the cancer in the American heart

the cancer in the American heart — joblessness

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Sunday August 08, 2010 · 4:15 AM PDT

2010/08/08 · 04:15

The title is taken from Frank Rich's op-ed How to Lose an Election Without Really Trying. The cancer unless treated will kill democrats this November and lead to a national disaster in the next two years.

I am not questioning that President Obama has leaped tall buildings and is faster than a speeding bullet. Joblessness is President Obama's Kryptonite and pure poison for us democrats.

The bottom line as Frank Rich so rightly states is:

The (We) Democrats have already retreated from immigration and energy reform. If they (we) can’t make the case to Americans like Alexandra Jarrin (See below) that they offer more hope for a job than a radical conservative movement poised to tear down what remains of the safety net, they deserve to lose.

. . . The Times ran a front-page report on "99ers," the growing band of desperate jobless Americans who have exhausted their 99 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits. The 99er featured in Michael Luo’s article, a 49-year-old unemployed corporate worker named Alexandra Jarrin, is a late-in-life college graduate and onetime business school student who owes $92,000, as she put it, "for an education which is basically worthless." She’s on the verge of homelessness not because she lacks the skills she needs to re-enter the 21st-century economy. She and countless others like her, skilled and unskilled, lack jobs, period.

The issue is what to do? I have argued here that we democrats need to work hard to convince voters that we are fighting hard for jobs. To me this means congress needs to work through August, September, and October to pass jobs bills, including money for state jobs, money for green energy research/development/factory jobs, money for infrastructure maintenance and building jobs, more money for education jobs, . . . Make the republicans talk (not declare filibuster but actually do it).

Unless we treat the cancer with everything in our arsenal the cancer will spread and destroy us.

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