Martha Stewart has Sarah Palin for Dinner

FROM THE DESK OF QUINCY

Happy Thanksgiving, Everybody!

Hello Everybody, it's me,

QUINCY.

I'm finally back now from my unexpectedly lengthy, undercover furlough investigating the culprits behind the Swine Flu pandemic, after becoming embroiled in the political controversy surrounding it. Many of the SWINE FLUERS insisted that I withhold my research for fear  that lady, Orly Taitz would start following me around and try to get me to sign a joint book deal entitled “UNNATURAL BORN PIGS AT THE TROUGH” to expose everybody in Russian and Chinese lab coats to the White House, where President Obama had to shell out $2M to get her off his back about where he was born.

The persistent questions Barack keeps receiving about the true whereabouts of his birth are really getting annoying to him. That would be like me going into my favorite chorizo place in Redwood City and asking the owner, server and dishwasher, Pepe, to show me his visa every time I went in there. And I go there a lot.

Anyway, this is the time of year when everybody gets a little nervous about who's inviting them to dinner, and for what.

What's so exciting this Thanksgiving is that the nation's favorite insider stock tip criminal and diva of delectable dishings, Martha Stewart, served up a skewered Sarah Palin on a silver platter of roasted foibles. When asked why people think Sarah Palin is so polarizing to people, Martha spared no cleavers:

“She's a dangerous person, she's very boring (when) she speaks, she's so confused...anyone in government like that is a REAL PROBLEM.”

Well, ok. Martha's right! The most dangerous thing about a politician is that when they're boring, nobody even wants to listen to them. Of the two of them, which one do you think has more Native American ancestry? It doesn't matter. Even if Martha IS Polish, she pulls off the whole “Mayflower Madame” thing a whole lot better than Sarah Palin, so that' s why I think she is so polar-bear-ized.

Martha ALSO said everybody should give back with services and money or with “guidance” and that's why I am writing her a letter to thank her for giving back to us with this delightful Palin dish on this Thanksgiving Day. I'm not sending her any money, since her well-greased stock tip turkey baster is going to be filled to the brim once this cap and trade bill gets passed.

Today, I am also pondering the parable of the wolf and the hawk, which is very important to me since I just found out that I am one forty second Cherokee! This really has me hoping that I will resolve my issues over whether or not it is ethically suitable to eat vegetables that have been cooked in clay pots next to the other white meat.

Well, make sure to celebrate your Native American roots, even if you don't have any because that's what this day is supposed to be all about and for giving thanks for being able eat as much as you can without being hauled off to the hospital in an ambulance for porking up like that guy in LIFE OF BRIAN.

Happy Thanksgiving!

QUINCY

Shell Pushes for "Unfettered" Cap and Trade

Cap & Trade or Carbon Tax?

Silicon Valley – It's the Derivatives Beast, Stupid! Get over yourselves and embrace the politics of eco-guilt and its elitist fraternal twin, cap and trade.

Climateer Investing reports that Shell Oil is pushing for an “unfettered” carbon trading market, along with BP Plc. Both support cap-and-trade, while Exxon Mobile Corp. prefers a more environmentally and consumer friendly carbon tax scheme. LWOH readers will recall that even the world's flattest and not-so-hottest NYT opinionator trashed cap-and-trade BEFORE he was for it. As yours truly has suggested, when former billionaire Tom Friedman is following the money, it's time to take a closer look at who's behind the next bubble. After all, if the U.S. can't keep its intellectual property safe from the Chinese or make stuff here anymore, what do Americans do for jobs? Time to tap George Soros and trot out the Goldman Sachs investment bankers. So...

Bend Over, Here it Comes Again! This from Climateer:

“Remember, just as economists using the tools of science (mathematics) doesn't make economics a science, artificial constructs like cap-and-trade using the tools of markets doesn't make the racket "market based".”

For more LWOH cap-and-trade market analysis, there are also voluntary cap-and-trade programs such as the one operated by the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), whose inbred and humble roots began with the current POTUS along with an all-too familiar, all-star caste.

