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President Obama’s address to Congress tonight was really two speeches in one. The first laid out his jobs plan—substantively, an attempt to forestall a double-dip recession. The second laid out a longer-term economic vision that promised, however vaguely, to restore American manufacturing.

Politically, both plans are aimed at shoring up the president’s support within the Democratic base: the jobs plan by its relative expansiveness (compared to the low-ball estimates the White House was putting out earlier this week so that Democrats would be pleasantly surprised at the plan’s actual scope), the manufacturing plan by its promise to use state power, in some unspecified way, to help restore middle-class jobs.

Both plans are also aimed beyond the Democrats’ core constituencies, however. Parts of the jobs plan—certainly, the payroll tax cuts to both employers and employees—will be hard for the Republicans to oppose if Obama and the Democrats simply hammer home these proposals day after day. Similarly, the theme of restoring America’s manufacturing capacities (and not, as the president asserted, by competing in “a race to the bottom,” but rather “a race to the top”) should play well in places like the industrial Midwest—if, and only if, the president changes our trade policies that were key to our deindustrialization in the first place. (more…)

WASHINGTON (PAI) — Government repression, in aid of large companies and Mexican millionaires, and abetted by longtime “company unions,” oppresses the overwhelming majority of Mexican workers, three leaders of independent Mexican unions are telling U.S. lawmakers. And that repression harms U.S. workers, too.

In a Sept. 13 Capitol Hill briefing led by the Steelworkers and the AFL-CIO International Affairs Department, speakers added the state of Mexican workers is important both there and here, as repression of Mexican workers drags down U.S. workers. Mexican wage and worker repression lets firms decamp there and threaten U.S. workers that they will do so unless U.S. workers lower their own living standards.

The briefing, in a packed congressional hearing room, comes as Congress prepares to consider two more trade pacts – without enforceable worker rights written into their texts – with two more Latin American nations, Colombia and Panama. Both pacts are modeled on the 1990s-era U.S.-Canada-Mexico “free trade” treaty, NAFTA. (more…)

Of all the lies that the American people have been told the past four decades, the biggest one may be this: We’ll all come out ahead in the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial society. Yes, we were counseled, there will be major dislocations, as there were during the transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy, but the America that will emerge from this transformation, like the America that emerged 100 years ago, will be one whose citizens are ultimately more prosperous and secure than their industrial-era forebears.

What a crock.

On Labor Day 2011, the America that’s replaced the vibrant industrial giant of the mid-20th century is a basket case. We’ve lost the jobs that created the broadly shared prosperity that made us the envy of the world. In their place, when we’ve created jobs at all, they’ve generated neither prosperity nor security.

The most prescient writer on post-industrial America offered a sobering perspective. In his 1972 book “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society,” sociologist Daniel Bell predicted a future of service jobs, rising consumption, compensatory entitlements and wars over taxes.

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The Chinese invasion tells us the true problem is that America is no longer willing or able to invest in its own future.  

Many economic Nostradamuses have long predicted that the epitaph on America’s tombstone will ultimately read, “Made In China.” But casual observers probably didn’t think the funeral procession would happen this fast. In the last year, though, most have wised up. Thanks to a spate of mind-blowing headlines, we are learning that the Chinese invasion isn’t just a distant possibility — it’s happening right now.

First, in February, ABC News reported that almost every Americana-themed trinket sold in the Smithsonian Institute is made in China. Then news hit that San Francisco is importing its new bay bridge from China. Then came the New York Times dispatch about the Big Apple awarding Chinese state-subsidized firms huge taxpayer-funded contracts to “renovate the subway system, refurbish the Alexander Hamilton Bridge over the Harlem River and build a new Metro-North train platform near Yankee Stadium.”

Astounding as all of that is, it was quickly topped by news last week reminding us that the new Martin Luther King monument in Washington was designed by a Chinese government sculptor and assembled by low-wage Chinese workers. (more…)

USW International Vice President Tom Conway talks about the damage to America’s manufacturing sector caused by unfair foreign trade.

The President is sounding like a fighter these days. He even says he’ll be proposing a jobs bill in September – and if Republicans don’t go along he’ll fight for it through Election Day (or beyond).

That’s a start. But read the small print and all he’s talked about so far is extending the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits (good, but small potatoes), ratifying the Columbia and South Korea free trade agreements (not necessarily a job-creating move), and creating an infrastructure bank.

An infrastructure bank might be helpful, depending on its size.

Which is the real question hovering over the entire putative jobs bill – its size.

Some of the President’s political advisors have been pushing for small-bore initiatives that they believe might have a chance of getting through the Republican just-say-no House. They also figure policy miniatures won’t give aspiring GOP candidates more ammunition to tar Obama as a big-government liberal.

But the President is sounding as if he’s rejected their advice.

That’s good policy and good politics.

Good policy because any jobs bill has to be big enough to give the economy the boost it needs to get out of the gravitational pull of the Great Recession.

Right now all the old booster rockets are gone. The original stimulus is over. The Fed’s “quantitative easing” is over.

