American competitiveness is severely hobbled by our "free market" and anti-government attitudes. One way our competitors hold us back is by encouraging this outdated ideology. Result: other countries have national economic/industrial strategies and we don't. So we lose.

Remember how "chips" was a major driver of the economy in the 80s and 90s? Then the Internet drove the economy late 90's and early 2000s? The world understands that "green energy" is the next big industry that will drive the world economy. Actually, the rest of the world has understood this for some time and has been investing and inventing and innovating and building. Meanwhile over here America's big oil and coal companies bought themselves a Presidency and an anti-government ideology and a climate-change-denial industry that has cost us 8 years and counting.

Now we're playing catch-up, and the rest of the world is determined to keep us from taking the lead.

In The Big Chickens Keep Coming Home to Roost, Leo Hindrey writes about the Chinese plan to buy part of the wind-generation arm of a company called AES,

China's state-controlled investment fund, China Investment Corp. (CIC), plans to invest $2.2 billion to acquire 15% of the stock and, forebodingly, 35% of the actual wind-generation business of AES, the Arlington, VA-based company that is deeply involved in developing and managing vital aspects of our nation's critical infrastructure - specifically, our power grids, electricity transmission and alternative energy production.

Hindrey expects China to use its stake in this company to get them to buy components from Chinese instead of American companies, as they help grow the American green grid.

...anyone who has ever been in business knows that a massive 35% ownership stake will inevitably create "incentives" for Chinese-sourced products to be used in AES's projects here in the U.S., incentives which will undercut our domestic innovation and against which no fair-dealing American manufacturer can easily compete.

. . . And strong evidence of this predisposition can be found in the new Chinese-sponsored $1.5 billion wind farm in Texas that recently applied to the federal government for financing from the stimulus package - a wind farm that will create only 30 permanent jobs in the U.S. but 2,000 to 3,000 permanent jobs in China where the wind turbines will be manufactured.

This will means lots and lots of jobs going to China. His solution?

Rather than allowing CIC and others to, on the one hand, use U.S. tax dollars to stimulate their economies and, on the other, often acquire the very technologies which represent much of our future jobs opportunity, our government needs to start buying American, bolstering domestic manufacturing, and protecting our intellectual property.

American competitiveness is severely hobbled by our "free market" and anti-government attitudes. Other countries have national economic/industrial strategies and we don't. Please read this from Hindrey:

In the world today, there are two general sets of business and trade rules. One set resides in the older developed countries, such as the U.S. and Europe, where companies still compete mostly on their own on the basis of their business acumen and product value differentiation. The other set resides in the world's largest emerging markets, most notably China, where there are elaborate policies to protect domestic enterprises, induce foreign corporations to shift their production facilities and technology to them, and anoint selected "champions" as the nations' chosen global competitors - and, as we are seeing with the AES deal, make overseas investments that gobble up competing facilities and technologies.

It is crucial to our future to understand that the rest of the world is moving ahead full-speed with the green revolution and that our competitors have developed national strategies where their governments work to guide/assist and grow their businesses to this end. And we have not. We are held back from this by our "free market" belief that it is "wrong" for our own government to help our own people and businesses.

One way our competitors hold us back is by encouraging this internal American "free market" and anti-government ideology. When we tried to get a "Buy American" requirement in the stimulus plan our competitors cried "protectionism" - so we weakened it. The result was that our stimulus dollars created lots of jobs - in other countries! One Texas wind farm deal, for example,

The group’s calculations last week put the number of American jobs at a little more than 300 — most of them temporary construction jobs, along with about 30 permanent positions once the wind farm is operating. Mr. McGarr told The Wall Street Journal that more than 2,000 Chinese jobs would be created by the deal.

Look, it is time to just drop this ideological nonsense. Just stop listening to these self-serving ideologues and leave it behind. The free-market deregulation nonsense created the conditions that caused the economic collapse. We know that. Leave it behind. The anti-government nonsense is holding us back from repairing our economy and developing strategies to take part in the green manufacturing revolution. We know that. Leave it behind.

When people keep telling you that the earth is flat and demanding that we follow flat-earth policies that keep harming us and holding us back, over and over, you finally have to stop listening to them and leave them behind. It's time. Let's start doing what organized, intelligent adults should be doing: taking care of each other, empowering each other, bringing each other up. That is what government is and that is what it can do if we let it. Let's give it a try.