As yours truly has also noted here, even Al Gore expressed the downside of cap and trade, preferring the more sensible carbon-based tax system which would create direct incentives to develop and use less carbon-intensive fuels and more energy-efficient technologies. Avast, me hearties! The Derivatives Beast waits for no one.

In other exciting news, Al Gore's Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers VC funded 25 or so person start-up Hara Software, which came out of stealth mode a few months ago, has been described as a “hot commodity.” Their product is meant to track the carbon footprints of large corporations and to identify or police “a business' entire environmental impact from laptop to long-haul truck.” Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers invested $6 million in venture capital with recent follow on investments from JAFCO Ventures and Nth Power. Fast Company explains Hara's noble rot or “low-hanging fruit” identification scheme:

“Hara CEO Amit Chatterjee says the software, "is focused on understanding organizational metabolism, the input and output of natural resources and energy."  Hara--"Fresh green" in Sanskrit--tracks use of electricity, water, chemicals, and gas, and compares it to outputs of waste water, greenhouse gas, and solid waste. The software identifies the "low-hanging fruit", or the simplest ways to cut energy use and waste, along with longer-term goals.”

Hara has also managed to attract Rupert Murdoch to help his media company, News Corp clean up their emissions, or whatever it is that they drag around in their canvas bags for lunch. News Corp go carbon neutral by 2010. It's one thing to ask the local steel mill to go all carbon neutral, but an office full of self-satisfied, upwardly-urban, literate neophytes? Aren't these people already heeding the climate change memo by wearing more sweaters in the winter, turning the lights off, recycling  their empty ale bottles and cooling it on the A/C during hot summer days like the rest of the world's eco-serfs?

News Corp’s manager of Energy Initiatives, Vijay Sudan, said in the company's report that News Corp had looked “at numerous solutions” and chose Hara “due to the intuitive nature as well as the breadth and depth of the Hara solution.” Given the sheer size of News Corp, Hara has bagged a very large win for such a small, newbie firm. Back in 2007 Murdoch described the impact of News Corp going carbon neutral as similar to “turning off the electricity in the city of London for five full days.”

There we have it. In a million, climate change wracked years, London would not ever stand for the electricity being turned off for a five full days. And with Hara's low-hanging fruit detection technology, let's hope that Murdoch's noble soldiers on the front lines will not end up losing the war on climate change, and that a good time will be had by all. After that, at least a few investors will collect their checks and go back to their country houses or Westminster flats.

Elaine Meinel Supkis at Culture of Life News offers signs of intelligent life in the blogosphere on the subject of cap and trade, as she reports how hackers released private global warming emails:

“The obvious hysteria of the people pushing us into the fatal carbon trading market scheme has alerted many people who already are not prone to trust bankers, into digging in heels over global warming.  And thus, we are set on the path to another mega-confrontation that will not be based on science by EITHER side of the issue but will be mostly emotional.”

About those emails, while one can reasonably conclude that although the science of global warming is real, a current cooling trend is here. One of the emails indicated that one scientist had to hide and bury the current cooling trend in the data INSTEAD of explaining or clarifying it with regards to “global warming.” Supkis correctly points out that the emails do not disprove global warming, but rather show that “scientists can be stupid or difficult like other people.” She truly understands the science behind global warming and the political and economic motivations prompting the urgency going into Copenhagen:

“Global warming was NOT embraced by the ruling elites until it was connected to the Derivatives Beast. Then and only then, did it take off like a rocket. Only, the sun didn’t cooperate, did it?”

-2Truthy

2Truthy's Happy Friday Birthday Hour with Sean Young: THE BOOST

Happy Birthday Sean Young & The Gay
Swami

November 20 -- If this isn't my favorite movie evah, it's right up there...

Let's enjoy this old, timeless classic as we celebrate Jimmy Woods & Sean Young in The Boost. These two are the Spencer & Tracy of blow movies, bar none,  and make Michelle Pfeiffer & Al Pacino look like Chip n' Dale.

Happy Friday, Loserettes!

