unemployment because it has been used as a political tool and has been changed over the years, e.g. in 1994 the government stopped counting discouraged workers who have given up looking for employment. At a time when an all-time high number of Americans are “not in the labor force” this manipulation of data has a dramatic impact.  An apolitical analysis of unemployment, that counts the total number of people in need of employment, results in a current unemployment rate of 22.5%, an all-time record total of 34 million people are currently in need of work.

http://october2011.org/blogs/kevin-zeese/labor-day-reflection-time-americans-participate-power

[manasia]

Double dip coming!  Now what will we hear come next Thursday?  Im sure most of it will be aimed toward his reelection campaign.

Their is no double dip recession. The recession has never been over.