Smoke On This

Smoke on this:

“President Obama has done more for us in this short time then Bush ever did in 8 years.

1. Kill Osama Bin Laden
2. Heath Care Reform. (First Person To Everrr Get It Done 44 Presidents Later)
3. Repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell
4. Bank Reform
5. Bring Troops Home (Happening in July - August)
6. Focusing On New Energy Platforms (Stopping Gas Subsidies As We Speak)
7. Help Small Businesses (17+ New Tax Cuts For SMBs)
8. Financial Reform Act
9. Create Jobs (Yes its going slower than we want but its moving. 2 million + private sector jobs created over 12 consecutiv­­­e months)
10. Pushed Stem Cell Research Forward
11. Increasing Foreign Relations
12. Equal Pay For Woman Act etc...

Next President Obama wants to fix the economy and the job market but it took the last President 8 years to screw it up to this level but you want this President to fix it in only 3 years. I think your asking for to much in such a short amount of time.

Also a lot of things President Obama is trying to do for the jobs market is getting stopped by the House Republican­­s and Congress. Where is your outrage for them? People like you gave control of the House to the Republican­­s and what have they done for you since they took over? A big fat nothing.

 

Don't Starve the Poor

At a time when struggling Americans need policies that serve the common good, political leaders are making choices that reflect grossly distorted values. Cuts to the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) nutrition program that the House Appropriations Committee approved would force the program to turn away 200,000 to 350,000 eligible low-income women and children next year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) faces $2 billion in cuts. The Commodity Supplemental Food Program would be slashed by 22 percent next year, which means a loss of food for well over 100,000 low-income seniors. The Emergency Food Assistance Program, which provides emergency sustenance to shelters serving the poor across the country, would be gutted. These are not simply abstract numbers on a page. They will mean real hunger for American children, mothers and the elderly. Emergency food pantries are already overwhelmed, and even formerly middle-class families are turning to local charities already strained to the breaking point. It’s inconceivable that charitable giving, no matter how generous, could come close to making up for this loss.
While these budget proposals are shocking, it’s also discouraging to hear little more than silence from the White House. With campaign season approaching and poll numbers slipping, the Obama administration seems to speak loudly about the middle class but only mumble about the poor. Our nation’s diverse faith communities, thankfully, have not mumbled. From all denominations, religious leaders are challenging Congress to pass a moral budget that doesn’t provide tax breaks for the rich at the expense of the poor. As a Roman Catholic, I’m proud of the leadership of my bishops. Religious organizations are on the front lines in caring for the most vulnerable. They realize what’s at risk by eviscerating federal food programs when needs are more pressing than at any time in last forty years. I urge all members of Congress to join with our nation’s faith leaders by endorsing the Circle of Protection.
We need fiscal prudence to tackle budget deficits. But it's immoral to increase hunger in America when other options are available. At the very least, it's reasonable to avoid any cuts to food assistance until charities, states and local governments are in a stronger position to respond. Surely, this is common ground for compassionate conservatives and progressives on Capitol Hill and at the White House. Let’s reign in wasteful spending, end irresponsible tax breaks for the rich and make smart budget choices that reflect our nation’s highest ideals. Don’t vote to starve the poor.

To Obama and the Republicans:

Robert Reich Says:

