By Dave Lindorff

If you are sitting in class taking a test, and you’ve chosen to sit
amongst your bone-headed, slacker friends, don’t turn to them for help
when you can’t figure out of any of the answers. They may all tell you
the same thing, but they’ll all be wrong.

That’s the situation President Obama finds himself in today in the
White House. Having surrounded himself with the very Wall Street con
men who set up the crooked game that led to the current financial
crisis and economic collapse, and finding that the lousy advice they
have been giving him since last January has left the country still
mired in deepening economic decline, with the banks still not lending
and unemployment still mounting, and with growing signs that instead of
bottoming out and starting to recover, the economy is threatening to
fall a second time, to new lows and higher unemployment, Obama has
turned to the same rotten advisors for answers.

A few days ago, in an interview with Fox-TV while he was in China
off all places (a country that has made a stupendous stimulus
investment to create domestic jobs!) Obama warned, for the first time,
that America faces the possibility of a “double-dip” recession. That’s
fine as far as it goes. I agree. But what did he say the risk was? Not
that the government has been failing to put significant numbers of
people back to work, but that the government keeps piling up deficits.

This has to be the lamest economic thinking since Herbert Hoover
started tightening the screws on government spending at the onset of
the Great Depression in 1930.

Clearly the American government needs to do just the opposite of
worrying about deficits. The only growth the US economy has seen to
date has been the result of government funding—the cash-for-clunkers
program gave a brief restoration of pulse to the auto industry, and the
$8000 tax credit for buying a first home kicked up home sales briefly.
We know this because when the clunkers program ended, auto sales
crashed, and when the deadline approached for the end to the new home
tax credit, home building plunged almost 11%. The hundreds of billions
of dollars poured into so-called “shovel-ready” state and local
projects like roads, schools, etc., may have added or saved as much as
a million jobs, but the economy lost many times that many jobs over the
same period.

The problem with these stimulus programs is that they are
inefficient ways to create jobs or preserve jobs. If roughly one
million jobs were created through the stimulus spending of say $200
billion (assuming that the February $800-billion stimulus program, to
mollify Republicans, consisted of one-half tax cuts and only one-half
actual federal spending, and that this federal spending was spread
evenly over a two-year period, that’s $200,000 per job!

If, instead, Obama had chucked the dunces at Treasury and in his
Council of Economic Advisors, and instead asked your Labor Secretary to
initiate a wide-ranging $200-billion-per-year jobs program, hiring the
unemployed at perhaps $20-25,000 per person to do everything from teach
in overcrowded urban schools to laying high-speed rail trackbeds, from
cleaning up parks to putting insulation in homes, he could have given
jobs to close 8 million people—people who would have then spent their
money on goods and services and helped rally the economy from the
bottom up.

Deficits? Who gives a damn about deficits at this point! The
country is up to the gills in debt without creating any jobs. (It’s
kind of like my mortgage. Why would I worry about using my credit card
to buy food for the week if I was low on cash, when my mortgage has me
deep in the red for the next ten years? Obama’s financial advisors, on
the evidence, would tell me I should let my family go hungry, because I
need to worry about my total debt load.) If you’re worried about
deficits, Mr. Obama, end the god-damned wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is costing one million dollars a year to send one lousy grunt to
Afghanistan or Iraq. And you want to have at least 100,000 guys over
there. That’s $100 billion a year right there—enough to hire four
million unemployed Americans back here at home!

This president is well on the way to rescuing President Hoover from
history’s crap heap by one-upping him in the realm of economic
mismanagement. We already have Obamavilles springing up around the
country. We haven’t started calling them that, but Naming Day isn’t far
off.

At least Hoover didn’t mire the country in another war while the economy was collapsing around him.

President Obama is on a short leash at this point. His fans, and I
was one of those who was willing to give him a shot last November, are
mostly giving up on him. Activists are already turning on him. My union
friends are disgusted. My African-American friends just shake their
heads in dismay. Liberal friends act embarrassed. A leftist friend,
retired, who devoted a month to campaigning for Obama full time in
Pennsylvania last fall now writes angry letters almost weekly to
Obama’s former campaign manager David Plouffe and others, blasting
Obama’s handling of the bank crisis and his Afghan War plans. Clearly
Obama cannot continue to appease Republicans and cater to Blue Dogs in
Congress and expect to be re-elected in 2012.

Indeed, if he doesn’t toss the crooks and charlatans in the Fed,
the Treasury and his Council of Economic Advisers out, and doesn’t stop
listening to the self-serving crazies in the military, he won’t even
have a Democratic majority in Congress by the end of next year.

President Obama, aren’t you tired of being an embarrassment to your
friends and family? Aren’t you tired of being mocked by your foes?

Come on. We’re sick of your speeches! Suck it up, be a
leader.finally and kick some butt. Do something unconventional and
daring. End the wars, bring the troops home, announce a huge jobs
program, issue an executive order expanding the Medicare program, raise
taxes on the wealthy to back where they were in the 1960s, and let’s
get the country moving forward again.
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DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net