-2Truthy

Blankfein & Buffett Establish $500 Million Small Business Charity

(Click on Photo to Enlarge)

New York -- "Oracle of Omaha" Warren Buffett has announced that he is "teaming" with  Goldman Sachs to provide assistance to 10,000 small businesses in the U.S. through a $500 million charitable effort:

"The newly created “10,000 Small Businesses Initiative” will be guided by an advisory council co-chaired by Blankfein, Buffett and Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter. The council will include George Boggs, president and CEO of the American Association of Community Colleges, and Dan Danner, president and CEO of the National Federation of Independent Business.

The program will contribute $200 million to local community colleges, universities and other institutions to provide small- business owners with practical business education. Goldman Sachs will invest $300 million through a combination of lending and philanthropic support to community development financial institutions."

The article states that the initiative "aims to provide assistance -- ranging from counseling to obtaining funding -- to 10,000 businesses." Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is the largest shareholder in New York-based Goldman Sachs. Counseling and obtaining funding? For $500 million, that's got to be some  kind of gold-plated counseling for those unnamed 10,000 small businesses along with access to obtaining funding...

Good to know that Buffett and Lord Blankfein feel the need to "do the right thing" by helping all of those charitable and philanthropic GS venture-backed portfolio companies (small businesses) to potentially get their newly minted guest worker/student visa holders up to speed by packing them off to community colleges. No mention was made as to whether or not unemployed/underemployed American engineers will be eligible for participation.

-2Truthy

Everybody Knows

(Very Special Thanks to the Amazing Leonard Cohen)

Silicon Valley -- Everybody knows. Wander around the halls of this valley's once great corporations and VC funded, neo-frat boy start-ups and you will find all you need to know about the causes for rising rates of American unemployment and underemployment. Whether it's Sun or Adobe, these "best and brightest" bean-counter powered executives have sold out the livelihoods of US engineers along with product/service quality for a quick cash-out to India under the ruse of a US skilled great labor shortage. And yet, US cheap labor junkies are STILL heading for the Hill to buy off another round of politicians to supply them with their fix while Obama  plans a summit on job creation next month.

LWOH readers know that  yours truly has written extensively on the wholesale sell-out of US white collar jobs and has provided the solutions with which to correct the problem of rising unemployment/underemployment by reforming CEO cheap labor lobby practices. It's not rocket science. Sometimes, my dear, a banana is just a banana...

In this excellent 2007 article by Alison Overholt at Fast Company entitled The Labor Shortage Myth, the author debunked the thesis that "When boomers start to retire, the theory goes, we'll see a job boom" by asserting "Too bad it won't happen." Overholt suggests that CEOs have manufactured the myth of a US labor shortage where none will exist, and cites this Wharton study by Peter Capelli, as yours truly has previously discussed:

"The labor-shortage alarmists underestimate the capability of younger generations. Peter Cappelli, another Wharton professor and director of the school's Center for Human Resources, notes that even though boomers outnumber busters overall, "the cohort of college grads didn't shrink. We've just pulled more kids up into the system," he says. Some 930,000 bachelor's degrees a year were conferred at the height of the boomers' run through college -- while the smallest graduating class for busters produced 1.16 million grads. Now college-educated members of the "Echo Boom," a group close in size to the boomers themselves, are starting to enter the workforce. No evidence there of a shrinking skilled labor pool."

In addition to Capelli's thorough research, he has been one of the most consistent yet dismissed scholars on the war on America's educated middle class. Overtholt references the following quote:

"But the coming labor shortage? The job boom? They're myths, kept alive mostly because they allow employers easy solutions. "A lot of companies got whacked around in the 1990s when the economy heated up and the labor market tightened. They learned it's easier to lobby for more Indian engineers on H-1B visas than to address their own retention policies and training programs," Cappelli says."

(Note that "easy" solutions = "cheap imported labor.") Fast forward to post ARRA 2009, and the promised jobs stats don't shake out, either.

Everybody knows. Millions of educated Americans are now unemployed and underemployed due to the flood of imported cheap workers that do not need to be here. We have been played by cheap labor junkies and it's time to throw them out. The H-1B temporary work visa program has kept workers in the US when they should have been sent back years ago. Now, Compete America, the cheap labor lobby (see above link)  wants MORE of them? What is the matter with the people of this country? This is nuts.

