Ezra Klein compares and contrasts the key points in Obama and Romney’s jobs plan:

In his news conference, Romney emphasized four ideas in his plan: expanding domestic energy production, working out trade agreements with Latin America, cracking down on China and cutting the corporate tax rate. These are all reasonable ideas. But working out trade agreements takes a long time. Getting the Keystone oil pipeline up and running takes a long time. Rewriting and implementing a new corporate tax code takes a long time.  Changing China’s policies takes a long time. It’s difficult to see how any of these ideas creates a substantial number of jobs quickly.

Obama also tends to emphasize four parts of his plan: increasing infrastructure investment, hiring more state and local workers, doubling the size of the payroll tax cut and adding a new set of tax cuts for small businesses and companies that hire new employees. Two of those policies imply directly hiring hundreds of thousands of workers. The other two move money into the economy immediately. It’s easier to see how these policies lead to more jobs and demand in the short term.

The real difference comes down to how each candidate would pay down the deficit, and as usual, Republicans are big on tax cuts and short on details on how they would pay for them. Writes Klein:

In terms of the deficit, the Obama administration has put forward a specific set of ideas — mostly by eliminating itemized deductions for wealthier Americans — to pay for its plan. The Romney campaign has not yet said how it will cut corporate and individual tax rates without increasing the deficit.

So Romney is basically sticking to the libertarian ideology that tax cuts and deregulation solve everything (including the deficit apparently) whereas Obama’s plan is actually, well, a plan.

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Agora Partnerships: Attracting top talent for impact investing

By Ben Cohen: One of the main motivators for doing exceptionally well at school is the prospect of a high paying job afterwards. In the modern economy, salaries are highest in the financial sector, and given America’s gigantic student debt problem, it makes sense that the best and the brightest would head off into the city to make their fortunes.

Or so we thought.

In a fascinating article in the Washington Post, Ezra Klein profiles ‘Venture for America’, an organization dedicated to playing the middleman between small, growing businesses and students who would want to work for them. It takes its cues from ‘Teach for America’ – a wildly successful non profit teaching program that has managed to attract top talent without top salaries. Writes Klein:

Teach for America solved that problem [attracting top talent] by providing schools across the country with the recruiting capacity and brand equity they lacked, enabling them to pool resources to attract top students. Venture for America is eager to play a similar role, serving as the middleman between small, growing businesses and students who might want to work for them.

In its first year, Yang estimates that Venture for America received about 500 applications for 40 slots. The jobs are in fast-growing companies that are less than 10 years old, and they pay from $32,000 to $38,000. Right now, Venture for America is working with companies in Cincinnati, Detroit, Las Vegas, New Orleans and Providence, R.I. Next year, the organization expects to have more than a thousand applicants for 100 positions, allowing expansion to Baltimore; Cleveland; New Haven, Conn.; Pittsburgh; and Raleigh-Durham, N.C.

It is a sign of changing times that money isn’t enough to attract the best and the brightest graduates anymore, an indication that the era of ‘greed is good’ is coming to an end. Klein spoke with a recent Ivy League Graduate who on paper, fitted the exact profile of a Wall St apprentice:

Two years ago, Mike Mayer appeared headed in the same direction. A high school valedictorian, he attended the University of Pennsylvania. As a sophomore, he worried that he wasn’t learning usable skills, so he switched into an undergraduate program at the Wharton School and, as he puts it, “followed the herd into the finance concentration, and then into New York and Wall Street.”…..he’s finished with Wharton and heading to New Orleans to work at a small software company. “There is a sense of creating something, of creating real tangible value,” he says. “A big bank does create value for our economy, but as a first-year analyst among 80 or 90 peers, you’re not seeing it. At a start-up, you’re seeing it every day.”

There are many other small to medium sized ventures out there doing interesting and important work that are attracting phenomenally bright and talented people – people who maybe 10 years ago would have committed themselves to the world of finance, but see a more fulfilling future for themselves doing something they find meaningful.

