harikari.com

Bob Herbert wrote today about the many ways that Obama is planning to create jobs with his economic plan. 

In a radio address on Saturday, Mr. Obama described his plan as follows:

“It will be a two-year, nationwide effort to jump-start job creation in America and lay the foundation for a strong and growing economy.

“We’ll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children and building wind farms and solar panels, fuel-efficient cars and the alternative energy technologies that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil and keep our economy competitive in the years ahead.”

The message is many years overdue. The hope is that it hasn’t come too late.

…

Right now infrastructure projects go forward willy-nilly. They are often financed haphazardly and are subjected to the worst kinds of political influence.

Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut is sponsoring a bill that would create an infrastructure bank with a bipartisan board of directors and a chief executive to be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

The board would streamline the process of reviewing and signing off on major infrastructure proposals. It would determine the value to the public of each project — and its environmental impact. It would provide federal investment capital for approved projects and use that money to leverage private investment.

Anyone living in Seattle and especially anyone who was working downtown or driving on the Alaskan Way viaduct during the Nisqually earthquake of 2001 knows that we need some serious infrastructure rebuilding as soon as possible.  Here’s a photo of what I see every day I drive to work on the viaduct:

That’s the lower level of the viaduct heading south.   During rush hour, it’s way more crowded than that.

And here’s a photo of what I’m thinking of every day I drive to work on the viaduct:

That’s San Francisco’s Cypress Street viaduct that collapsed during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.  Dozens of people in cars on the lower level were crushed to death.  The death toll probably would have been in the hundreds had the earthquake not occurred during warm-ups for the World Series that was happening at the time, because fans had already traveled to the game or were watching it at home on television.  Anyway, the Cyprus Street viaduct and the Alaskan Way viaduct were built about the same time using essentially the same design.  Both bridges were built on fill, and the S.F. quake showed that a lot shaking results in catastrophic structural failure.

Seattle’s 2001 Nisqually quake was different than San Francisco’s.  The earth shook more horizontally during the San Francisco quake and more vertically during the Seattle quake.  I was on the eleventh floor of a concrete office building downtown when the Seattle quake hit, and I thought I was a goner.  The quake lasted forty-five seconds.  Ordinarily that doesn’t seem like a very long time, but it seemed like an eternity while I was bouncing up and down under my desk.

When the quake was over and I started walking around, I remember looking out a window towards the viaduct to see if it had collapsed.  I was both surprised and relieved to see that It had not.  I read recently that scientists think it would have collapsed had the quake lasted fifteen more seconds.

The point is that we do have hundreds of bridges in our country that are in serious need of repair or replacement, and I am all too familiar with one of them.

So, President Elect Obama and Senator Dodd, let this be a formal request for you to send some stimulus “economic recovery” dollars to Seattle so we can tear down our life-threatening viaduct.  Seattleites have been arguing about what to do with it for over seven years.  (Nothing that has anything to do with transportation happens quickly in Seattle.)  We need someone from the outside to say, “Here’s a bunch of money.  Tear that deathtrap down.  NOW!”

John McCain, who claims he is the most qualified candidate for Commander and Chief, made some “misstatements” about who was supposedly training Al Qaeda in Iraq:

Mr. McCain said at a news conference in Amman that he continued to be concerned about Iranians “taking Al Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back.” Asked about that statement, Mr. McCain said: “Well, it’s common knowledge and has been reported in the media that Al Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran. That’s well known. And it’s unfortunate.”

It was not until he got a quiet word of correction in his ear from Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, who was traveling with Mr. McCain as part of a Congressional delegation on a nearly weeklong trip, that Mr. McCain corrected himself.

“I’m sorry,” Mr. McCain said, “the Iranians are training extremists, not Al Qaeda.”

And it wasn’t the only time he “misspoke.”  He made the same mistake earlier in a radio interview with The Hugh Hewitt Show.

