The Wrong Approach

The economy stinks. Obama has not fixed it in three years plus. He is wholly responsible for the financial crisis. Mitt Romney and his billionaire boyfriends are spending hundreds of millions to sell you this baloney. They are not above lying like rugs to make sure you believe them

When people on the Right attack people on the Left for calling them liars and stupid they should understand that there is a basis for those accusations and that, that basis is the GOP’s current presidential candidate.

Yes, Romney’s at it again, calling attention to a closed factory in Ohio and labeling it a symbol of the Obama administration’s economic failure.

It sounds good doesn’t it? Look at this crumbling pile of rubbish. Think of all the jobs lost, all the families with no food or housing that once worked here. It’s a real tearjerker. Only one problem, the factory closed during the Bush administration.

See, that’s why the Left calls the Right, liars and stupid. Either Romney knew the truth about the factory and was flat out lying about it to get an edge, or he didn’t know, was fantasizing, and was dumb enough to think nobody would check.

How can a guy who wants to run the country be so (pick all that apply) lazy, dishonest or dumb? If Romney and the rest of his backers and stooges would stop and listen to the basic bullshit they are trying to sell to unaffiliated voters, who are after all, the targets of both party’s high cost campaigns they would understand that those unaffiliated voters are the smart ones, the thinkers, the considerers, not the nose in the butt crack followers of one side or the other. As such it takes a little more than just shouting gay predator, fetus killer, welfare black or illegal immigrant to get them to pay attention to such faulted rhetoric.

The Right keeps harping on the Obama job losses, hoping against hope that no one will actually do their homework and find out that most of the job losses, over 350,000 per month happened in the last year of the Bush administration and that the last few, less than 100,000 total, lost their jobs in the first quarter of 2009, after Obama was sworn into office but before he could put any policies in place. Still the latest figures are not encouraging.

Could Obama be doing a better job promoting new employment? Sure, but the truth be known, most of what he has tried in that realm has been stymied by the GOP whose only governmental aim during the first three years of Obama’s administration has been to keep him from getting re-elected; Those are the words of Mitch McConnell, backed up by many others. If that’s the only aim of any political party that is supposed to be trying to run a country than that party is nothing but pathetic, and if you vote for them, you get what you deserve.

Not that the Democrats are much better. Stunned by the 2010 elections, they have floundered around doing nothing; hoping desperately that if that didn’t get noticed, and didn’t get anyone angry at them, they could hold onto their high pay, low labor jobs for one more term.

In this process, both parties have abandoned the electorate, greedily hanging onto their patronage and their perks and ignoring the needs of the people who elected them to run the country.

The President has had big failures but they have been somewhat mitigated, by the fact that he is, at least trying to solve the problems. His healthcare bill, not perfect but a start where no other president was able to get even that far, his attempts to regulate Wall Street and the banking industry, his sometimes confusing forays into energy and the environment and especially his policies of pursuit and execution of our countries enemies have stood head and shoulders above anything either party has done in congress or in previous administrations.

His biggest failure appears to be his inability to get more people back into jobs but he has tried and it appears that he is still trying. To accomplish these aims, he needs one of two alternatives to happen. Either the Democrats have to get up on their hind legs, back the president, put some push into their whine, and deal with those they can speak to on the other side; or the GOP has to sit down shut up and stop getting in the way of progressive programs; programs that will give the work force a chance to get back on the job.

These are not earth shattering concepts. The way to reduce unemployment is to create jobs.  The jobs we have to create now, this moment, are the kind that can be done by our currently unemployed. We are speaking about an undereducated employment force that can’t wait three years to get educated to the new technology. That will come later and be accomplished by others. Right now we have to create jobs for the people who need them and those jobs have to be long on muscle and short on tech know how. Our country is desperately in need of infrastructure repair, high-speed rail transportation and airport facilities. They are the kind of jobs that must be created by the government in an atmosphere in which industry is unable or more properly unwilling to create jobs, themselves.

This is the kind of stuff that can take years to get off the board or it can come off in a flash, the way it did during and after WWII. It’s all a question of will and cooperation. If the White House has the will and if the parties decide to cooperate, it can be done and it can be done fast. But that means everyone, for once, has to drop his or her agenda and focus on doing the job they’re being paid to do, not pleasing their backers or some lobbyist or the guy whose mother controls ten votes in the second district.

I for one don’t think we have that kind of ability, honesty or integrity in congress. I don’t think we will ever get all those hacks to function and focus on something this important for the country without putting their own agendas first. I would love to be proved wrong but if I’m not, then that’s a message for November. Vote them all out.

I once said, that based on the results of the 2010 election and the disastrous Tea Party victory that took about 60 seats and elected about 3 functional people to them, that such an action was counter productive. I still think so, but the current bunch of crooked do-nothings in congress can’t be any worse than a bunch of ignorant do-nothings so why not give it a try.

We need to do something to get people back in jobs. People who work and pay taxes, do not collect unemployment insurance; they create product, buy product and add to GDP. The lack of this is the primary problem in this country right now. If we don’t solve it we are truly screwed.

This lack of job creation is Obama’s greatest challenge in his fight for re-election. Romney’s war cry is, “the economy has not recovered under Obama.” This is true and it behooves Obama to agree and to point out why. He must make it clear to the American people that the reason the economy has not recovered is the Republican obstructionist policies; policies based, not on helping the economy recover, but on blocking him from getting a second term. This is not like most Republican fantasies, but a provable, quotable, on the record, fact.

Obama must show that the Republican policies will defeat the economy, as they did during the Bush administration, and bury all but the rich in a deeper hole than the one in which they already exist. He must illustrate using Romney’s own statements, that Romney will reinstate the calamitous Bush economic policies and must show how this will lead the country into an economic dark age, from which it will not recover for decades.