Save or Create 3 Million Jobs

Technorati Tags: Stimulus bill,President Barack Obama,save or create 4 million jobs

President Barack Obama has pledged repeatedly that the $800 billion stimulus bill he is about to sign will either “save or create” 4 million jobs.

What does that mean exactly? Will 3 million jobs be saved and 1 million created? Will 500,000 be saved and 3.5 created? At last, we have clarity:

“The report confirms that our plan will likely save or create 3 to 4 million jobs,” Obama says in his weekly radio and YouTube address. “Ninety percent of these jobs will be created in the private sector. The remaining 10 percent are mainly public sector jobs we save, like the teachers, police officers, firefighters and others who provide vital services in our communities.”

It’s the Economy, Stupid

Technorati Tags: Economy,recession,depression,$800 billion stimulus bill

I just hope that the $800 billion stimulus package jumpstarts the economy long before 2010. If people don’t have health insurance, jobs, homes or enough to eat, that could trigger a situation close to the French Revolution.

This time, as with that time,  people will not be assuaged by the privileged swatting away the concerns of the masses. Companies such as  CitiGroup, AIG and Goldman Sachs, among all the others that benefit from people’s late payments on mortgages and credit cards with untenably high interest rates, don’t deserve the break they are getting.

If relief is not at hand, something else will be: a deep and dangerous sense of discontent.

Rance O'Quinn's Turn to Rest His Feet

He’s 71 now and his legs can’t carry him anywhere near the long distances he regularly marched for civil rights in his younger days.
For this presidential inauguration, Rance O’Quinn sat down and watched on television the embodiment of one of the Civil Rights Movement’s highest goals take the oath of office.
It’s been a long walk to Jan. 20, 2009, for the man born and raised in Centreville, Mississippi, a small town near the Louisiana border, a man whose father was shot in the back of the head on Aug. 14, 1959, for educating other black Americans on their rights.
Rance O’Quinn became president of the Springfield branch of the NAACP; a director of investigations for the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination; worked at the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights and as supervisor of investigations and acting area office director for the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission in Boston.
There are names and dates, births, deaths and killings, the blessings of his family, paid and unpaid work to create a more perfect union, what he lost along the way and now, Barack Obama.
He has simple advice for the new president: “Steady as you go.”
The footprints leading to the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement are many and O’Quinn’s are there, steady as he went.
The quiet courage of a seamstress, Rosa Parks, who refused to sit at the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on Dec. 1, 1955; the heinous crimes committed by two white men against 15-year-old Emmett Till, just a few months before, on Aug. 28, 1955, in Money, Mississippi, for whistling at a white girl. O’Quinn was a junior in high school when he heard of Till’s torture and beating death and was awakened to the long road ahead.
In an interview at his Springfield home, where two of his infant granddaughters vied for his constant and gentle attention, he recalled how hopeful he was when in 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. the Board of Education that schools could not be divided by color.
He thought change was coming for sure, and it would be fast.
But as he learned painfully over the years, and acutely when his own father, Samuel O’Quinn, was gunned down at his doorstep, change is the result of many steps, many votes, many years.
Just last year, then-President George W. Bush signed into law the Emmett Till Unresolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which reopens the investigations of civil rights murders in Mississippi.
The case of Samuel O’Quinn’s killing is among those that is under consideration for review.
Through the decades since his youth, Rance O’Quinn has worked to eradicate institutional racism. While Obama’s election is a sign of progress, the march doesn’t show an end in sight for human rights for all, he said.
“Everything has changed,” he said, “but everything has stayed the same.”
Still, when he and his wife of Shirley went to vote, he felt history in the pulse in his fingertips, the pounding of his heart, a tap on his shoulders.
As he stood in the voting booth and connected the broken arrow next to Obama’s name, he had a quiet moment of remembering his father.
“This is something my father had always wanted to do: to vote,” he said. “Even though I was the only one voting, it was something my father was doing as well.”
By the day’s end, Obama pulled a 10-million popular vote advantage over McCain, 70 million to 60 million, and 365 electoral votes of the needed 270 to win the presidency.
“It was a crying moment,” O’Quinn said.
For all practical purposes, Obama has been presidential, if not president, since his victory. Every day he has held press conferences to introduce his selections for Cabinet and other positions, released photos, or used public speeches to signal to Congress what he wants to get done.
“He’s got kitchen-table sense,” O’Quinn said.
He wishes he could have walked the mile-long National Mall in Washington, D.C., to witness the achievement of a nation that rose to its feet after centuries of deferring the dreams of millions of blacks.
In a first-person story published in 2004 in The Republican, O’Quinn’s daughter, Bea O’Quinn Dewberry, a journalist, wrote about the family’s summer trips from Massachusetts to Mississippi to visit her grandmother Ida. It was a 1,400-mile drive and the family slept and ate in the car as they traveled through the South.
“I thought sleeping and eating in the car was just part of the fun - sort of a camping trip on the road,” she wrote. “I learned later in life avoiding stops on the road was intentional.”
The ghosts of Samuel O’Quinn, young Emmett, of many others who were hung, beaten and shot, serve as guides.
O’Quinn and those who walked with him carried this country to this historic moment and by rights, they all should have had front-row seats at Obama’s inauguration.
But it was one trip too far. So as I stood at the inauguration, I kept thinking: Mr. O’Quinn, yes, please sit down, rest your aching feet. Millions of others are walking now.
Natalia Muñoz is editor of La Prensa of Western Massachusetts (www.LaPrensaMa.com)

More on ABC’s “Homeland Security USA” Reality Show

The executive producer, Arnold Shapiro, acknowledged at the time that the show was meant to portray Homeland Security in a good light.

