My Stimulus Jobs Plan

You want to create jobs? Let's ask the private sector to help out. How? I'll tell you how.

$1m will pay 40 people $25,000.

$10m will pay 400 people $25,000.

$100m will pay 4,000 people $25,000.

Now, get 30 people to contribute $100 million each to hire people. I'm thinking the top 30 people from the Forbes 100 Richest Americans. (Just checked: this would be 1% or less of their net wealth.*)

This is an instance hiring of 120,000 people. What would they do? Well, that can be determined. We could pick 12 cities and give the non-profits in those cities the option of hiring up to 10,000 people. We could hire 10,000 tutors to flood the school systems of those cities (particularly the bad ones). We could create free daycare centers for low-income people looking for work.

*http://www.forbes.com/wealth/forbes-400?boxes=HomepageSpecialStorySection#p_1_s_arank_-1_

Notes on: This Illegal American Life

This Illegal American Life on Current. Worth watching. You may feel it's sympathetic to the illegals but they ones shown are all employed by American companies. Our agricultural infrastructure is based on these people.

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You know, I used to watch Current all the time and this is why.

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Watching this documentary; I would fund these kids to go to college because they're not taking the American Dream for granted. I actually think someone should start a movement to sponsor all these kids to become citizens; to create a network of Americans who will take on the responsibility of making these kids, who grew up here their whole lives and are de facto citizens, if not on paper, into true American citizens.

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When you learn the kind of shit that people endure to come here - to WORK! - I think it's a testament to the character of these people. The idea that any woman crossing illegally can expect to be raped; that children walk through a desert for five or six days: what did you have to endure to work in America? What did it cost you to become a citizen? Perhaps we are all Paris Hiltons of citizenship: rich, gifted and spoiled with the wealth of a society we were lucky to be born into.

Notes on: An Inconvenient Truth

"An Inconvenient Truth" is on. There's a reason it won an Oscar; it really is a great *story* film. Even if you disagree with its message, it's a well-built and shaped film.

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One of his pictures shows smokestacks billowing smoke and it made me wonder: Does someone have a list of all of these places? How many of them are in the United States? What kinds of things would need to happen for those smokestacks to be cleaned up? Could the government create a program that would give grants to clean up all those smokestacks? Could we give international aid to clean up all the smokestacks in the rest of the world?

==Watching the movie it also occurs to me: We've mostly forgotten this whole issue. Since 2008, the country has been pre-occupied with Barack Obama, the Economic Crisis and now the war over the government's finances. The health of the Earth has been forgotten.

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Boy, oh boy: Gore's talk about record-setting hot summers and cities recording the most 100+ days sounds REALLY prophetic now.

The Consumer Economy

You know, on the one hand I feel like Obama should say what Bush said: Go out and spend; if you have a job, start buying. If we have a consumer economy, people need to consume. On the other hand, that's absurd because our consumer economy was based on nothing, on extended credit and money people didn't really have. How much do you have on your credit cards?