The lament above has been written by Ted Rall, a cartoonist who seem to have lost his brush in the face of Obama-the-indecisive... Usually one lampoons the rite wingnuts for their callus ways they deal the cards and load the dice... But having to deal with Obama can be puzzling for someone trying to understand the economic events...

The Wrong Idea

Stocks on Wall Street dropped sharply on Thursday, with investors spooked, again, about the euro-zone debt crisis and the sputtering United States economy.

Yet, even at this hour, leaders on both sides of the Atlantic seem determined to handcuff fiscal policies — the main tools that can increase jobs, consumer demand and economic growth — with an unquestioning devotion to rigid austerity.

Europe’s post-2008 economic problems have differed from America’s in many important ways. Washington has mercifully never had to cope with the problem of a dollar torn apart by the separate taxing and spending policies of 17 sovereign governments.

But as the crisis moves toward its fourth year, there are disturbing common threads.

One is the chilling specter of sovereign default, something that never should have come up in the United States but did for a while because of the reckless brinkmanship of House Republicans. A more real threat of default now haunts European bond markets, as chronically underfinanced bailout plans with punitive terms have made it impossible for the debtor countries to grow fast enough to pay down their debts.

Another grim parallel is the refusal by leaders to take politically tough but economically necessary stands.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/opinion/austerity-is-the-wrong-idea.html?hpw=&pagewanted=print

As shown by yet another global stock selloff, investors have finally woken to the reality that we have not yet recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. Many smart economists had been warning that this time was different, that we wouldn't enjoy that simple, V-shaped return to normalcy after the Great Recession. But the global investment community had been living in some sort of alternative universe, oblivious to how persistent unemployment, ongoing housing meltdowns, soaring commodity prices, European debt crises and misguided government policy were conspiring to derail global growth.

Read more: http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2011/08/19/does-the-west-need-a-new-growth-model/#ixzz1VTSnXtbH

For a few years now, on this site, we've been pushing for (and promoting) a new way to do business sustainably. One is to make sure the environment of the planet is protected, while population growth is tackled and comforts for all is improved.

From the USA:

Some of the country’s best-known multi­national corporations closely guard a number they don’t want anyone to know: the breakdown between their jobs here and abroad.

So secretive are these companies that they hand the figure over to government statisticians on the condition that officials will release only an aggregate number. The latest data show that multinationals cut 2.9 million jobs in the United States and added 2.4 million overseas between 2000 and 2009.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/corporations-pushing-for-job-creation-tax-breaks-shield-us-vs-abroad-hiring-data/2011/08/12/gIQAZwhqUJ_story.html?hpid=z2

The White House that shook in Tuesday's earthquake has been home to its present incumbent for 32 months. Obama wasn't around to watch the furniture shake. He's up on Martha's Vineyard for the third year in a row with Michelle and their two daughters, bunkered in a $25,000-a-week holiday rental on a lush 28-acre estate in the little town of Chilmark.

He's keeping a low profile. Words like "stand-offish" roll petulantly off the tongues of the island's liberal elites. They were spoiled by Bill Clinton who spent six presidential vacations on the Vineyard. No renter he. Bill free-loaded on rich pals and party donors, mostly synonymous.

No one could ever accuse Bill of being stand-offish, though he once confided to Vernon Jordan that he preferred Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to Martha's Vineyard as a vacation spot since it was impossible to get "pussy" in the stuffy Massachusetts resort.

Obama's stand-offishness includes, I am informed by one knowledgeable Martha's Vineyard local, failure to show at an exclusive fundraiser, also at a party of his friend Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard prof whose July 2009 spat with the Cambridge police once prompted the normally hyper-prudent Obama to say the cops had acted "stupidly" – probably the most vivid off-the-cuff judgment of his entire presidency.

The presidential excuse for the Gates no-show was apparently that he and Michelle didn't "want to leave the kids alone." Alone? One of the houses on the Chilmark estate is occupied by the Secret Service; another by close aides. You'd think at least two could have been press-ganged into child-minding duties.

YAMHILL, Ore.

WHEN I’m in New York or Washington, people talk passionately about debt and political battles. But in the living rooms or on the front porches here in Yamhill, Ore., where I grew up, a different specter wakes friends up in the middle of the night.

It’s unemployment.

I’ve spent a chunk of summer vacation visiting old friends here, and I can’t help feeling that national politicians and national journalists alike have dropped the ball on jobs. Some 25 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed — that’s more than 16 percent of the work force — but jobs haven’t been nearly high enough on the national agenda.

When Americans are polled about the issue they care most about, the answer by a two-to-one margin is jobs. The Boston Globe found that during President Obama’s Twitter “town hall” last month, the issue that the public most wanted to ask about was, by far, jobs. Yet during the previous two weeks of White House news briefings, reporters were far more likely to ask about political warfare with Republicans.

(I’m an offender, too: I asked President Obama a question at the Twitter town hall, and it was a gotcha query about his negotiations with Republicans. I’m sorry that I missed the chance to push him on the issue that Americans care most about.)

A study by National Journal in May found something similar: newspaper articles about “unemployment” apparently fell over the last two years, while references to the “deficit” soared.

When I’m back on the family farm in Yamhill, our very closest neighbor is one of those 25 million. Terry Maggard worked on a crew detecting underground gas, electrical or cable lines, and after 15 years on the job he was earning $20 an hour. Then at the outset of the recession in late 2008 his employer fired him and the other old-timers, and hired younger workers — who earned only $9 or $10 an hour.

Terry has been knocking on doors everywhere, including at McDonald’s, but nobody wants a 56-year-old man. “The only call I got in two years was one asking if I could it's unemploymentbe a French chef,” he recalled, laughing. “I said ‘Oui.’ ”

Mais non, the chef’s job did not come through.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/opinion/sunday/kristof-did-we-drop-the-ball-on-unemployment.html?pagewanted=print

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