Combine the budget cuts state and local governments continue to make with the slowdown in consumer spending, the reluctance of businesses to expand or hire, and the magnitude of unemployment and under-employment, and you need a big new booster rocket. I’d estimate the shortfall in aggregate demand to be $300 billion to $500 billion this year alone.

A bold jobs plan is also good politics. With more than 25 million Americans looking for full-time jobs, the wages of people with jobs falling, and an economy on the verge of a double dip, the President has to come out fighting on the side of average people.

Besides, Republicans won’t go along with any jobs initiative he proposes – even a tiny one. Better they reject one that could make a real difference than one that’s pitifully small and symbolic.

If Republicans reject it, Obama can build his 2012 campaign around that fight. Maybe he’ll even call Republicans on their big lie that smaller government leads to more jobs.

What would a bold jobs bill look like? Here are the ten components I’d recommend (apologies to those of you who have read some of these before):

1. Exempt first $20K of income from payroll taxes for two years. Make up shortfall by raising ceiling on income subject to payroll taxes.

2. Recreate the WPA and Civilian Conservation Corps to put long-term unemployed directly to work.

3. Create an infrastructure bank authorized to borrow $300 billion a year to repair and upgrade the nation’s roads, bridges, ports, airports, school buildings, and water and sewer systems.

4. Amend bankruptcy laws to allow distressed homeowners to declare bankruptcy on their primary residence, so they can reorganize their mortgage loans.

5. Allow distressed homeowners to sell a portion of their mortgages to the FHA, which would take a proportionate share of any upside gains when the homes are sold.

6. Provide tax incentive to employers who create net new jobs ($2,500 deduction for every net new job created).

7. Make low-interest loans to cash-starved states and cities, so they don’t have to lay off teachers, fire fighters, police officers, and reduce other critical public services.

8. Provide partial unemployment benefits to people who have lost part-time jobs.

9. Enlarge and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit – a wage subsidy for low-wage work.

10. Impose a “severance fee” on any large business that lays off an American worker and outsources the job abroad.

Some of these won’t cost the federal government money. Others will be costly in the short term but lead to faster growth.

Remember: Faster growth means a more manageable debt in the long term. Which means the President could tie this (or any other jobs bill of similar magnitude) to an even more ambitious long-term debt-reduction plan than he’s already proposed.

A bold jobs bill is good politics and good policy. Let’s wait to see what the President actually proposes.

Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, now in bookstores.

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This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.

Last Thursday, President Obama suggested that voters give Congress an earful on the horrible state of the economy. He was right to do that. There is plenty that Congress can do to spur private sector job creation that would not swell our federal budget deficit.

Taken together, these steps would provide a significant boost to the productive sector of the American economy. Creating one manufacturing job will support four or five other jobs in the economy, which is why it makes sense to adopt a coordinated manufacturing policy which would include the following steps:

• Establish a national infrastructure bank to leverage capital for large-scale transportation and energy projects.

• Reshape the tax code in a revenue neutral way to provide incentives for job creation and inward investment. (more…)

The AFL-CIO remains strongly opposed to the proposed U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement “until Colombia takes sustained, meaningful, and measurable action to change the culture of violence that plagues those who work to better their lives,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a letter to Congress yesterday.

Although the administration of Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has abandoned the heated, anti-union rhetoric of his predecessor and has engaged in apparently good-faith efforts to improve the environment for working men and women, Trumka says, Colombia is still the most dangerous place in the world for union members.

The 51 trade unionists killed in 2010 represented an increase over the murders of trade unionists in 2009 and 17 have been killed in 2011, including 10 just since the announcement of the Obama administration’s “Labor Action Plan,” in April.

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A statement from the AFL-CIO Executive Council:

The United States is in a continuing and severe jobs crisis. Our economy is growing at less than 2 percent per year, and growth is slowing. Official unemployment is 9.2 percent and rising—driven now by mass layoffs of teachers, first responders and other public employees. The real unemployment rate is almost twice as high—once labor market dropouts and involuntary part-time work are taken into account.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There are real solutions to the jobs crisis, but real solutions require government action.

Yet Washington is inexplicably focused on measures that will make the situation worse—both in the short and long run. Our nation’s leaders are offering working people the choice between bad and worse policies. Instead of addressing our profound economic crisis, they are adding to it an unending series of fake political crises. (more…)

A friend who’s been watching the absurd machinations in Congress asked me “what happens if we don’t solve the budget crisis and we run out of money to pay the nation’s bills?”

It was only then I realized how effective Republicans lies have been. That we’re calling it a “budget crisis” and worrying that if we don’t “solve” it we can’t pay our nation’s bills is testament to how successful Republicans have been distorting the truth.

The federal budget deficit has no economic relationship to the debt limit. Republicans have linked the two, and the Administration has played along, but they are entirely separate. Republicans are using what would otherwise be a routine, legally technical vote to raise the debt limit as a means of holding the nation hostage to their own political goal of shrinking the size of the federal government.

In economic terms, we will not “run out of money” next week. We’re still the richest nation in the world, and the Federal Reserve has unlimited capacity to print money. (more…)