The problem in American labor is not that there isn't enough work to do, or money to pay for it. It's that management, either private or public, is not connecting the two.
Note: on Meteor Blades' recommendation, I have converted my comment in MB's frontpage story into this diary. Please read it and discuss how to fuse two problems into a grand solution...
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NB: I revised this diary, as discussed in a thread in its discussion below.
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We have a vast oil spill that will need unprecedented labor to clean up. Right where we have 5 year old hurricane ruins rotting in the sun. The Gulf Coast needs hundreds of thousands of people to repair it, a job that will take years. A job that is repeated over time in smaller doses but across the world.
The damage was caused by the oil corps and the banks. From reckless drilling to reckless emissions to reckless lending and scamming.
500,000 jobs on the Gulf Coast at $40,000 annual average salary (the US median) is $20 billion a year. BP just made over $6B profits in just the first quarter of 2010. Goldman Sachs reported $3.3B profits in 2010 Q1; over $13B profits last year. And those two corps are just the most undeniably liable money pots - their whole industries are packed with liabilities and $billions to pay them. A 5 year programme costing $100B labor + $50B materials to repair the Gulf Coast, including rebuilding wetlands and proper levees, and housing and rail transit, would fix unemployment, the infrastructure and ecology, and serve justice.
State and Federal governments would get over $30B in taxes from that surge. $150B spent on labor intensive jobs in one of the poorest regions of the country would jumpstart multitudes of local economies with real wealth creation, from the bottom up. And Democrats could point to how "socialism" (court sentences of fines reinvested in jobs) rebuilt the Southeast, after Republicans reduced their last stronghold to rubble.
There are surely other, more comprehensive programmes. Indeed, accounting and collecting liabilities for all the "externalized costs" of rapacious corporatism should be a comprehensive policy that would work far beyond the Gulf Coast. But this one specific region, this small scope of liabilities and culprits, could form the kernel of recovery. Recovery of jobs, economy, government integrity, ecology, and justice. That's comprehensive enough to get started. Strike while the iron is hot, the oil is sticky, and the Gulf Coast is waiting.