Lip Service and Tokenism

I actually intended to listen to President Obama this morning but by 8:00am PDT had entirely forgotten he was speaking, which tells me he isn’t talking about anything that I really want to hear from him. I’m retired, so jobs don’t matter to me personally, but the well being of my nation matters to me more than his damned election does and that means we need to put people to work rather than fulminating about whatever it is that the oligarchs in Washington think is important.

I don’t know what is the “right thing to do” on the debt ceiling and the deficit, and I don’t really give a damn. What I do know is that while you idiots are blathering on that stuff you are doing nothing whatever about putting my fellow citizens back to work, and I am utterly fed up with your indifference to the working men and women in this nation. And this is not self interest, because I am old and retired and I’m not going back to work.

Obama is talking about the polls telling him that “America is with him on this” but he is listening to the wrong polls. The polls that say that people want this or want that as to debt reduction don’t offer a choice that says, “I don’t give a damn, this is the wrong subject and we should be talking about jobs.” If they did, no one would be “with Obama” on these debt talks because almost everybody would be checking the option telling him to change the subject to the generation of jobs.

Obama did one little “stimulus” thing that was too small to begin with. Almost half of it was tax cuts which don’t create jobs, and much of the rest of it was social policy spread thin geographically and timewise and diluting its impact to invisibility. Since then he has spent a year on his own “big things” of “health care reform” which turned out to deal with health insurance rather than health care and hasn’t even gone into effect yet, and now the deficit which is for the benefit of Wall Street rather than Main Street.

Spending cuts, tax increases and deficit reduction are not going to generate jobs. It is time, past time, for more than lip service and tokenism on the jobs issue. To hell with Obama's "big things," quit screwing around and put America back to work.

Update: Obama's "big thing" obsession.

Obama is not content to just get us through the crisis, he is obsessed with "doing something big." But it won't be his fault if it all goes wrong.

Obama described any temporary solution that did not tackle long-term spending problems as the least attractive option. "We have a unique opportunity to do something big. We have a chance to stabilise America's finances for a decade, for 15 years or 20 years, if we're willing to seize the moment," he said.

This is the "Shock Doctrine" at work. Just like George Bush, he is more concerned with his legacy, his place in history, than he is with the well being of the people he governs.