Tag: jobs

Memo to Code Brown

Hey, what do you know, the stimulus worked, added jobs, and increased real, inflation adjusted GDP relative to the GOP approach: don’t do anything (aka: go die in the streets):

CBO estimates that in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2009, ARRA added between 1.0 million and 2.1 million to the number of workers employed in the United States, and it increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by between 1.4 million and 3.0 million. Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers. CBO also estimates that real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) was 1.5 percent to 3.5 percent higher in the fourth quarter than would have been the case in the absence of ARRA.

Code Brown: PAM

ryking reports that:

the Teabaggers were going apeshit over Brown’s vote for the jobs bill on Twitter and I almost wet myself laughing at the vitriol. I guess these imbeciles thought he’d vote like a typical GOP automaton. News flash, imbeciles: Brown knows he won a protest vote in Massachusetts; he wants to be re-elected after he serves out the last two years of Ted Kennedy’s term so he can’t — and therefore won’t — march in goosestep, er, LOCKSTEP, with the America-hating GOP.

I wish I thought this was an accurate analysis. Unfortunately, I’d say this is an example of the GOP leadership knowing that a lockstep vote here, coming hot on the heels of the Brown mania, would be an all-too-clear and inescapable indictment of their current anti-democratic ways.
Of a piece with that, repeatedly bottling up jobs bills just isn’t going to play for any of them. Thus, Brown is given the go-ahead to vote for cloture, and a few of the moderate GOPers also scurry in to join him. The key vote, though, comes later: when the bill will pass 98-0 or some-such. The GOP Senate knows well that people don’t pay attention to anything, and certainly not the vagaries of cloture votes. No price will be paid for their delaying or otherwise weakening bills; after all, the GOPers can still just run on having voted “for” it in the end. They know that neither will their enablers in the media ever bring up the inconvenient cloture votes nor will the Democrat ever stoop to being so impolite as to mention such a thing in public.

It’s basically stimulus 2.0: take all the glory of anything that works or turns out to be popular, while doing none of the actual policy work needed to bring it about. In fact, you fight all that every step of the way and use the legislative mayhem to further inculcate the sense that DC is fundamentally off the rails. Rest easy that nobody on any side of the aisle or in the media will say or do anything about it. It’s an entirely cost free position that, so far anyway, is working like a charm.

So, no. I don’t feel the need to advance our Code Brown independent vote counter past 0. That happens in the unlikely event of his taking a difficult stand, one clearly against the leadership’s wishes. When FOXnews hollers about a vote, or he’s forced to apologize for some perceived slight, or prostrate himself before Rush: then and only then the 0dometer will advance. And sorry, it’s just not going to happen.

Just about everyone

America: satisfied to be number two. Or ten; or even just outside the top-25 somewheres, but who can keep count?

While China (and others) use the current downturn to invest heavily in their infrastructure, we in the United States use it to line up for group photos and pat ourselves on the back for the political savvy it took to stop any kind of productive jobs bill from getting through and but still allowing some “jobs” bill to get through such that we don’t look like obstructionist asshats (it’s our “play of the week”, Bill!). Oh, wait, did I say “we”? I meant the GOP.

Anywho, worth repeating:

a Chinese official [reportedly told] him “over the past decade you’ve spent $1 trillion on Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve spent $1 trillion building the future of China”

You’d think a politician somewhere would grab this concept that seemingly combines 52 different concerns into a simple, understandable concept that can be stated in one sentence, and then use that sentence to craft a new politics of American progress, building infrastructure and other actually useful projects that both provide jobs today and also create the greased skids of tomorrow’s economic growth. But, no. Can’t do that here. Just like most other things China is, you know, actually doing.

It’s going to be a long, slow slog back up. America:Britain::1900:2015. Welcome to functional irrelevancy.

Code Brown

Boston NPR was predictably atwitter this morning on the news that Scott Brown accelerated his swearing in. What they got through without ever saying, even once, is that he most likely was doing so such that he can be there to vote in lockstep with the GOP to block such critical world-changing policy points as who is going to head the NLRB. Goddamned Liberal Media bias working against us once again.
Brown is genuinely staving off the utter collapse of The Republic by keeping somebody notionally pro-union out of the chairman’s seat over to the labor board. So this “independent” will undoubtedly go 0-4 on the independent thinking front in week one, likely also helping to stop a jobs initiative. And, as Lord Jesus well knows, politically independent Americans have no taste for job creation, no matter how anemic or government sourced those jobs may be. We just don’t want new jobs. Why can’t the fat-cats in Washington understand that? Probably because many of them don’t drive trucks.

Will he be asked about this 0-4 first week, even once? Of course he won’t. Will the Globe add a front-page feature counting days, months, years without a non-GOP lockstep vote on Brown’s part? Of course they won’t. Will enterprising reporters get into his face this week and ask for the deep policy explanations that underlie his supposedly independent stance that just happens to perfectly align with GOP political plays this week, and thus be ready to call him out as either a fool or a fraud? Of course they won’t.

Here’s your Scott Brown “independent” vote counter, brazenly predicted two years in advance and carved into the electronic firmament for all to see: 0.