STATEMENT BY AFL-CIO PRESIDENT RICHARD TRUMKA
ON PRESIDENT OBAMA'S PROPOSALS TO ACCELERATE JOB GROWTH
December 8, 2009

President Obama is right:  We must take urgent steps to create jobs.  
And we must fundamentally rebuild our economy so we never again face
the unnerving financial meltdown that confronted President Obama and
all of America when he took office in January.  While Wall Street is
busy cashing their bonus checks, now is the time for immediate action
to stabilize the economy for struggling working Americans on Main
Street.  

We will be working hard and nonstop to help President Obama and
responsible leaders in Congress succeed in creating jobs now. We must
ensure that any plan is big and robust enough to meet the scale of the
crisis we face.  

I am encouraged that President Obama and his team are proposing many of
 the same steps that we see as the most promising, efficient routes to
job creation.  The AFL-CIO has proposed a 5-point plan that includes
putting TARP funds to work for Main Street by making it available to
provide credit to small business; extending the lifeline of
unemployment benefits, food assistance and COBRA benefits for jobless
workers; rebuilding America's schools, roads and energy systems;
increasing aid to state and local governments to maintain vital
services and prevent the layoffs of teachers, firefighters and police
and putting people to work doing work that needs to be done.  

As the AFL-CIO works with Congress and the administration to implement
our five point plan we do not believe that tax credits are the most
effective way to create jobs and should not be the main priority for
spending public funds.

For more information go to www.aflcio.org/createjobs

From Bloomberg, we learn how China is pushing an ambitious domestic clean economy agenda, planning large scale projects that will keep their citizens employed and civil unrest at bay.

A 20 gigawatt wind farm that will be the world's largest is scheduled for completion by 2020 and, as the Bloomberg article also notes, the country will also be building the world's largest solar installation and embarking on an enormous reforestation project. (They've either been paying attention to the latest research indicating that forests can attract their own rain, or they're just sick to the teeth of the dust storms. Either way, they're being proactive.) For a country that doesn't want to be tied to binding international targets, China's still doing a good job of jumping into the climate problem with both feet.

How could we get there?

First, we obviously have very different economic and social considerations. China has high labor flexibility because they're bringing a lot of people up from nothing and they've made a point of creating jobs for their majority of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, so they've developed a track record of delivering on employment promises. The US job market experience over the past three decades has largely been one of trading downwards in both job quality and availability, leaving an electorate that's sensibly distrustful of the elite's willingness to secure new opportunities for them. Being at different points in our cultural dialogue, the exact same solutions aren't going to work in both countries.

But what about the New Deal, or the Danish model? At the previous link, Meteor Blades of Daily Kos discusses the need for new approaches at the president's upcoming jobs summit and quotes Robert Kuttner, from his book, Obama's Challenges:

On the one hand, the Danes are passionate free traders. They score well in the ratings constructed by pro-market organizations. The World Economic Forum Competitiveness Index ranks Denmark third, just behind the United States and Switzerland, and even the far-right Heritage Foundation ranks Denmark eleventh, giving it demerits only for the size of its public sector. Denmark’s financial markets are clean and transparent, its barrier to imports minimal, its labor markets the most flexible in Europe, its multinational corporations dynamic and largely unmolested by industry policies, and its unemployment rate of 2.8 percent, the lowest in the OECD. [Now 4.1%, and the lowest in the OECD – MB.]

On the other hand, Denmark spends about 50 percent of its GDP socially and has the world’s second-highest tax rate after Sweden, as well as strong trade unions and one of the world’s most equal income distributions. For the half of the GDP that they pay in taxes, the Danes get not just universal health insurance but also generous child-care and family-leave arrangements, unemployment compensation that typically covers around 95 percent of lost wages, free higher education, secure pensions in old age, and the world’s most creative system of worker retraining.

What makes the flexicurity model both attractive to workers and dynamic for society are six key features: full employment; strong unions recognized as social partners; fairly equal wages among different sectors, so that a shift from manufacturing to service-sector work does not typically entail a pay cut; employer freedom to hire and fire as necessary; a comprehensive income floor; and a set of labor-market programs that spend an astonishing 4.5 percent of Danish GDP on programs such as transitional unemployment assistance, wage subsidies, and highly customized retraining. In return for such spending, the unions actively support both employer flexibility and a set of tough rules to weed out welfare chiselers; workers are understood to have duties as well as rights.

