What's more important? The needs of the empire or the needs of middle-class America? Jobs for people so they can feed their families or money for corporations so that they can compete internationally? The answer is that the government will help those who can help them. Corporations are the new welfare queens.
Hoa binh

"Bailing out multinational corporations is just as bad a project, as those corporations use the money to move jobs out of the country. Witness the moves made by GM and Chrysler"

Bub...if you don't understand that the bail outs and subsequent ownership tranfers to the Unions was a direct campaign pay off you are pretty darn stupid. This had nothing to do with bailing out the "Corporations"

"Progressives" like John Nichols and The Nation magazine are froever trying to figure out a way to reform Capitalism to somehow make the run-amok, gangster Capitalist economy somehow work for the economic benefit of the people.

The major economic, ecological, social crises that are impoverishing and destroying orginary working people in the U.S. today are intrinsic with the long-term decline and now collapse of U.S. Capitalism.

Capitalism cannot be "bailed out" or "reformed" to make it function to enable a "living wage" and benefits to even the majority of working people. Capitalism is the economic system that makes capitalists increasingly wealthy and impoverishes or destroys everyone else in the process of wealth accumulation.

Massive economic inequality, today increasingly oppressive even in the U.S., is the intrinsic nature of capitalism, a characteristic observable worldwide.

Millions will remain unemployed in this country because of cheap labor overseas. Under Capitalist Globalization, global free-market economics, the jobs will not come back until workers in this country are willing to work at the slave-wages of impoverished working people overseas.

The "collateral damage" of capitalism has been the root cause of the world crises of survival now facing humanity. Wars are started to secure oil profits. Militarism and more wars are essential to maintain the profits of the military industrial complex. Global warming is continued because capitalist-controlled governments will not shut-down .
To maintain their wealth, the ruling class of the U.S. has corrupted the political process with massive bribery and corruption. The mass media is owned to serve corporate need to continuously indoctrinate the masses of ordinary people.

Obama and the Democrats are fully integrated into the corporate corruption of political processes to carry out a continual "class war" on their behalf. The latest "Obamination" is the implementation of the destruction of Social Security!

John Nichols and The Nation magazine, despite minor misgivings, have supported Obama, the Democratic Party, and thus the maintenance of the economic system of capitalism.

For an anti-capitalist, socialist perspective on current affairs read daily the World Socialist Web Site at http://www.wsws.org

"In fact, big banks and investors have for many years been more inclined to lend money to companies that promise to move jobs overseas than to create them at home"

John Nichols typically appeals to the people's better side while simultaneously promoting exploitation-as-usual to a dangerous extent.

But he provides some good fodder for discussion. The much more relevant version of the fact he proclaims above is this: Big banks all along have existed to fuel/fund the elite status quo. The entrenchments of the USA in its various quagmires were funded with the funny munny of the big banks.

Warfare depends on the funny munny of big banks. Fossil exploitation depends on the funny munny of big banks. Petro-chemical agriculture depends on the funny munny of big banks. The entrenchment of the USA in the most expensive modes of transport, education and healthcare, depended on the funny munny fabricated out of thin air by big banks.

If you notice a pattern, congratulations. Big business and big banks are partners in crime. They are after all two components of the very same elite establishment.

They should all be busted up. The great populist revolution needed in the USA should target big business/banks. Victory for the people will be defined as the complete elimination of big business/banks.

In the 30's, the New Deal stimulus was putting people to work in various government programs. Those people began to get a little money in their pockets. They decided maybe they'd like to buy a radio. Demand for radios increased and GE and Philco started hiring.
The trouble with stimulus spending today and why we have a so-called jobless recovery is that if demand for consumer goods increases it will mean more jobs...in China!
That's where the jobs went, thanks to both of our counterfeit political parties.
But don't worry, Americans. If we just toss all the illegals back across the Arizona border and burn a few mosques things will be fine.
It is a fascinating and frightening thing to watch a people so willingly complicit in their own destruction.

The right response to unemployment is NOT smarter stimulus spending. The right response is to eliminate Wall Street Fraud, once and for all. To seize the entire assets of the fraudulent "investment houses"/market manipulators, to nationalize the Federal Reserve; to nationalize banking and eliminate interest; to cancel international trade agreements with unequal economies, and to instill a sense of pride in nationally produced goods, and a nation that supports its own economy over that of "Red China". It always puzzles me that, for how much Americans hate "the Commies", they sure buy a lot of their crap every year.

This is better than Weisbrot's empty column yesterday - at least Nichols notes that it does matter what sectors of "the economy" get stimulated - but Nichols still fails to allow himself to see the stark reality of the US system.

He still sends his advice and his energy and his faith toward the Democratic party, instead of toward the people.

We the people do not need to have faith in the leaders of the Democratic party. We need to have faith in ourselves, and start the long hard work of retaking our lives, and our world.

"The supply of college graduates is not keeping pace with demand. Therefore, more investment in education could reduce both the cyclical unemployment rate, as more Americans stay in school, and the structural unemployment rate, as they graduate into the job market."

WHAT "DEMAND"? WHAT "JOB MARKET"?
This is a fairy tale. Firstly, although going back to school is great(if one can even afford it and pay the bills at the same time) how are these students going to handle the debt when they graduate and the grace period is over? Simply, there are scarce jobs available, and many will find a rude awakening.

Let's look at some figures of job prospects for college grads:

Law schools are over saturated with students, and when they graduate they will find little opportunity in their field, as outsourcing lawyers to India (Google this on the NY Times article)is beginning to take hold.

Teaching---forget about it. Teachers, many of whom are of retirement age, are not leaving, schools are cutting positions, adding more students in the classroom...adding to an already demoralized and crumbling profession.

MBA? Like the Law profession, way too many of them. And the funny thing is the price tag to go to grad school for the positions I've named above (just to cite a few examples) is simply not worth the reality of the job market.

What is really chilling and telling of our current state of the labor market is to look around college campuses---hardly any recruiters come by unless it's for "National Security" jobs. Orwellian society is fast approaching when the only openings these are days are in the defense or spy fields.

Nichols is basically correct here, in a a way that should not be controversial: hiring people does create jobs, so stimulus spending does speed a depressed economy, whatever else one may think of the aggregated result.

"Smart" spending, judging from Nichols' description, is spending on productive domestic industry and services -- "smart" because that would stimulate a productive local economy.

That makes sense.

What disturbs me, however, is that these things have been more or less common knowledge to students of economics since the 1930's, when Roosevelt's New Deal stopped spiralling unemployment, which rose again when some of the measures were rescinded.

American economists and politicians who advocate not spending to aid the domestic population do so not generally because it will not create jobs but despite the observation that it will. They claim that some benefit will derive from going through "the pain" (as though the results were just unpleasantness and not damage).

However, most (not all!) of the people who claim to be "small government" are in favor of massive deficit spending outside of the country, for invasions, occupations, arms, and black ops. These expenditures are known to stimulate the economy very little, both because much of the money goes directly abroad, and because none of it is productive: if one pays to sow corn, this results in corn. If one pays to blow up the cornfield, that does not.

I am afraid that the real motive that government and even business do not help the population amounts to a fear that the "wrong people" will get the money and thereby make decisions.

Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."

Nichols is a lukewarm tickle-down Obama-ite.

Robert Reich has much better ideas in his Labor Day article titled The Real Lesson of Labor Day posted on this same site today. But even Reich's ideas add up to only about half of what is needed. As usual, he talks around the "free trade" regime, citing technologically generated class inequities but omitting that the "free trade" treaties catalyzed & rapidly spread those inequities globally. This kicked out the domestic manufacturing base's support legs from under the real economy faster than it could adapt. That made the overall economy over-dependent on false equity from the decade long housing bubble. Now with the bubble popped we see the true aftermath of 16 years of "free trade" and (insanely) ongoing government-protected tax-payer subsidies for corporations to offshore workforces and manufacturing plants. That combined with Bush II's historically unprecedented tax cuts for the super-rich when he had multiple bogus oil/pipeline wars to pay for, and deregulation of banks & derivatives followed by fraudulent bank bailouts have all combined to create the present long-term slow motion collapse--whose bottom is only economic guesswork for contemporary neo-liberal, pro-"free trade" Milton Friedmanites (Team Obama and the GOP) and pro-"free trade" Keynesians (Paul Krugman, Robert Reich and a dwindling number of other media wonks).

The carbon tax is a good idea ecologically, but not when the economy is clenching up with anti-demand lock-jaw. Only when there is concerted effort behind an environmentally and economically sustainable economic policy that has led to ACTUAL RECOVERY would the system be able to withstand that kind of initially demand-killing shock. Carbon taxes in the present situation would rain down too hard upon those who are already struggling the most.

Restoring 75% to 90% income tax rates on those making over $250,000 a year for 15 to 20 years is a start. Doing a slowly phased in, industrial & agricultural sector-by-sector moratorium on the "free trade" treaties over a 7 to 15 year period is another good idea and it should be complemented with generous and widespread government subsidies for recreating green manufacturing inside the U.S. Updating and unifying the national electricity grid to existing German standards to allow for efficient and (initially at least) government-subsidized medium & small private landowner sales of wind, solar and geo-thermal surplus energy sales back into the grid is another good idea. Subsidizing the construction of a nationwide system of wind-powered electric vehicle refueling stations (such as are now being constructed in Denmark) is another good idea. Devising a food growing and distribution system that puts more emphasis on medium and small family owned farms and locally or regionally sourced food and restricts high-carbon footprint global and transnational food imports is another.

But stripping American corporations of the horrific, now globalized fiction of "legal personhood" and returning them to citizen elected direct oversight over their operating licenses is the best idea of all.