Obama Finds One More Way Not To Create Jobs

From Robert Kuttner at the American Prospect, this report of an utterly cynical ploy:

"There is a lot of circumstantial evidence that President Obama is planning to include in his eagerly anticipated post-Labor Day jobs speech a variation on a truly lame state program called Georgia Works.

The program, begun in 2003, pays people on unemployment insurance a small additional stipend, currently $240, if they agree to work 24 hours a week, for no wages, for a private employer while unemployed, in exchange for some form of training by the employer."

Do I even need to point out what this program produces?  First of all, it does absolutely nothing to create one single job, so what the hell would it be doing in Obama's speech, except as a time-filler to obscure the fact that he doesn't intend to make any meaningful inroads into joblessness between now and his defeat next year. Secondly, it provides free labor to companies, subsidized by taxpayers, including other workers who would presumably be happy to have these jobs if they paid an actual wage.

If this is the sort of meaningless gesture that he is going to propose, as an alternative to the real answer- more government stimulus- we're screwed.  President Perry and the Christian Confederate Republic of America, here we come.

Now, while I'm on the subject of jobs, here's a chart from Daily Kos that I think is well worth a look:

Here

Here you can clearly see the results of Republican jobs strategy, which consists in a series of very successful actions to kill job creation as fast as possible.  No one who knows the economic history of the Great Depression could be confused about this.  Here's a little chart I ran recently which shows the same thing:

We have known clearly since the 1930's that, in bad economic times, stimulus makes the economy improve, and budget cutting and balancing does the exact opposite.  By "we" I mean all of us.  The Republican party is currently engaged in a deliberate attempt to harm our economy, as part of a systematic plan to drive Democrats out of office.  I will not quibble about whether this constitutes mass treason or mass sedition, or what you want to call it; the fact remains that Republicans have done hundreds of times more damage to this country than Al Qaida could ever hope to.

Obama presumably has a responsibility to defend the country against all enemies, as they say, "foreign and domestic."  On the issue alone of defending us against domestic enemies, he is a monumental failure as a president.  No president since Lincoln has faced such a concerted effort to destroy this country from within (by, I suppose I should note, largely the same kind of ignorant, greedy, racist jackasses;)   Lincoln rose to the occasion.  We're still waiting, Barack.