Yes, the Republican candidate for president who in January admitted to not knowing much about how the economy works now shows that he doesn’t know much about what’s going on in Iraq either.  Sounds like the perfect replacement for our current president.

“As the mortgage market has become more segmented and as risk has become more dispersed, market discipline has in some cases broken down and the incentives to follow prudent lending procedures have, at times, eroded.”

– Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, December 18, 2007

Everything you need to know about Alan Greenspan’s economic policy in six panels of This Modern World.

I’ve made it through most of the Krugman article mentioned a few posts down that published in the latest Rolling Stone and, just to whet your appetite, here’s an excerpt:

Rising inequality isn’t new. The gap between rich and poor started growing before Ronald Reagan took office, and it continued to widen through the Clinton years. But what is happening under Bush is something entirely unprecedented: For the first time in our history, so much growth is being siphoned off to a small, wealthy minority that most Americans are failing to gain ground even during a time of economic growth — and they know it.

…

The widening gulf between workers and executives is part of a stunning increase in inequality throughout the U.S. economy during the past thirty years. To get a sense of just how dramatic that shift has been, imagine a line of 1,000 people who represent the entire population of America. They are standing in ascending order of income, with the poorest person on the left and the richest person on the right. And their height is proportional to their income — the richer they are, the taller they are.

Start with 1973. If you assume that a height of six feet represents the average income in that year, the person on the far left side of the line — representing those Americans living in extreme poverty — is only sixteen inches tall. By the time you get to the guy at the extreme right, he towers over the line at more than 113 feet.

Now take 2005. The average height has grown from six feet to eight feet, reflecting the modest growth in average incomes over the past generation. And the poorest people on the left side of the line have grown at about the same rate as those near the middle — the gap between the middle class and the poor, in other words, hasn’t changed. But people to the right must have been taking some kind of extreme steroids: The guy at the end of the line is now 560 feet tall, almost five times taller than his 1973 counterpart.

What’s useful about this image is that it explodes several comforting myths we like to tell ourselves about what is happening to our society.

Krugman goes on to debunk the following three myths:

1: Inequality is mainly a problem of poverty.
2: Inequality is mainly a problem of education.
3: Inequality is doesn’t really matter.

… and he provides examples of how Bush’s tax cuts have given enormous tax breaks to the super rich.

And summarizes with:

As the past six years demonstrate, such political corruption only worsens as economic inequality rises. Indeed, the gap between rich and poor doesn’t just mean that few Americans share in the benefits of economic growth — it also undermines the sense of shared experience that binds us together as a nation. “Trust is based upon the belief that we are all in this together, part of a ‘moral community,’ ” writes Eric Uslaner, a political scientist at the University of Maryland who has studied the effects of inequality on trust. “It is tough to convince people in a highly stratified society that the rich and the poor share common values, much less a common fate.”

Read the whole article and pass it around…

Listen to Bob Dylan’s “Workingman’s Blues #2″ today.

There’s an evening haze settling over town
Starlight by the end of the creek
The buying power of the proletariat’s gone down
Money’s getting’ shallow and weak.

Well the place I love best is a sweet memory
It’s a new path that we trod
They say low wages are reality
If we want to compete abroad.

From his new album, Modern Times.  Great stuff!  Go buy it today.

Please read this excellent column by Paul Krugman in the Friday New York Times. Excerpt:

For the last few months there has been a running debate about the U.S. economy, more or less like this:

American families: “We’re not doing very well.”

Washington officials: “You’re wrong – you’re doing great. Here, look at these statistics!”

(big snip… read the whole damn column here.)

You may ask where economic growth is going, if it isn’t showing up in wages. That’s easy to answer: it’s going to corporate profits, to rising health care costs and to a surge in the salaries and other compensation of executives. (Forbes reports that the combined compensation of the chief executives of America’s 500 largest companies rose 54 percent last year.)

Oh why does Paul Krugman hate America so much? Why does he work so hard to screw it up? Only Bernie Goldberg knows for sure.