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America and the world owe a great debt to Occupy Wall Street for making the problem of economic inequality impossible to ignore. The tiny spark that began in Zuccotti Park just six weeks ago has triggered a major shift in the national dialogue on inequality, our economy and our democracy.

Now it’s time to begin a conversation about solutions — solutions big enough to fit the scale of the problems that Occupy Wall Street has highlighted. Fortunately, the American Dream Movement spent this last summer taking on this very challenge. We are a vast, growing network of progressive organizations and individuals. We are fighting to renew the American Dream and return our country to the principle of liberty and justice, for ALL (not for some).

We launched in June 2011, with the support of more than 70 national organizations, including MoveOn.org, Planned Parenthood, Center for Community Change, Campaign for America’s Future, SEIU and AFL-CIO. Since then, more than half a million people have joined our ranks and become members on www.RebuildtheDream.com. We now have membership in every congressional district of the country.

In July, the American Dream Movement created an inclusive process to forge a jobs agenda that would put the country back to work without hurting essential programs like Medicare and Medicaid. More than 131,000 people got involved, both online and in person (NOTE: That is nearly three times the number of people who helped craft the Tea Party’s famous”Contract from America.”) Participants generated more than 20,000 ideas, then rated and ranked them to identify the best ones.

The outcome was our 10-point program: the Contract for the American Dream.

The common sense remedies in the Contract are based on the fundamental idea that a functioning U.S. economy requires opportunity for all and responsibility from all. Here are the ten items:

I. Invest in America’s Infrastructure – Rebuild our crumbling bridges, dams, levees, ports, water and sewer lines, railways, roads, and public transit. Invest in high-speed Internet and a modern, energy-saving electric grid. These investments will create good jobs and rebuild America.

II. Create 21st Century Energy Jobs – Invest in American businesses that can power our country with innovative technologies like wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal systems, hybrid and electric cars, and next-generation batteries. And put Americans to work making our homes and buildings energy efficient. We can create good, green jobs in America, address the climate crisis, and build the clean energy economy.

III. Invest in Public Education – Provide universal access to early childhood education, make school funding equitable, invest in high-quality teachers, and build safe, well-equipped school buildings for our students. This is critical for our future and can create badly needed jobs now. (more…)

Seems like only yesterday conservative nabobs of negativity predicted America’s ballooning budget deficit would generate soaring inflation and crippling costs of additional federal borrowing.

Remember Standard & Poor’s downgrade of the United States? Recall the intense worry about investors’ confidence in government bonds — America’s IOUs?

Hmmm.

Last week ten-year yields on U.S. Treasuries closed at 1.83 percent. (more…)

President Obama’s jobs speech was the right narrative and the right tone. It suggested a president who was a capable leader in a crisis, who gets America’s pain. He also boxes in the Republicans—and by offering a plan that includes elements that many Republicans support, he makes it much harder for them to oppose it.

Progressive critics who were waiting for President Obama to sound a more urgent note on jobs were happy to treat the speech with generosity. The Times’ Paul Krugman called it “significantly bolder and better than I expected.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/opinion/setting-their-hair-on-fire.html

Demos President Miles Rapaport called the speech “the narrative we’ve been waiting for,” adding the caveat:

The overarching question I asked myself after the President’s speech concluded was ‘Can he, will he, hold this theme?’ Can he keep his focus clearly on investing in the future, and not sink back into the deficit and austerity culture where the opponents of government want to drag both him and us?

(more…)

I opened up my Yahoo account when I got off work and was greeted by an article from the New York Times about how the State of California is outsourcing the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge project to China.

Outsourcing has become an everyday occurrence. Big Businesses and governments like this tell our American citizens and workers exactly what they think about them every time a project like this is sent overseas. According to the article, the California government saved around 400 million dollars by sending our jobs overseas.

This type of action should be considered criminal.

The state of California contracted a Chinese company that pays their workers less than a dollar an hour, and works them for more than 100 hours per week to steal 3000 jobs from qualified and competent American Workers. Their safety concerns were so great that they had to ship 250 consultants, government employees, and contractors to Shanghai. (more…)

The AFL-CIO today is announcing a major “commitment to action” to bring public and private partners together to encourage both workers’ capital and skilled labor to promote large-scale investments in America’s infrastructure.

This pioneering commitment, which will be announced at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in Chicago, will seek to create good jobs and address our public infrastructure deficit and the threats posed to the environment and our economy by the way in which we use energy.

As part of the commitment, the AFL-CIO will work with business and government to promote infrastructure investment with a goal of at least $10 billion in new funding over the next five years. (more…)

By Mike Hall
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

The nation “must dig in and redouble our efforts to ‘Make It In America‘,” said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., at a Senate hearing Wednesday on reviving the nation’s manufacturing base.