Danish workers don't have to be afraid of losing their jobs, or switching jobs, or of being abused by their employers. Denmark clearly has the labor market flexibility and high employment that the Chinese prioritize, but without any of that unpleasant social unrest. Everybody gets what they want, nobody gets left behind.

Why won't we do that? More, why won't we do that so our industrial sector can fearlessly retool to profit from the biggest challenge our species faces?

Climate change is now responsible for so many natural disasters that it's already a major humanitarian crisis. Coastal cities may be washed away, flooding and shifting rainfall threatens food security, and melting ice is already causing water shortages that are projected to get worse.

Solving each of these problems is a job opportunity for millions of people. Indeed, because of the persistent truth that it takes more effort to fix a problem than to avoid it, humans have created an enormous amount of work for ourselves.

All the reasons to move fast on transitioning to an efficient, clean, renewable energy economy are good ones. There's no labor shortage preventing the work from getting underway at once. Most of our international competitors are doing it and making loads of money at it. So again, what's the hold up?

Update: And if we needed one more reason to act urgently to create these new industries, Nouriel Roubini, one of the economists exiled to the hinterlands of polite opinion for the crime of being right, says that under business as usual, the jobs aren't coming back for years. That's a major problem for political incumbents anywhere in the world.

I'm no brilliant, 11th dimensional chess player, but it seems to me that unless Democrats want to fall prey to a 'throw the bums out' sentiment in the next election, they'd better get moving on job creation with a powerful quickness.

It's Time to Put Jobs First

We've got a jobs crisis in this country, and we need to fix it—now!

This fact shouldn't come as a surprise—in fact, a look around our nation makes it painfully obvious. The "official" unemployment rate is 10.2 percent--that's one in every 10 workers without a job—but that doesn't include the millions who have been unemployed and discouraged in the long term, and the millions more who are barely getting by with part-time work.

While millions go without work, some people are talking about "recovery"—as though numbers on Wall Street or profits at the big banks are the same as the real economy for working families. Wrong. We're still in crisis--and if we don't create jobs now, we will slide even further.

We have to put America to work—at good jobs that support families. We've tried out the everything-must-go, trickle-down, bubble economy for the past decade, and it's been a disaster. If we're really going to have a recovery--not just a recovery on Wall Street or for the big banks, but for real people—we absolutely must create new jobs.

Last summer at an event in Ohio, I met a young woman who is facing this crisis head-on. Lacey, who is not yet 20 years old, wants to become a teacher. But after her dad's factory closed and he was laid off, she had to put off her hopes of attending college to help her parents keep a roof over their heads. Lacey took a job in a school cafeteria--until the state budget got cut, and she got laid off, too. After months in which she and her father were both searching for jobs, Lacey said she felt lucky to find a part-time, fast-food job that pays half of what the cafeteria paid. Lacey has more unemployed friends than friends with jobs, and, like a third of workers her age, she's still living with her parents. Here's what Lacey said to me that day:

I wanted to be a teacher to help children get the education they need to get ahead. But now I feel like I'm just going backward myself. I'm really scared for the kids my age. We want to work. We need jobs.

We owe Lacey our support. We owe Lacey and millions like her a future to be hopeful about—not one to be feared. Lacey and her generation could find their future permanently stunted, their potential never fully met. That's unacceptable. We can't afford to let that happen.

The recovery package passed by Congress this year was a major accomplishment, and it saved our country a million jobs, but it only takes us part of the way toward repairing the damage done to our economy. We need serious, active investment in job creation. Our economy has lost more than 8 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007--that's a big hole to fill.

What does our jobs agenda look like? It's based on five key points that will give working families the help they need now and set us on a better course in the long term. Congress and the Obama administration must take these steps to turn around our dangerous slide.

1. We must extend the lifeline for jobless workers. The families who have been hit by this economic crisis are at risk of losing unemployment benefits, food assistance and health care benefits at the end of the year. We need to act now to prevent the human suffering and economic damage that would result.
2. Rebuild America's schools, roads and energy systems. We must 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 a178 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. Fund jobs in our communities. While workers go without jobs, important work is left undone in our communities. These are not 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. The administration can act on this immediately.