The silence is deafening. While the rest of the nation is heading back toward a double-dip, Washington continues to obsess about future budget deficits. Why?
Republicans don't want to do anything about jobs and wages. They're so intent on unseating Obama they'd like the economy to remain in the dumps through Election Day. They also see the lousy economy as an opportunity to sell Americans their big lie that government spending is the culprit -- and jobs will return if spending is cut and government shrinks.
Democrats, meanwhile, don't want to admit the recovery has stalled. They worry such talk will further undermine consumer confidence or spook the bond market. They don't want to head into the election year sounding downbeat. And they don't think they have the votes for anything that will have much effect before Election Day anyway.
But there's a third reason for Washington's inaction. It's not being talked about -- which is itself evidence of the problem.
The unemployed are politically invisible. They don't make major campaign donations. They don't lobby Congress. There's no National Association of Unemployed People.
Their ranks are filled with women who had been public employees, single mothers, minorities, young people trying to enter the labor force, and middle-aged men who have been out of work for longer than six months. You couldn't find a collection of people with less political clout.
Women who had been teachers, public health professionals and social workers have been hit hard. These jobs continue to be slashed by state and local governments. Public schools alone accounted for nearly 40% of the nation's total public sector job losses in the last year. From March 2010 to March 2011, women lost 214,000 public sector jobs, compared with a loss of 115,000 public jobs by men.
Unmarried mothers are having a particularly difficult time getting back jobs because their work was heavily concentrated in the retail, restaurant and hotel sectors. Many of these jobs disappeared when consumers reduced their discretionary spending, and they won't come back in force until consumers start spending more again.
According to a new report by the California Budget Project, the recession erased more than half the jobs single mothers in California had gained from 1992 to 2002. The result has been a drop in the share of unmarried mothers in jobs, from 69.2% in 2007 to 58.8% in 2010. Unmarried mothers who still have jobs are working fewer hours per week than before.
Blacks also continue to be hard hit. Their unemployment rate here in California reached 20% this past March, up 5% from a year ago. That's more than double their rate before the downturn. Some of this is because of the comparatively low education levels of many blacks, and their weak connections to the labor market. Some is due to employer discrimination. Blacks were among the last hired before the recession and therefore among the first to be let go in the downturn. That means they'll be among the last hired as the economy recovers.
Many young people who have never been in the job market are unable to land a first job. Employers with a pick of applicants see no reason to hire someone without a track record, particularly those without much education. Unemployment among high school dropouts is hovering around 30%. Even recent college graduates are having a much harder time than usual finding a job. Many are settling for jobs that don't ordinarily require college degrees, which pushes those with less education even further back in the line.
Older workers who have lost their jobs are at the greatest risk of continued unemployment. Employers assume they aren't as qualified or reliable as those who are younger and have been working more recently. According to research by the Urban Institute, once you're laid off, your chance of finding another job within a year is 36% if you're under the age of 34. But your odds drop the older you get. If you're jobless and in your 50s, your chance of landing another job within the year is only 24%. Over 62, you've got only an 18% chance.
What do these jobless have in common? They lack the political connections and organizations to get the ears of politicians, and demand policies to spur job growth.
Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.

 

 

Save the Babies

In the name of curtailing deficits, politicians across the country are hacking away at programs that aim to make children healthier. In Congress, for example, House Republicans are spearheading a budget that eviscerates funding for food assistance and effectively defunds the wildly successful Children’s Health Insurance Program. Similarly, from Texas to California, state lawmakers are chopping children’s health programs in the face of budget shortfalls. In all these initiatives, the rhetorical leitmotif is “fiscal responsibility.” Like clockwork, this has set off the now-standard ideological debate over values, with liberals arguing that it’s immoral to deny health care to today’s kids and conservatives countering that it’s even more immoral to saddle the next generation with debt. But as highlighted by a new National Bureau of Economic Research report, both sides are ignoring the most important non-ideological fact: Any so-called “deficit reduction” plan that cuts child health programs is almost certain to increase deficits. The NBER study compared British and American illness rates, controlling for both demographic differences and risk factors like smoking and drinking. It found that (a) we have “much higher” childhood illness rates than our British counterparts, (b) the transmission rate of childhood illnesses into poor health in adults is greater in America than in Britain, and therefore (c) “the origins of poorer adult health among older Americans compared to the English traces back right into the childhood years.” In other words, America’s broken private health care system allows kids’ medical afflictions to become far worse in adulthood than they become in Britain—a nation with a government-sponsored universal health care system

Obama Looks Weak for 2012 Election

 In the United States, the reality looks a lot different. Many political leaders in Britain fail to understand the degree to which the American people are deeply unhappy with their president’s poor handling of the economy. Nor have they grasped the epic scale of the defeat suffered by the president in the November mid-terms, and the emphatic rejection by a clear majority of Americans of the Big Government Obama agenda.
Just seven months ago, the United States was swept by a conservative revolution that fundamentally transformed the political landscape on Capitol Hill, and gravely weakened the ability of the president to pass legislation. This revolution is not in retreat but gaining ground, led by charismatic figures such as Paul Ryan, the Reaganite chairman of the House Budget Committee, entrusted with reining in out of control government spending. And as a Gallup poll showed, America is unquestionably a conservative country ideologically, but one that is ironically led by the most left-wing president in the nation’s history.
Ultimately, the 2012 presidential election will be decided by the state of the economy, and new data released this week makes grim reading for the White House. In fact you cannot watch a US financial news network at the moment, from Bloomberg to CNBC to Fox Business, without a great deal of pessimism about the dire condition of the world’s biggest economy. 66 percent of Americans now worry the federal government will run out of money in the face of towering public debts.
To say this has been an extremely bad week for the Obama administration on the economic front would be a serious understatement. As The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, home prices in the United States have sunk to their lowest levels since 2002, falling 4.2 percent in the first quarter of 2011. At the same time, employment growth is stalling, with only 38,000 Americans added to the workforce in May, the smallest increase since September. This compares with 179,000 jobs added in April. There has also been a steep slowdown in the manufacturing sector, and a downturn in the stock market on the back of weak economic news.
Bill Clinton’s labour secretary Robert Reich summed up the grim mood in a hard-hitting op-ed in The Financial Times, which took aim at both the administration and Congress:

What Have Poor People Ever Done For This Country?