Testifying on behalf of the AFL-CIO, United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo W. Gerard told the Commerce, Science and Transportation committee:

American manufacturing is in dire circumstances and its future is in jeopardy.  Our economic and national security is at risk. Despite the small uptick in manufacturing employment and production, it occurs against a backdrop of long-term decline and devastation.

He outlined several steps that must be taken to rebuild manufacturing and create jobs including: (more…)

By Bill Scher
Executive editor of LiberalOasis.com

Last week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a joint statement with the AFL-CIO supporting President Obama’s call for increased public investment in infrastructure, which read:

Whether it is building roads, bridges, high-speed broadband, energy systems and schools, these projects not only create jobs and demand for businesses, they are an investment in building the modern infrastructure our country needs to compete in a global economy.

That’s great. Now it’s time for the Chamber to tell it to all those Tea Partiers it helped get elected to Congress.

No outside group spent more to help Republicans take over than Congress than the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, dropping $31 million funneled from undisclosed donors on ads that attacked supporters of economic stimulus for spending recklessly and failing to create jobs.

Funny thing about that is: a major supporter of President Obama’s stimulus law was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But instead of backing lawmakers who helped the member companies of the Chamber from suffering a full-blown Great Depression, the Chamber decided to punish them because many also backed reform of health care and Wall Street. (more…)

By Dave Johnson
Fellow with Campaign for America’s Future

Last week, I wrote that the President may have sacrificed his long-term vision on trade and economic/industrial policy to day-to-day concerns and politics. The tax-cut deal is another indicator that a big-picture vision has been sacrificed. But however much smoke gets thrown up to mask the real problem it’s still all about the economic paradigm.

There is still a lot of forward-thinking work to do on our economy. The big picture is, of course, jobs. It is balance of trade, a coherent and especially comprehensive economic/industrial policy, education, infrastructure. But even more than those, fixing the real economic mess is about finding a sustainable and equitable formula, and changing the equations of who gets what for what. It is a bigger picture.

But now we are totally caught in the day-to-day fights over tax cuts for the rich, giving forever more and more to the big financial institutions, letting the big corporations get away with more and more while delivering less and less and making us work harder and harder. It seems that all we do now is just react to corporate/conservative assaults. We are trying to fight off attacks on everything, everything and on every, every front.

Instead of job-creation programs we are fighting over just giving unemployed people the same unemployment benefits that American workers have always gotten. Instead of doing something about climate change we are fighting to keep the big oil companies from killing rail projects and green energy initiatives. (more…)

By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

Last week, the same day the White House was finalizing its $900 billion tax deal with Republicans, the president gave an important address at a vocational technical school in North Carolina.

It was his clearest statement yet about the challenges America faces in the global economy. The United States has gone from 1st to 9th place among nations in the percentage of its population that graduates from college, he noted. We now rank 24th in the portion of our children who have a high school degree. Our infrastructure is crumbling.

“The most competitive race is between America and our competitors around the world,” he said. “In the race for the future, America is in danger of falling behind.”

But the president’s tax deal makes it harder for the United States to get back on top. By extending the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy, shrinking the estate tax, and freezing discretionary spending (on everything except defense), he’s leaving almost nothing for education and infrastructure.

And by embracing deficit reduction while agreeing to $900 billion in tax breaks — the lion’s share for the rich — he’s making education and infrastructure spending sitting ducks for a Republican congress intent on shrinking the size of government.

The states — many of them broke — are still firing teachers, doing away with preschool programs, and raising tuitions and fees at public universities. And now that the stimulus is about over, there won’t be any more money to rehabilitate the roads, bridges, sewers, and energy systems that are still falling apart all over America.

“We can win the competition,” the President said last week. His words were inspiring. But his deed that day, approving a tax deal that continues George W. Bush’s fiscal policies, makes that goal harder to achieve.

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Robert Reich served as the nation’s 22nd Secretary of Labor and now is a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, now in bookstores. His book, “Supercapitalism,” is out in paperback. For copies of his articles, books, and public radio commentaries, go to www.robertreich.org.

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This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.

Here’s what U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont told the Burlington Free Press recently: “In the years to come, it is imperative that we not only create jobs but create jobs that pay people a wage they can live on.”

Sen. Sanders, a member of the Senate labor committee, would create new manufacturing jobs with solid middle-class wages by rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure, constructing the new renewable energy generators like wind turbines and solar panels, and fostering  employee ownership.

Watch him talk about his plans at five town meetings: