A Five-Point Jobs Plan for the Economic Recovery of the People, and not just the Corporations & Stock Market

In order to keep the U.S. from following the path of Herbert Hoover into another depression, the Economic Policy Institute and the AFL-CIO have offered a clear path to a real jobs and national recovery, rather than just a corporate recovery.

We hope President Obama will follow this clear path to recovery, since anything less robust than this will be repeating either the mistakes of Herbert Hoover during the early 1930s, or of the Japanese during their "lost decade" of the 1990s.

A lukewarm response to the jobs crisis will fail to restore the more than 10,000,000 jobs lost during the last two years. A piecemeal, dribbled response will condemn the U.S. to a perpetually high unemployment rate, and will be a disaster not only for the millions of people condemned to joblessness, but for the entire national economy and the political prospects of the Democratic party.

From the AFL-CIO:

America Needs Jobs Now

No one needs to tell America’s families that unemployment and underemployment are at crisis levels. We need jobs—and we need them now.

Wall Street has gotten its bailouts. Now it’s time for Main Street to get some immediate help.

The AFL-CIO is calling on Congress and the Obama administration to take five steps now to care for the jobless and put America back to work.

1. Extend the lifeline for jobless workers. Unless Congress acts now, supplemental unemployment benefits, additional food assistance and expansion of COBRA health care benefits will expire at the end of the year. They must be extended for another 12 months to prevent working families from bankruptcy, home foreclosure and loss of health care. Extending benefits also will boost personal spending and create jobs throughout the economy.

2. Rebuild America’s schools, roads and energy systems. America still has at least $2.2 trillion in unmet infrastructure needs. We should put people to work to fix our nation’s broken-down school buildings and invest in transportation, green technology, energy efficiency and more.

3. Increase aid to state and local governments to maintain vital services. State and local governments and school districts have a $178 billion budget shortfall this year alone—while the recession creates greater need for their services. States and communities must get help to maintain critical frontline services, prevent massive job cuts and avoid deep damage to education just when our children need it most.

4. Put people to work doing work that needs to be done. If the private sector can't or won't provide the needed jobs, the government should step up to the plate, putting people who need jobs together with work that needs to be done. These should never be replacements for existing public jobs. They must pay competitive wages and should target distressed communities.

5. Put TARP funds to work for Main Street.The bank bailout helped Wall Street, not Main Street. We should put some of the billions of dollars in leftover Troubled Asset Relief Program funds to work creating jobs by enabling community banks to lend money to small- and medium-size businesses. If small businesses can get credit, they will create jobs.

America’s jobs situation would be even more dire without the economic stimulus program President Obama and Congress enacted, which has saved or created 1 million jobs. But the depth of this crisis demands that we do more—and that we do it now, before more people lose their jobs, their homes, their health care and their hope.

See chart: The Gap In The Labor Market


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Five-Point Plan for U.S. Recovery: American Jobs Plan

In addition to the AFL-CIO, the Economic Policy Institute has a similar Five-Point Plan, backed up by research to support each of its key points for moving the U.S. Economy into a Path to real recovery--

The United States is experiencing its worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression. Nearly 16 million Americans—our family, friends, and neighbors—are out of work. This national crisis demands a bold plan to put people back to work. The Economic Policy Institute proposes the American Jobs Plan, a plan that would create at least 4.6 million jobs in one year.

Here you will find EPI's comprehensive research and analysis of the jobs crisis—how severe it has grown and why—and the details of EPI's American Jobs Plan.

In order to put Detroiters and Michigan residents back to work, we need a robust national American Jobs and Recovery Plan, not the wimpy excuse for a plan just passed by Congress....

Detroit's Katrina: Where is the National Response to Assist Detroit's Residents in Rebuilding Their City?

From "Community-Based Preparedness" (Oct. 14, 2009)

On October 7, an estimated 30-50,000 Detroit residents descended on Cobo Hall in downtown Detroit--not to escape the ravages of a hurricane, but with the simple hope of being able to escape the increasing ravages of homelessness and hunger that are threatening many of Detroit's residents.

