Good Advice from Robert Reich

Here's Robert Reich working hard trying to get Barack Obama pumped up to become a real president instead of the figurehead he has been up until now:

We’re not in a double-dip recession yet. We’re in a one and a half dip recession.

Consumer confidence is down. Retail sales are down. Home sales are down. Permits for single-family starts are down. The average work week is down. The only things not down are inventories – unsold stuff is piling up in warehouses and inventories of unsold homes are rising – and defaults on loans.

The 1.5 dip recession should be causing alarm bells to ring all over official Washington. It should cause deficit hawks to stop squawking about future debt, blue-dog Democrats to stop acting like Republicans, and mainstream Democrats to get some backbone.

The 1.5 dip recession should cause the President to demand a large-scale national jobs program including a new WPA that gets millions of Americans back to work even if government has to pay their wages directly. Included would be zero-interest loans to strapped states and locales, so they didn’t have to cut vital services and raise taxes. They could repay when the economy picked up and revenues came in. The national jobs program would also include a one-year payroll tax holiday on the first $20,000 of income.

The President should stop talking and acting on anything else – not the deficit, not energy, not the environment, not immigration, not implementing the health care law, not education. He should make the whole upcoming mid-term election a national referendum on putting Americans back to work, and his jobs bill. Are you for it or against it?

That's just the wind-up pitch of Reich's latest posting. Go read the whole thing.

The rest of Reich's posting is dreadful reading. He summarizes the array of opposition to doing what is right, doing what is needed, doing what will help millions, doing what is sensible & essention. Sadly, the forces of darkness are out in full force and they are going to make sure that America goes down for the count. They want to make this into a decade-long recession. They want to go head-to-head with Japan for the reputation of who could post the worst numbers in a decade long darkness of the soul. Sad. Incredible. I never thought I would see such idiocy.

I guess the last time there was this much insanity abroad was during the 1930s when the Republicans fought viciously to prevent any aid to the millions of unemployed and those same Republicans fought viciously for their "isolationist" America... a disarmed American that got trounced in round one when Japan thwacked them. The same insanity walks the land. You would think people would learn to distrust the crazies, but it is like some drug that sucks the American voters back in again and again.

Here's how Reich ends his posting. He is bitter about how "helicopter" Ben who promised to do everything humanly possible to stop the next Great Recession has been doing his best imitation of Andrew Mellon. Here's how Reich characterizes him:

This is like the captain of the Titanic looking carefully at his lifeboats to make sure he’s comfortable with using them as the ship starts sinking.

That's what passes for "leadership" in Washington. Pathetic!