Overholt's article inspired the visionary scenario into what CEOs across the country might do to bring back the millions of professionals they kicked to the curb by sending back the millions of temporary visa holders whom our unemployment statistics prove corporate America no longer needs. She queries the "pro-worker" reality that educated boomers (and their kids) need those jobs back here:

"With retiring age being pushed off and Social Security at risk, will labor conditions turn pro-worker at any point in the future?"

How to heal this problem? Like the crack whore it is, Corporate America and their lusty political enablers are addicted to imported cheap labor like a sex rehabilitation client is to a daily quickie with the Swedish therapist. Sending millions of temporary work visa holders home so that our citizens can get back to work may not be a sexy topic,  but it can no longer be ignored or swept under the carpet as "politically incorrect." As yours truly reported here, in 2007 Bill Greider also predicted that the US would have to  ostensibly stop the great American jobs giveaway:

"At the moment, there's a great yawn about all this, but one day when everything collapses, people will ask: Why didn't we do anything about this?"

Indeed, Overholt got it right about corporate America's dependencies on "demographic crutches":

"The real solution, of course, is more difficult. It requires companies to invest in the right technologies and in their own employees in order to stay ever more productive. It's not as sexy as a demographic crutch. It just happens to be the right answer."

So let's help Obama with his jobs summit next month by demanding that the cheap labor junkies detox from their fixes of imported labor by sending them back and getting educated Americans back to work again. This H-1B/green card  visa scam has been propped up by the lie of an American skilled labor shortage myth. Now we are in a depression, and US citizens  need jobs. This is no longer a secret.

Everybody knows.

 

-2Truthy

Obama Names USAID Czar

 More Eyes on India

For Immediate Release

Washington -- Obama has today named a 36-year-old doctor, Rajiv Shah to head the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), filling what lawmakers and aid experts had called a "glaring vacancy" on a key foreign-policy front. His impressive seniority and in-depth track record is noteworthy, suggesting deep, deep reaches into even deeper pockets. Not only has he served as undersecretary of agriculture since June, but he previously worked for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest private charity headed by Bill "Give Me Infinite H-1Bs" Gates.

The highly seasoned professional even has ties to Al Gore, Obama's very special sponsor:

"Shah, whose family emigrated from India, holds an MD and a master's in health economics and gained political experience advising Al Gore's presidential campaign on health-care policy. He was deeply involved with international vaccine efforts at the Gates Foundation and led Agriculture Department efforts on the Obama administration's food security initiative, part of a global campaign to help small farmers get more food to the hungry."

But wait...there's more! Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is said to be deeply interested in this development, "wanting to link it more to diplomacy." This worries some aid groups, which fear that projects with little short-term political payoff may be short-changed.

Obama is pledging to double foreign assistance to $50 billion a year and make non-domestic economic development a pillar of his strategy in Afghanistan and to "push for a $20 billion program in conjunction with other countries to fight hunger."

-2Truthy

2Truthy's Happy Friday Hour with Sesame Street & Loretta Lynn: The Coal Miner's Lamp

(Click on photo to enlarge)

Very Special Thanks to Sesame Street and the Amazing Loretta Lynn

In celebration of our friends over at Sesame Street who have dispensed laughter, joy and communism to us and our precious cargo for forty years, we were going to feature Loretta Lynn's timeless “Coal Miner's Daughter” but decided “Don't Come Home a Drinking'” would work better with our exclusive photos and captions.

Happy Friday, Loserettes!