This human surge was a response to news that 3500 federal grants were available to assist city residents needing temporary housing assistance to avoid homelessness. This is how badly the residents of Detroit are hurting. But they've been hurting for a long time--so long, in fact, that the nation seems to yawn whenever they hear another story like this one, which hit the headlines only days after TIME magazine's lead cover story on "The Tragedy of Detroit."

Detroit has been drawing a lot of media attention over the last year, and has now even "earned" for itself the "honor" of a Detroit office for TIME magazine with a front page cover titled "The Tragedy of Detroit" that launched its one-year "Assignment Detroit" project. This project will feature Detroit-area stories over the next year.

But while the "tragedy" of Detroit has been receiving news coverage, along with a lot of freelance photographic coverage of its decaying urban architecture, the slow-moving tsunami that has devastated Detroit's human population over the last decade has received no national or federal response similar to the kind New Orleans received after the Katrina disaster.

While Katrina devastated New Orleans in a single week in August 2005, Detroit has been in crisis for decades, the victim of repeated waves of slow-moving economic "hurricanes" that have left Detroit's physical and human infrastructure severely damaged. And of course this damage has only been magnified over the last year by the triple hurricane of the national economic recession, the crisis of the auto industry, and a series of local governmental scandals that have virtually paralyzed Detroit government for more than a year.

Detroit's citizens have been needing an effective and responsive government, and we can now hope that the long series of elections of Mayor and City Council in 2009 will yield the kind of government in 2010 that will work with, rather than against, the community and its energy and capacity to bring about change in Detroit. While more efficiency in government spending is clearly necessary, this efficiency cannot be achieved by cutting the basic services needed by Detroit's residents, such as public transportation, which are already at bare-bones levels.

Meanwhile, the nation seems to react to every story of about the Detroit "tragedy" with a collective yawn.

Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans suddenly, and its devastating impact--largely the result of human neglect and failed response--was highlighted every night on the national news for weeks at a time. President Bush's miserably failed leadership in response to this crisis helped to raise New Orleans to the center of national consciousness, and it became a symbol of the racialized impacts of bad policy, neglect, and the poor planning that made the nation take the Katrina disaster in New Orleans to its heart, and respond in kind. For a moment, at least, the nation even seemed to admit that in spite of its desire to be colorblind, racial inequities and racism were still major determining factors in American life.

Detroit is a twin sister to New Orleans, not only in its French heritage, but in its suffering as a result of the racialized impacts of bad policy, neglect, and poor planning over many decades. Yet Detroit is the twin sister whose major needs have been all but ignored by the nation--even though the needs of its citizens, and of the city as a whole, are just as great, and perhaps even greater now, than those of New Orleans.

The twinned collapse of the national economy and the local auto economy have left Detroit with a depression-level 30% unemployment rate, and a rate of housing abandonment that probably surpasses that of any other city in the nation. Without having suffered the destruction of the wall of water that devastated the lower ninth ward in NOLA, significant parts of Detroit closely resemble NOLA's most devastated ward.

But where is the national surge of response to help Detroit's residents, its nonprofit organizations, and its local government to recover from this disaster?

We need a national recovery program that will fund the many nonprofit organizations and residents in Detroit to put the city back to work rebuilding itself. As someone who has gotten to know many of the amazing people and organizations in Detroit who have been doing great work under the most trying circumstances for many years with very limited resources, I've seen the great things that are possible for Detroit--if only the nation will move beyond simply telling the story of Detroit's tragedy, and will instead move to funding Detroit's recovery.

Detroiters are ready to rebuild their beloved city. They have the passion, the energy, the commitment, and the vision for rebuilding. All they need is some help with the financial resources, which have been drained from the city for several decades.

The nation and much of the rest of the state of Michigan has stood idly by for decades and watched the city decline. Some, but not all, of Detroit's problems have been self-inflicted. The state of Michigan is now in almost as desperate an economic condition as Detroit, so has not been able to extend much help to Detroit in the current crisis. And so Detroit's recovery requires and demands a national response.

Its time for the nation to stop yawning, and to start doing what is necessary to lift up the city that was once the arsenal of its democracy. Its citizens can make the city great again, with a bit of help from their fellow citizens across the nation, and from our shared federal government.

So let this be an appeal for shared labor and collective national investment in the future of Detroit and its residents. For the fate of Detroit over the next several years will signal, in many ways, the fate of our entire nation.