"I love investigative journalism, but that's not what we're doing," he told The Reporter in May. "This show is heartening. It makes you feel good about these people who are doing their best to protect us."

Most people who cross the border seek asylum here as a result from U.S. economic policies that have plunged them into poverty. They seek work to send home money. This is a TV show that reduces the greatness of this nation.

Homeland Security USA To Air on ABC on Three Kings Day

Big media and its partners in crime, the vested interests of the few along with political forces that challenge the promise in the Constitution of forming a more perfect union, have selected January 6 to premiere its new reality show, "Homeland Security USA."

January 6 is celebrated throughout the Spanish-speaking world, and it is a big world with two dozen countries, as Three Kings Day. On this day, three kings from the Middle East are said to be returning from Bethlehem, on their way back to their respective countries. To aid their journey, children leave hay and grass in their homes to feed the camels. In return, the kings leave a small token of appreciation.

Why, of all days, would ABC air "Homeland Security USA" on the very morning that Latinos celebrate Three Kings?

The answer is easy. It is not a mistake. It is yet another slap on our culture by Big Media and the government to stop Latinos from crossing the border.

Write to ABC to protest the poor choice of subject for a reality program and the cynical selection of its starting date.

It is Obama

Barack Obama,Wall Street bailout,Hillary Clinton

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., wasn't my first choice for president; he was my third, behind New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and New York Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Richardson soon proved that experience wasn't enough. He even lacked gravitas. Hillary Clinton could woulda shoulda been the Democratic Party's nominee, but Big Media threw so many sexist slings at her while elevating Obama as the Great Black Hope that she succumbed to the powerful forces of NBC, CNN, ABC and the rest. For a long time, I couldn't even talk about it. Sexism was allowed to flourish and be renamed Bill Clinton. It quickly became impossible for Hillary to overcome the partesan pundits in Big Media who have become too powerful for the nation's good.

Millionaire blovioators like Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC who think they represent Everyman and Everywoman, were part of a dismaying chorus of self-appointed progressive white men who could not abide Hillary and adored Obama. They helped pave the way to his victory as the nominee. They, and the so-called "Lion of the Senate," Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., he who killed Mary Jo Kopechne and has, according to one of my sisters, never again leave anyone behind, moved mountains to crush Hillary.

They crushed my spirits, too, for a while. Sexism is still OK. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., recently won over a contender, Ed O'Reilly, in the primaries in Massachusetts. O'Reilly should have won -- he brought new ideeas, new energy; he brought views that were strkiningly similar to that of Obama, but Kerry still could help but do all he could avoid a debate. The two finally did have a debate, and Kerry, in an intervew afterwards, said dismissively of O'Reilly, "I go back to work in Washington. I've got a full-time job, unlike my opponent."

Kerry went back and voted for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout bill that paid for executives at AIG to have a $400,000 retreat.

Obama, meanwhile, had seemed to me, from day one, to be a naive yet arrogant contender for the party's nomination. After all these years of W., I didn't want another unprepared president, no matter how gifted with words.

In one editorial, the New York Times bemoaned Obama's stance of awaiting for a coronation rather than enduring the primary process.

In the end, though, because of superior organizational skills matched by sexism, Obama won.

The irony is that Obama became a candidate worth supporting. He endured, matured, he kept making those poetic speeches in front of crowds in the thousands because he knows that we need policy points and poetry; he changed the landscape of what is expected of a politician running for the presidency. He has been consistently a statesman in the face of attacks and disdain by opponents. He has shown his mettle.

I always knew he was smart. Finally he doesn't appear smarmy as well. In these last three weeks, I have come to know a candidate who has worked hard to persuade me to his side by showing up again and again in the line of fire by Republicans and repelling their insults with his own ideas -- health care for everyone ("It is a right," he said at the second debate).

A friend said to me, "History is calling Obama and he is answering."

A few months ago, I thought Sen. John Edwards would win, since is a white man. This primary season has taught me about hope. Hillary gave the best speech in Denver that showed why she was the best presidential candiadte. But Obama is just as deserving of the nomination. He earned it.

 

 

 

 

Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton's Best Speech

Hillary Clinton’s speech at the Democratic Party Convention was presidential and bittersweet. She should have been the party’s nominee for president, but through strategic mistakes of her own and big media’s love affair with Barack Obama, her time was not this time.

Her speech was her best yet and belongs in the pantheon of American political speeches. She displayed grace, wit, gravitas, stateswomanship, leadership, authority that not even the party’s iconic Edward Kennedy has ever enjoyed. She commanded every line and by the time she said these words:

This is the story of America. Of women and men who defy the odds and never give up.
How do we give this country back to them?
By following the example of a brave New Yorker , a woman who risked her life to shepherd slaves along the Underground Railroad.
And on that path to freedom, Harriett Tubman had one piece of advice.
If you hear the dogs, keep going.
If you see the torches in the woods, keep going.
If they're shouting after you, keep going.
Don't ever stop. Keep going.
If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.
Even in the darkest of moments, ordinary Americans have found the faith to keep going.
I’ve seen it in you. I’ve seen it in our teachers and firefighters, nurses and police officers, small business owners and union workers, the men and women of our military – you always keep going

She was no longer speaking, she was singing and the convention hall was swept off its feet. Finally, Hillary Clinton has arrived. Sadly, Hillary Clinton has just left the stage.

Now progressive voters are left with the tepid ticket of Obama and Joe Biden, a reactionary coupling that instead of forging ahead with the message of change, reclines in more of the same. Michelle Obama could have delivered a rousing speech that highlighted her accomplishments, but instead she offered the safe I am a mom and wife dance that sounded eerily similar to Laura Bush.

The time for strong women to be leaders is not here. Not this time. That fire is next time. One hopes.