-2Truthy

Middle Class Czar Joe Biden Hosts Exclusive "Stripped Dignity" Panel

Click here for lyrics to yours truly's “Everybody is a Czar”

-2Truthy
(Special thanks to Sly and the Family Stone)

Middle Class Czar Joe Biden on Stripping American Dignity

Washington – Vice President Joe “Middle Class Czar” Biden hosted a live webcast today with a panel of scholars to discuss the demise of American middle class citizens. Biden is chairman of the White House Task Force on Middle Class Families, established by President  Barack Obama earlier this year. The task force was created “to ensure the administration’s economic recovery effectively raises the living standards of middle-class families and those aspiring to be in the middle class.” The site invites questions for the Czar, and LWOH has a few below. (Yours truly likes Joe Biden and hopes he will succeed by using his gilded pulpit to not only give himself something self-important to do but to actually get results for the greater good of the non-hubris class...some of whom might actually take his Czar position in all of its grand regalia seriously.)

During the speech, Biden observed that “people have been stripped of their dignity” but insisted that the administration is not interested in redistributing wealth. (h/t Sam Stein.) Hmm. Is he talking about more labor arbitrage to”level the playing field” by reducing middle class incomes for educated citizens to cap at the paltry $40,00 per year range instead of doing the smart thing by reinstating the 91% tax rate and relieving us of U.S. corporate cheap labor junkies? Queried the Middle Class Czar:

"We aren't talking about income redistribution," he said. "We are talking about a fighting chance to make a decent income... it's about fairness. It is about simple fairness. It is about an equality of opportunity. At least that's what we are searching for. We are searching for that Holy Grail. How do we establish that level playing field?"

Back to the pressing questions for the Middle Class Czar. Let's start with electronic health records (EHRs) and the Democrats' curious refusal to bring Single Payer to the table and worse, their lust for sticking it to middle class Americans via a cost prohibitive mandated health insurance scam that will, in the words of Obama, stop middle class Americans who don't have insurance because they can't afford it from “gaming the system.” Why is the Obama administration so hell bent on forcing Americans to buy unaffordable health insurance and to subsidize the same corporate technocrats who pander to the cheap labor lobby that refuses to hire educated Americans in favor of cheap imported labor? Read more on this research from yours truly in this recent article Electronic Health Records (EHRs) No Cure-All.)

There's a gold rush in them thar hills, and a few technocrats smell a big, fat taxpayer-funded bonanza at the insufferable elitist BBQ pit – at the expense of the jobs and health of educated America's beaten down middle class. The creation and taxpayer subsidization of half-baked venture backed technologies is nothing new, but when it comes at the expense of health and jobs for middle class Americans, its forced expansion into the domain of health care providers has raised concern from some of the nations finest physicians and organizations. Indeed, the shake down on the nation's physicians is so mighty that even the Huffington Post's “Investigative Fund” has teamed with American University's Investigative Workshop in today's post entitled Stimulus fuels Gold Rush for Electronic Health Systems. (h/t Fred Schulte.)

What could Biden really do to represent middle class Americans? As U.S. taxpayers bankroll or subsidize private electronic medical records technology firms (many whose employees and contractors are not U.S. citizens but imported workers), a few elementary questions for Czar Biden include: “So, to the tune of an estimated $50 billion, where is our Single Payer health care bill?” And “Does Biden represent the portfolio class of corporate technocrats whose business plans revolve around kicking America's educated white collar middle class to the curb via offshoring/onshoring U.S. jobs to foreign workers?” Naturally, the next question is “What are you doing to stop these corporations from importing cheap labor so Americans can get back to work to pay for this craptastic, cost-prohibitive mandated coverage?” Finally “Since most doctors don't want these EHRs, why are you meddling?”

Of all the pressing needs that middle class Americans face today, access to a non-mandated, universal health care system and good paying jobs for its citizenry displaced by imported workers are most critical. Both issues are intrinsically related. Now that the Huffington Post's tentacles have finally gripped the ongoing research of yours truly regarding the stealth taxpayer funded EHRs diverting money from universal health care coverage for all, the corporate sponsored nature surrounding the “health care debate” appears to have much more to do with taxpayer funded, private corporate welfare sponsored growth than preserving health and avoiding financial ruin via a much overdue Single Payer health care system.

