Labor Day musings

MANIFESTO

BO can promote the advancement of the American middle class all he wants, but as long as seven of eight working Americans aren't protected by a labor union, the exhortation is meaningless.

UPDATE — Yesterday, Robert Reich wrote in much the same vein:

It is not that America is out of ideas. We know what to do. We need massive public spending on jobs (infrastructure, schools, parks, a new WPA) along with measures to widen the circle of prosperity so more Americans can share in the gains of growth (exempting the first $20K of income from payroll taxes and applying the payroll tax to incomes over $250K, for example).

The problem is lack of political will to do it. The naysayers, deficit hawks, government-haters and Social Darwinists who don’t have a clue what to do would rather do nothing. We are paralyzed.

If there was ever a time for bold government action it is precisely now. Obama should be storming the country, demanding the largest responses to the jobs emergency in history. He and the Dems should be giving Republicans hell for their indifference to all this.

Instead, Obama is all over the map — a mosque controversy, an Israeli-Palestinian peace talk (that may take years to complete if ever), a symbolic withdrawal from Iraq, and lots of little tax-cutting ideas.

It's really ironic (and pretty offensive) that the US will be commemorating something called "Labor Day" on Monday while the powers that be seem completely at ease with a 9.6% unemployment rate.

FURTHER UPDATE — E.J. Dionne wrote to this point on Labor Day.