Jobs Now

Democracy Now! interview here and here with Dennis Kucinich, still fighting back through his last week in Congress.  Speaking on a range of subjects, including spying on Occupy Wall Street and the so-called fiscal cliff, Mr. Kucinich repeatedly returned, in the conversation, to the importance of creating jobs and the relationship of unemployment to how we are becoming "increasingly dysfunctional as a nation because of our unwillingness to challenge the military-industrial complex, which Dwight Eisenhower warned about generations ago."

Lately, we are having "the wrong discussion," Mr. Kucinich asserted,

Why haven’t we been talking about stimulating the economy through the creation of jobs? We’ve seemed to accept a certain amount of unemployment as being necessary for the proper functioning of the economy, so that for corporations it will keep wages low. That is baloney. We’re creating our own economic vice here that is entrapping tens of millions of Americans, and I just find it unacceptable. It’s like this whole fiscal cliff thing is a creation of people who are unimaginative and locked in by special interests.

A co-writer of the widely popular Medicare For All legislation H.R. 676 -- and one of the longest progressive hold-outs in the health care "overhaul" fight (whereby both Democrats and Republicans blocked a Medicare for All plan), Mr. Kucinich stated that the White House has to stand up for Medicare and social security, and that we have to "decide who we are as a nation."  He stated,

We’re spending more and more money for wars. We’re spending more and more money for interventions abroad. We’re spending more and more money for military buildups. And we seem to be prepared to spend less and less on domestic programs and on job creation. This whole idea of a debt-based economic system is linked to a war machine. And it’s linked to Wall Street’s concerns rather than Main Street’s concerns. We need to shift that. We need to get government—give government back the ability to create jobs. Private sector is not doing it.

Here's a clip of Dwight from RobUniv.

Photo Credits/top, courtesy of Lake Erie Winds, posted by Rich Norgard, August 2011, Jobhunter With Sign, EPA Hiring Jobless Workers For Great Lakes Cleanup/middle, courtesy of wikipedia, photographer: Brian Corr, Dennis Kucinich addressing an anti-war demonstration in Boston during the 2004 Democratic National Convention/bottom, courtesy of the guardian, photographer: Mark Ralston, August 2010, Protesters hold up "I want to work" placards in a demonstration of several thousand people outside City Hall in Los Angeles, California.