Schulte describes the voracious corporate sales push to hustle the same physicians that American middle class citizens depend upon to provide them health care here:

“A super group of major tech firms has banded together and hit the road with what they call a "stimulus tour" to boost sales. So far, the tour, which includes officials from Microsoft, Dell and Allscripts-Misys Healthcare Solutions, has played in more than 30 cities. It stops at local convention centers and hotels, where it holds seminars for doctors. Those who attend receive a "customized stimulus analysis of how much money your practice could earn in federal incentives."

Perhaps Czar Biden, in his role of middle class protectorate can explain how to bust up the toga party between this taxpayer funded, consumer driven private health care medical industrial complex and its evil twin, the American job sacking machine (h/t to EndH1B.com) to restore community and civility to our country's broken, for-profit government run by neo-frat boy corporate elites. Until Biden proves otherwise, that's the group our Middle Class Czar appears to represent.

-2Truthy

Health Care Debate Focuses on Legal Immigration

Will Health Care Debate Offer Fix to Corporate America's Cheap Labor Junkies?

Will legalized immigration mainline a cure-all for corporate America's smackheads? Today's New York Times article Health Care Debate Focuses on Legal Immigrants by Julia Preston reports that bipartisan lawmakers are “wrangling” over how much health coverage “to provide for immigrants who have settled in the country legally.” The article only mentions Latino immigration and not other legal immigration from countries like India who might also be eligible for subsidies under the debated health care reforms for legal immigrants. Meanwhile, Microsoft today announced it has cut an additional 800 jobs, up from its previous estimate of 5,000 by 2010 in the company's round of layoffs. An MS spokesman said positions being eliminated “will affect staff internationally and in a range of business units.” As local U.S. unemployment rates rise and millions of people lose Cobra benefits, how will the current health care debate for reform help millions of unemployed/underemployed citizens and immigrants (legal and illegal) obtain access to affordable health care?

Let's face it. Corporate America wants cheap workers, who tend to work better if they're healthy - especially when corporate America can get U.S. taxpayers to pick up the tab while still holding onto  hard won tax shelters, cuts and cheap labor loopholes. The NY Times article reports that Latino leaders are exclusively worried that Congress “might quietly cut back benefits” for legal immigrants, and provides this health policy analysis below:

“They don’t want to get on government benefits because they don’t trust the government and they don’t want to do anything to damage their chances to become citizens,” said Sonal Ambegaokar, health policy analyst at the National Immigration Law Center, an immigrant advocate group in California.”

What health care provisions will be made for H-1B visa holders who are laid off and don't go home? (here is a global health insurance 800 number.) As cheap labor lobbyists in California would vigorously attest, removing the proposed five-year wait for Medicare and Medicaid that was first imposed on legal permanent residents as part of the federal welfare overhaul in 1996 would greatly help the state's neo-frat boy feudal slave lords complete their purge of dreadful American middle class citizens from employee payroll and benefits roles:

 “Some Republicans favor excluding immigrants who have been legal permanent residents for less than five years, as well as all illegal immigrants. Democrats broadly agree that illegal immigrants should be excluded, but many want all legal permanent residents to be able to participate inproposed {sic} health insurance exchanges and receive subsidized coverage if they qualify.”

Leave it to the physicians, who are our communities' first line of intelligent and compassionate defense when it comes to truly understanding the vital need for an accessible and affordable health care system for all. U.C.L.A.'s Dr. Michael A. Rodriguez explains here:

“They may have conditions that don’t get identified and infectious diseases that could be prevented that put the public at risk, and they may need to use higher cost hospital services when other services become inaccessible.” 

 

How true. People get sick, regardless of make, color or creed, and no human being should ever suffer the indignity of being denied access to quality health care. Who will pay for it? Will corporate America's cheap labor junkies start opening their wallets? Isn't it time to bring back the 91% tax rate or will this tab be picked up via looting what's left of the American middle class?

The most important lesson to be learned from our leading economists is this: Healthy serfs make for happy feudal slave lords with even healthier, heftier, mud flap-sized bottom lines. For every one American citizen who is replaced by 4-8 cheap, imported workers, 89,000 champagne corks are popping inside boardrooms and brothels all across the state of California, creating more jobs for derivatives beast creators, pseudo-technocrats, displaced hookers, and the French liquor industry. Not to mention Afghanistan's poppy field entrepreneurs.

