Up to this point today on the Daily Kos front page we have the following diaries even tangentially related to the Jobs crisis this country faces.
The unemployment report - Pretty much a news brief on the unemployment report released today.
Economics Daily Digest One link gets at the jobs problem. (Prospect)
Yesterday we got only an economic digest.
Economic Digest
I did not check the articles for jobs relation, but nothing jumped out at me.
How can we call ourselves progressives and this is all we have get on the front page of Daily Kos about the Jobs Crisis in this country?
I don't know if I will pull this off. I don't know if anyone will care enough to help. The front page of Daily Kos looks like a series of reports about what is going on. I feel like I am being wagged. Our politicians are talking about entitlement "reform", so that is what is in the front page diaries. While we must defend social programs we can do more than one thing at the same time. Can we attempt to drive the narrative instead of just reacting to it?
I will attempt to post a diary as close to daily as I can. The first part will be to harass the Front Pagers about ignoring Jobs.
The rest is a request to all of you. With the help of the community can we find our Congress people who say something that will have a positive impact on jobs and link to it, so we can encourage them, especially their constituents among this community. We should also put the negative comments by our Congress people about Jobs, especially the misguided comments that somehow austerity will help the economy.
More below...
I expect most of what we will get in terms of Congress people comments will be misguided claptrap that somehow reducing the deficit also known as austerity will some how create jobs. This is false and has been proven false in the Eurozone. It does not matter if it is increasing taxes on the wealthy without spending cuts or letting the payroll tax holiday expire. Any tax increase without a spending increase and any spending cut without a tax decrease is austerity and will hurt the economy and hurt jobs.[1]
I want to change the narrative. It is naive and I have no idea if I can possibly be persistent enough over a long enough time frame to have a chance of even moving the narrative a little further to the left on this site even, let alone among our representatives. But, it kills me that not a single politician seems to be able to get in front of the cameras and say "What the hell are we doing? 25 million people are unemployed or underemployed and we are worried about the deficit. Millions more have job insecurity and could lose their job at anytime and we are worrying about the deficit."
It might be the mainstream media. But, how about here we find the obscure Congress person who puts out a little press release about how they want a stimulus bill, and give them some positive feedback.
Let's manipulate our Congress people via positive and negative reinforcement to move in the direction we want. It will be slow and boring and may not work. But, what else can we do. We don't have billions and gigantic think tanks that can hire people and give them fancy titles, so they can go on Meet the Press. So, we do what we can.
Of course that assumes, I can maintain sufficient dudgeon (currently at high dudgeon) to keep posting diaries often enough. And, that anyone will care.
[1] On the margins some spending and taxes are more or less stimulative than others. But, at those margins we won't make a dent in unemployment anyways. So, lets just be against all austerity and stupid stimulus like tax cuts for the rich.