Elmer Smith on the Employment Summit

"If big financial institutions needed a TARP, American workers need a tourniquet..."

Dear friends,

On th elink below you will find a piece by the pro;ific writer/thinker Elmer Smith of the Philadelphia Daily News.

An interesting comment from one of the people he interviewed in doing this report says, " 'We should be putting people to work in public jobs programs designed to help communities by repairing rusting infrastructure,' Dodds said. 'In the '70s, we put 4,000 to 5,000 people to work in this region in the CETA program. It's time to do that again.' "

None of the politicians or economists seem to get it. That is, make-work jobs are short-lived patch work operations that hide the real problem: people need to start developing their own communities, so that they can create their own livelihoods and not have to depend upon either the government or huge corporations. In order to do that, they must institute a new way of making value judgments that call for citizens in any particular community to work together for the common weal, as opposed to the dog-eat-dog type of mentality that became the major focus beginning with Ronald Reagan's and his bosses' assent to power.

G. Djata Bumpus
http://www.philly.com/dailynews/local/20091208_Elmer_Smith__At_employment_summit__the_10-percenters_call_for_some__good_jobs_.html