 

Like the old Irish song goes:

“When immigrants' eyes are smiling, feudal slave lords' are smiling more...in the hubris halls of Woodside, you can hear the laughter roar...”

Party on, plebes!

-2Truthy

Robert Reich Omits Solution for Getting Americans Back to Work

“While affordable health care is criticially {sic} important to Americans, making a living is more urgent.”

-Robert Reich

Robert Reich Neglects to Mention Real Solution for Getting Americans Back to Work

On the face of it, the title of Robert Reich's post Health Care Reform is Critically Important, But Getting Americans Back to Work is More So would appear to summarize what yours truly has been saying over and over again: It's not the Economy, Stupid. It's YOUR JOB. As I have said before, affordable health care for Americans is not an issue as long as they have good jobs. But Reich's post misses the mark entirely about the real causes behind American unemployment/underemployment and for the necessary solution to get Americans back to work.

In his post, Reich is now concerned that Obama's “confused priorities” have led to overspent political capital focused on health care reform instead of “getting Americans back to work” and explains:

“Obama's focus on health care rather than jobs, when the economy is still so fragile and unemployment moving toward double digits, could make it appear that the administration has its priorities confused. While affordable health care is critically important to Americans, making a living is more urgent. Yet the administration's efforts to date on this more basic concern have been neither particularly visible nor coherent.”

If Reich is so concerned about Obama getting Americans back to work, his post handily neglects to answer the obvious question: How is Obama going to get Americans back to work when our elected leaders and their corporate frat boy, neo-feudal corporate paymasters profit legally by giving those jobs to imported workers instead of our own educated citizens via their insider payday machine known as the Cash Cow of Indian Outsourcing?

Last week, the White House issued a new report claiming that the Stimulus Bill saved or created roughly 650,000 U.S. jobs, while during the same period, the federal government has imported more than a million working-age foreign citizens (h/t/ NumbersUSA) “to negate every positive impact the stimulus could have had for U.S. workers.”

Not only does Reich fail to mention corporate America's organized assault on ridding U.S. middle class professionals of their jobs, he also argues that the stimulus package should have been larger, despite the fact that Wall Street is doing great but Main Street and its people are suffering:

“The current rate of unemployment would have been even higher were it not for the federal stimulus package, but the stimulus should have been much larger.”

Confused priorities from Obama, or more obfuscation and denial from Reich regarding the ongoing purge of white collar, educated Americans from U.S. corporations and plummeting wages via the ensuing labor arbitrage? The Obama administration understands that health care reform (in the form of anything that includes the word "reform") is a shiny bullet point on this administration's resume, irregardless if it does nothing to save  millions of Americans from health and fiscal crises.

What Mr. Reich fails to mention is that we do not need MORE stimulus money as he proposes, but we need the U.S. government and corporate America to stop giving away U.S. jobs to imported workers when there are not enough jobs for educated white collar Americans. When Reich wants to finally get serious about reporting the real reason why Obama isn't “getting Americans back to work”, below are the numbers and facts from this NumbersUSA article entitled White House Claims 'Stimulus' Saved/Created 650,000 Jobs (but it imported 1,125,000 foreign workers at same time) to help him and Obama get their “priorities straight”:

“NumbersUSA has tried since last November to persuade the news media to monthly report how many working-age foreign citizens are getting first-time work permits from the feds.

It remains the great national secret because the U.S. news media -- from the liberal to the conservative wing -- won't report these facts.

Click here to see the full calculations and sources for these figures.”

Reich asserts “While affordable health care is criticially {sic} important to Americans, making a living is more urgent.” OK. I'll buy that. As I have said, “Pay Americans well and the health care funds will follow.” But about that jobs thing? For a guy who is supposed to know something about numbers and the economy, it is hard to believe that Reich can't grasp and articulate the simple answer to the problem of importing workers for U.S. jobs when there are not enough of them to employ our own citizens. Perhaps that is precisely the plan, after all?

-2Truthy