Reprinted by permission of Ray Abernathy. Ray's website is available at: http://www.rayabernathy.com
See, didn’t I tell you about the job losses and the recession six months ago? It was as obvious and inevitable as the prediction I’m now making that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are drifting toward a torrid affair, which he foretold at the end of the Los Angeles debate when he put his hand on her chair, leaned down and, borrowing a line from the hit movie Juno, whispered softly in her ear, “You smell like soup.”
Just kidding about the affair stuff, Barackary, but I’m not kidding about jobs and the recession. One of you is going to be faced with an Aegean stable cleanup at the Department of Labor (and lots of other places) when you take office next January. The monthly job stats just released by the DOL showed employers eliminated 17,000 jobs last month, bringing the average number of jobs created over the past three months down to 42,000. When you consider we need 125,000 new jobs just to keep up with the growth in the work force (never noted in the DOL report, rarely in the media), it should be no surprise that, according to Lou Uchitelle and Michael M. Grynbaum writing in the New York Times, even President Bush had to say the jobs report “provided ‘some troubling signs’ that the economy was weakening.” The Times story also said that revisions made to last year’s job reports “showed much weaker job creation over the past year than initially reported.” It’s the umpteenth time the Bush DOL has issued downward corrections to the jobs report, leaving one wondering if the Bushleaguers in the Department have been cooking the books.
My point here is that signs of trouble in our economy were there long before the housing market collapsed and the sub-prime mortgage fiasco, so the first thing one of you needs to do next year is remove the public relations spinners from the Department of Labor and replace them with career employees who can count to ten without taking off both shoes. But what both of you can do right now as leaders in the Senate is equally important: Get back to work and insist your colleagues show some backbone and send Bush a broadened stimulus package that includes extension of unemployment benefits to the 200,000 workers now losing them each month, a substantial increase in food stamps benefits, some big chunks of cash to states so Medicaid benefits don’t have to be slashed, and a go-ahead on long-delayed projects to rebuild our schools, bridges, highways and sewage plants. Do it now and get some real money in the pockets of workers fast. Then when you get to the White House you can deal with the real causes of our economic nosedive, namely trade policies that keep shipping our best jobs overseas, tax breaks for the rich that keep draining our federal treasury, and labor laws that keep stopping workers from joining unions and kicking the butts of politicians and CEOs who are deliberately driving down wages.
And guys, good luck on Super Tuesday tomorrow. Whatever happens, don’t give up on the Dream Team notion — you look terrific together.
McCain: Batboy for the Bushleaguers. A Recurring Reminder for Drifting Democrats. With Hannity, Coulter and Limbaugh gang-banging John McCain (and guaranteeing him the GOP nomination), some disgruntled Dems may be thinking the little war hero is a moderate. Banish the thought: McCain is a certifiable Reaganaut who once said, “I’m not going to bring back a lot of these jobs. I can’t because with a global economy they’re headed the other way.” This is the same guy who voted against an amendment to S. 1054 last year that would have extended federal unemployment benefits for many of the workers who lost those jobs. McCain also voted against an amendment to S. 1637 that prohibited the overseas outsourcing of government contracts.