This nation is truly f*cked long term unless we create or bring back millions of manufacturing jobs that we have allowed corporations to move overseas. How are kids who can't afford college educations going to make decent livings? How are adults going to become "consumers" again when they have been laid off from jobs that are simply disappearing, with nothing equivalent in skills or salary to be found? Those jobs are gone, Gone, GONE -- they no longer exist. Unless we find solutions to this fundamental question, there will be no such thing as a true "recovery," and no rebound from "consumers" who lack the income to stimulate the economy.

Because NAFTA and GATT and other trade-opening agreements never addressed this fundamental employment quandary, we set ourselves up for this, a colossal systemic problem we still seemingly choose to ignore because there are no useful short-term solutions. We lack the guts to challenge extra-national corporations, so they do as they wish without challenge, and move their labor wherever it's cheapest. (Let's be real. Many of these corporations may have had their roots in the U.S., but their allegiances are to profits, not nations.) Until we take on the problem of corporations grown too big to control, federal "stimulus" plans will never be anything but ineffective band-aids.

"People know when they're being screwed by sleaze" --

That's why I'm sure you knew you were being screwed by the sleaze of the Bush administration, even from their first month in office, when they refused to identify the sleaze that took part in that closed-door energy summit. I'm sure you were there fighting the good fight when Bush-Cheney fought disclosure in court, every step of the way to the Supreme Court, where the conservative appointees came to their rescue. And I'm sure you recognized the sleaze involved in their lying about the Iraq-9/11 connection, the sleaze of a Medicare prescription drug benefit that was a gift to big pharma, the sleaze of torture and of expanded domestic spying, and the legal contortions to authorize that, the sleaze of firing U.S. attorneys for failing to carry out hit jobs on Democrats ... and it goes on and on. Plus we are still finding out the depths of that sleaze, and of a sleazy former vice president who didn't mind killing thousands of soldiers and civilians to accomplish his illegal, unethical, immoral ends, who goes out of his way to talk now, but not when he was really responsible to us. Do you recognize that sleaze when you see it, conservative tool?

Nothing Obama has done or is seeking even comes close.

Thanks again, Mr. Tennis, for another piece of great writing. I really appreciate how you capture feelings and views about living life that I usually share, yet in your unique voice, you help me see those things with greater clarity.

One thing you could have suggested was that she continue to act with the kindness she has been disappointed to find lacking in others, including extending that to the jerk-weasels. Those mean-heads are making civility disappear, replaced with a general atmosphere of hostility. Defending and growing civility starts with the individual. It is a fight worth waging, not giving up to the jerk-weasels.