Speak Out for Jobs

With Isaiah J. Poole

When the Speak Out for Good Jobs Now Tour rolls into Miami on Saturday, it will be in a state where bad economic conditions are being made more harsh by a series of conservative policy actions.

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Today's Bureau of Labor Statistics report is a stunner, with only a net total of 18,000 new jobs created in June and the unemployment rate nudging upward to 9.2 percent. Meanwhile, conservatives in Congress have been literally leaving new jobs stranded on crowded, crumbling highways. The negligible jobs growth reported today is one consequence.

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It has been called the city that moved America; the city that spawned the sound of a generation. For decades, Detroit was the assembly line of the American Dream. Its auto factories produced the cars that made possible the suburban life that defined the American middle class, and provided jobs and wages that lifted more families into the middle class.

Now, with its abandoned factories and vacant lots, Detroit symbolizes the deterioration of the American Dream it once fueled. So, it only right that Detroit is one of the first stop son the road to rebuilding that dream. Today, the Congressional Progressive Caucus brings its Speak Out For Good Jobs tour to Detroit. Caucus members promise to "listen to what everyday Americans have to say and take that back to Washington with them as they continue to fight to reinvigorate the American Dream." If so, Detroit has a story to tell; one of a city and a dream in decline.

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Here is the video of last night's launch of Rebuild the Dream campaign, with Van Jones. (If you want to skip the music parts, start at 9:15.)

Watch Van Jones spell out "the three big lies" of the conservative narrative:

1) America is broke.
2) Asking the super rich to pay taxes hurts the economy. more »

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To start your weekend on a boiling mad note, read what Talking Points Memo published this afternoon regarding the details of why Republicans bolted Thursday from the deficit-reduction talks being conducted by Vice President Joe Biden: more »

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The Federal Reserve and its chairman, Ben Bernanke, should not be allowed to get away with what they did on Wednesday.

What they did at the end of their Open Market Committee meeting was to essentially throw up their hands in the face of their legal responsibility to create a full-employment economy in a way that keeps inflation in check. more »

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There is no "Texas miracle" for workers and job-seekers. more »

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"It's an employer's world," said Rebecca Penny, a 55-year-old widow who was laid off over a year ago from her job at a Chevrolet plant in Tennessee.

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We've been deferring maintenance of our infrastructure since the Reagan tax cuts - never mind modernizing to restore American competitiveness. It is something that has to be done anyway, and here we are with so many people needing work. It's just nuts. Millions of jobs that need doing, and millions out of work, and we can't connect the dots. more »

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