We never hear any urgency from this president when it comes to jobs. You want to know how to get those jobless claims down? Here we go:
1. Obama needs to go to the Gulf and say, OK, we need some compromise here. We know that we had an outlier in BP, but we need to keep America on the move and hire people.
2. We need to get domestic in our fuel, and that doesn’t mean just coal. We have abundant natural gas; we just have to get it to the right places. So we need to put people to work building pipelines, just like in the 1930s. We need to allow fracking and encourage drilling safely, because it will create hundreds of thousands of jobs. We have to accept that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and as much as we like solar and wind and conservation, we need to compromise.
3. We need to ask the winners, the Fords, the Caterpillars, the Disneys, the Cummins, the JP Morgans, what they need in order to hire people.
4. We need to call in the banks, and even though we may not like them, we need to call the CEOs into a room and say, "Solve this housing crisis for us. Do it in an expedient way. We can't do it without you, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan. You are too important to the issue."
5. We need to help our exporters get more deals overseas, and we need to finance those customers to use our products. Start with aerospace and move further.
6. We need to get the public sector to take some pension hits to make it so we don't run out of money. It is a shame, but we need to get behind a more realistic public-vs.-private pay scale and pension, because the risk to public-sector employees is nowhere near as high as it is for those in the private sector.
7. We need to fund small businesses that are profitable and want to expand. We need to guarantee some loans made to them by the banks.
8. We need to offer 1 percent financing from the FHA for people who want to stay in their homes for the next three to five years until we are past this crisis.
9. We need to temporarily remove the obstacles to hiring, such as a payroll tax exemption for new hires.
10. We need to keep the Bush tax cuts as they are until we are back on our feet.
Other than the FHA and the small-business initiatives, there isn't much here that is common ground with the president. And believe me, the president is calling all of the shots. Every country that is doing better than us, which is pretty much every country, has worked hand and hand with private industry to ask what needs to be done.
Our CEOs get called in for photo ops--and believe me I know, because I speak to the ones who have been called in--and then they are berated or derided.
It's ridiculous. We know it is true.
If we were serious about creating job, it would mean compromising the agenda. But compromise is the way the world works, and compromise is anathema to community organizers--the background of this president.
I understand this. As a union member, as an agitator, as a provocateur at one point in my life, part of me applauds the president for his principle. But it isn't the part that has anything to do with creating jobs, putting people to work. It is the part of me that says there is great inequality in the country, and I want it to be changed by taking from those who have and helping those who don't.
The problem is that the only way to do that now is to compromise on principles and create jobs.
And that was anathema to me when I was in my 20s.
We elected me. With hair. In my 20s.
I am doing my best!
Disclosures: At the time of publication, Cramer was long BAC, CMI, and JPM.
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