What have poor people ever done for this country?

1. They built it. The country was literally built on the backs of poor immigrants and slaves. To this day, construction workers are some of the hardest working people in the country, yet their average wage is only $50,000 per year, which includes management. People that maintain the roads driven by the wealthy (and everyone else) are paid only $30,000 per year.
2. They care for our children. The average nanny is paid only about $30,000 per year, usually without benefits.
3. They teach our children. The average teacher makes around $45,000 a year, which might not sound poor, but for that salary, most positions require advanced degrees.
4. They make the world beautiful. It would be difficult to determine the average salary of an artist, but very few of even the most talented artists achieve financial success.
5. They inform and entertain. Writers, actors and filmmakers are just as likely to live in poverty as visual artists.
6. They create. Inventors are often poorly paid for their inventions, if paid at all.
7. They are entrepreneurs. Two thirds of startup businesses fail. Many of them fail because they were simply out financed (think the big coffee chain moving on to the same corner as the independent coffee house).
8. They keep our world clean. People that do the dirtiest jobs are notoriously some of the least paid, yet can you imagine a world without people emptying our trash and cleaning our toilets?
9. They keep you alive. Without poor people, produce would rot in the fields. There would be no goods on the shelves. There would be no store clerks to sell them to you. Most Americans would most likely starve.
10. They fight for our country. The average starting salary of enlisted personnel is about $30,000 per year.
11. They save the world. Many of history’s most selfless people live their lives in or near poverty. They join the Peace Corps. They work for or start charitable organizations.
12. They pay their taxes. Much is made of the statistic that between 40 and 50 percent of people don’t pay federal income tax. That is typically because they are too poor. But even if they don’t pay federal income tax, they pay taxes. They pay Social Security taxes. They pay state taxes. They pay the identical sales tax on food and clothing as their wealthy brethren. They pay identical gasoline taxes as their more fortunate counterparts. Unlike the wealthy, taxes deeply impact the well being of the poor, yet, unlike the wealthy, they are unable to take advantage of the loopholes that were designed to specifically benefit the wealthy.

New book. 'Parenting, Back to The Script'

This is a new parenting book unlike any other. It is about the innocent children being preyed upon by predator parents. The book mostly talks about how not to be an extremely bad or a disengage parent of small and teenage children. It talks about how children who are born into this world knowing nothing at all about their parents, the environment, and the up bringing that will tell the entire story whether it’s good or horrible. It talks about preventing the child from growing up and becoming a bad girl or the bad guy, soon to hurt another child. Key points will be stressed again and again throughout this book

This can take place in any inner city within the United States. The author's main goal here is to try and save innocent children from the mean streets. There are thousands and more parenting books out here; however, this is the first to hold the parent’s feet to the fire in such a dramatic fashion. Most young children bad actions can come from just plain awful parenting. The parents maybe drug addicts, they may be illiterate, or they not have the mindset to be good parents, and they may be thugs teaching their children to be thugs. They are so many parents who do not love their children. There are so many parents who let their children rule their households. There are some parents who refuse to talk to their children. There are so many parents who just throw their children away and the child join gangs and sometimes it end up even worse. There are good parents everywhere; however, there are too many awful ones. What are we if can’t help a great child survive?

This is a cutting edge NEW book, soon to be released, on how not to parent a child. Why some children are the victims of their own parents. Blame it on the Parents is chilling indictment of all parents who willfully stand in the way of their child's progress. A must read for everyone!!

LOOK FOR Book  AUGUST 2011 RELEASE,
"PARENTING BACK TO THE SCRIPT, PARENTING FOR 21ST CENTURY"

Author: George Wilder Jr.
gwilder40@hotmail.com
Books are available at:
http://www.amazon.com/

Publisher: Publish America
website http://www.publishamerica.com/
or call your order in 301-695-1707