Come Senators, Congressmen, please heed the call.
Don't stand in the doorway, don't block the hall,
For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled.
There's a battle outside and it's ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls,
For the times, they are a' changin' ...
Bob Dylan from his 1964 album, The Times They Are A-Changin'
Robert Zimmerman (aka Bob Dylan) was born in Duluth, Minnesota. He grew up in Hibbing on the Mesabi iron ore range. He knew whereof he sang.
In 2008, a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation was awarded "to Bob Dylan for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power."
Let the beat go on ...
Item: Front cover, The New Yorker, August 15 and 22, 2011:
In the background, the American economy sinking like the Titantic. In the foreground, a life saving boat occupied by three vested and tuxedoed Monopoly men, sipping champagne and enjoying a cigar.
Item: Warren Buffet:
"The 400 of us pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter. If you're in the luckiest 1 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent."
Item: Jon Stewart:
"So, raising [the] income tax on the top 2% of earners would raise $700 billion, but taking half of everything the bottom 50% have in this country would do the same. I see the problem here: We need to take all of what the bottom 50% have."
Item: John Cassidy, "How Bad is it?" in The New Yorker:
"A political system that responded rationally to the country's problems would be concentrating on creating jobs. ...
On Wall Street, unlike in Washington, there is general agreement that the 2009 stimulus package was one of the main reasons that the economy expanded, however slowly, in the past couple of years."
Item: Chris Bowers' headline in Daily Kos:
Republican members of Congress facing protests en masse during August recess.
Item: Bill Gross, guru of bond traders, quoted and cited approvingly in Barrons, the Wall Street Journal and other famously liberal publications, with this in The New York Times:
"Mr. Gross, a billionaire [and professed Republican] acclaimed for his early warnings that the dot-com and subprime mortgage bubbles would burst, said, 'Capitalism in its raw form can’t pull us out of this hole.'
Mr. Gross says the government should finance immediate job creation to shore up the third structural weakness: America’s fraying infrastructure. Updating roads, bridges and airports would provide an engine for reducing unemployment faster.
'You’ve got to create a demand for labor,' Mr. Gross said. 'The private sector is not going to do it.' Even if the government must do it directly, he said, 'Putting a shovel in the hands of somebody can be productive.'"
Yes, it can! Fast and soon.
Now the spending-cutters can wring their hands over debt rhetoric. That's being cared for by The Bargain and The Super-Committee. Let the designated committee be at its work diligently, triggers and all.
But jobs that represent consumer spending and economic growth in this economy now are so much higher priorities than debt reduction feathered along down the timeline.
It is time to put the lie to claims that regulation and the fear of it is hampering business and bank lending. To call a lie claims that tax rates discourage job creation, when huge corporations pay little or nothing in Federal taxes and billionaires pay at lower effective income tax rates than their office help.
Let the people be heard, not manipulated. Instead of standing still for what the GOP and some of the mainstream media says the public thinks, let's be heard in our own voices:
Come, mothers and fathers throughout the land,
And don't criticize what you don't understand.
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.
Your old road is rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the way ... if you can't lend your hand
For the times, they are a changin'.