Families like Lacey's are hurting, and they need support. Millions are losing not only their jobs but also their homes, their health care and their hope. We can't afford to do nothing—America's working families are demanding action now and we intend to fight for them. We'll work with businesses, government and community organizations to make a jobs agenda a reality. We'll call out and fight back against those who would block progress, and we'll work hard to support leaders who do the right thing.

We need jobs now.

.

You have seen it. The plastic bucket beside the cash register at the convenience store. A photo is taped to it. A child needs an operation. His father lost his job. The family lost its insurance. They are about to lose their home. Can you spare some change?

What civilized country operates like this? In case God-and-country defenders of the status quo need reminding, America’s for-profit health insurance system serves neither.

Reform advocates must hammer away at this relentlessly: health insurance reform is a moral issue more than an economic one.

Nicholas Kristof delivered further proof that the system is morally bankrupt in the October 4 New York Times.

Travis and Michael Waddington hoped to donate a kidney to their father, David, 58, a wine retailer and victim of polycystic kidney disease. PKD had destroyed David’s kidneys. Since the disease is genetic, Travis and Michael needed to be tested for the disease themselves before donating. Yet a positive result might mean the sons might never be able to get insurance. So their doctors advised against getting tested. Another advised getting tested under fictitious names. To protect their sons, husband and wife shot down the idea, even at the risk of David’s life.

Eventually, David received a kidney from a deceased donor, but Michael recently began experiencing PKD symptoms and now faces an insurance nightmare now all too familiar, obtaining affordable insurance – or any insurance – after being diagnosed with a serious illness.

Closer to home, an acquaintance recently donated a kidney to his father under somewhat different circumstances, but with similar risks. Such acts of mercy by organ donors (talk about risky behavior) present insurers with an elective pre-existing condition, and present donors with a moral dilemma. Fortunately, his father’s insurance covered both transplant surgeries. But both the son’s own physician and the transplant surgeons recommended that he say nothing to his insurer. It was illegal to deny coverage or insurance to organ donors, doctors told him. Nonetheless, they often heard of it happening.

Why tempt fate? He told his insurer nothing.

Kristoff calls an insurance system that forces patients into such impossible choices, “the disgrace of the industrialized world.”

But that’s putting it mildly. As T.R. Reid puts it in The Healing of America, our system is virtually a worldwide laughingstock. One thing on which experts at international health care symposia can agree, Reid explains, is that the U.S. for-profit insurance system is a mess. “Bashing the U.S. system is a standard agenda item.”

Joanne Ford, a patient on Social Security disability and wearing Coke-bottle eyeglasses, arrived for a Remote Area Medical free clinic in Knoxville. She came hoping to get a new pair for free. But nearly last in line, she almost missed her chance. Interviewed by 60 Minutes, Ford said tearfully, “I am sad that we are the wealthiest nation in the world and we don’t take care of our own.”

Even the socialist bogeymen of Europe treat their own better.

For-profit insurance can be cruel and capricious, not unlike the age of Dickens that Keith Olbermann invoked in a recent hour-long commentary. America’s uninsured have "a 40 percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts," a new Harvard study finds. Furthermore, 45,000 Americans a year die from lack of health insurance. Like Dickens’ London, America’s working poor too often are either invisible or else blamed as surplus population –– impediments to the economic fortunes of their “betters.”

It is a seasonal tradition to revisit cherished redemption stories during the coming dark nights around the solstice, to refresh human connections not just to family and friends, but to our fellow men. Defenders of the status quo, especially, need to refresh theirs.

America would do well to revisit those redemption stories earlier this year as it considers how best to rehabilitate a business more informed by Wall Street than A Christmas Carol. For-profit health insurance is rare in the civilized world, and rightly so. It is a cold-hearted business more interested in serving the numbers on its balance sheets than the humanity behind the numbers.

That calls into question the humanity of its defenders, like the conservative radio icon who brags about taking on all comers with half his brain tied behind his back. That would be the feeling half. The human half. The half that Messrs. Scrooge and Potter let atrophy as an impediment to being good men of business.

Right now, a popular caterer downtown has posters on her door. A child needs an operation. A strawberry blonde boy in an adult-sized straw hat. He has a severe immune deficiency disease. He is with his parents at Duke University Medical Center for a bone marrow transplant. There's a pancake breakfast to raise money.

You might as well hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.

What civilized country operates like this?