Excuse me?

• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Position: Vox Populist - Criticisms on President Barack Obama's economic and employment policies - Essay

Five days before taking the oath of office, Barack Obama called on the millions of people who had actively campaigned for him to be the engine for real change in America: "I don't want them to just sit around and wait for me to do something. I want them to be pushing their agendas."

He asked for it, so let's shove this agenda into his line of vision: Jobs. Middle class jobs. Jobs with a future. Jobs doing useful work that contributes to American progress and the common good. Lots and lots of those jobs.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Obama has talked often about the need for more jobs. But he's put little Presidential heft into creating them. Instead, he has focused most on extending unemployment benefits to assuage some of the pain of being jobless.

Incredibly, he tried for a while to rationalize his "banker-first" Wall Street bailout as a jobs stimulus. The argument went like this: Rescuing failed bankers might induce them to make loans to corporations, which then might increase corporate production, which then might cause corporate executives to hire some Americans (unless, of course, they used the capital to expand operations in China). That's a lot of "mights," and, as we've seen, the money mostly remains in the tight clutches of the bailed-out bankers, producing little "trickle-down" benefit.

Meanwhile, the nation's official unemployment rate is soaring to 10 percent and beyond. That's not a statistic; it's fifteen million struggling people. Plus their families. Their numbers nearly double when we add in part-time workers who need and want fulltime jobs, as well as other underemployed and discouraged workers.

Meet Debbie Kransky, a striver from America's great middle class who's now struggling. Living in Milwaukee, this intelligent and hardworking fifty-one-year-old was offed by a medical firm in February and has been jobless ever since, despite being constantly on the hunt. Her unemployment benefits have run out and her small life savings have been depleted. "I've got October rent," she told a New York Times reporter. "After that, I don't know. I've never lived month to...