Take for example ‘Agora Partnerships‘, a company that accelerates early-stage businesses throughout Latin America and links them to impact investors around the world. They work specifically with “impact entrepreneurs” in the region – men and women who are intentionally using their business to solve a social, economic, or environmental problem in their community. Agora has attracted top talent to work for them, not because they’re handing out Wall St salaries, but because they get to be involved with something they feel is important.

Director of marketing and communications Jesse Grainger was attracted to the company because of the principles Agora adheres to. He told me:

I chose Agora because it meant something more to me than a paycheck. Right out of grad school I worked with a record label for a year before realizing that selling music and concert tickets wasn’t fulfilling enough for me. We’re facing myriad of problems in our society today. I wanted to feel as if I was a part of the solution. Also, it’s an exciting time for the socially responsible sector. Traditional “do-gooder” organizations are embracing more market reforms and entrepreneurial ingenuity. There seemed like a lot of opportunity in this space to grow.

The next generation of America’s best and brightest are not necessarily anti-money or anti-business, they are just concerned about the products they will be involved in making. Companies like Agora are for-profit businesses, but they care about where that profit comes from. That concern is also reflected in the talent they attract to work for them. Says Grainger:

We attract talented people by selling the vision/purpose of Agora as well as the nuts and bolts of what we do. We communicate to people that we are building a movement to use business to solve social problems using tried and tested best business practices.

Young people are growing up in a world where consumerism and materialism are the defining features of our culture – they are bombarded with non stop advertising encouraging them to buy an endless choice of products. The results have been disastrous from a societal point of view – mental illness is soaring along with reliance on chemical medication, young people feel increasing disconnected from the political process and are depressed about their future prospects. The idea of clocking in to a 9-5 day in day out for the rest of their working lives for institutions with little impact on anything relevant to them isn’t enough any more.

The rise of social entrepreneurialism, the rekindling of interest in small business is a sign that the next generation is fighting back – not by protesting on the streets or engaging with the political process, by opting out of Wall St and Big Business culture and forging their own paths. It’s a quiet revolution, but one that is definitely happening.

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Noam Chomsky: An advocate of Latin American independence (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Ben Cohen: The popularity of austerity in America and most of the industrialized world has revealed the truth about how modern economics works: Economies are beholden to banking institutions and have little control over their own destinies. Austerity measures are not working, but because the financial system dictates that the measures must be followed, governments have little choice other than to take orders. Who controls the money controls policy, and through debt the banks literally have the world at their feet. The popular uprisings across the European continent and the election of a socialist in France are a sign that the dynamics are changing, but there is an uphill struggle and no guarantees that the power of financial institutions can be reigned in.

If the supposed enlightened nations want to know what a future without the dictatorship of banks looks like, they’d do well to look at Latin America where popularly elected governments are working diligently to control their own destinies. Here’s Noam Chomsky talking about the extraordinary changes happening on the continent that have either been ignored or vilified in the western press:

What’s happened in Latin America in the last 10 years is just spectacular. I mean, in the last 10 years, for the first time in—since the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors—that’s half a millennium—Latin America has freed itself, substantially freed itself from Western domination and control, meaning mainly U.S……

U.S. and Canada are isolated in the hemisphere. And in fact, there’s a new organization, just formed about a year ago, CELAC, which formally excludes the U.S. and Canada, includes everyone else. It’s quite possible that that may replace the Organization of American States, which is U.S.-run. One sign of it is the U.S. has been essentially kicked out of its military bases in South America. They’re also moving towards dealing with some of their internal problems, which are severe.

And the other thing that’s exciting there is the role of popular movements. I mean, there are mass popular movements of indigenous people, working people, others who have just been—you know, who have been extremely successful in substantially changing policy. That’s of historic significance.

As Francesca Ghersenti of International Democracy Watch notes, CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) was created at an interesting time:

The creation of CELAC comes at a specific historical juncture, in which the Western countries are facing extreme economic and financial difficulties. Contrary to this, Latin America is experiencing an economic boom and restored cultural and identity due to the 200th independence anniversary. As a result, it could be the economic and financial crises and the historical moment themselves to be speeding up and strengthening the process towards strong regional integration.

In fact, the CELAC economic agenda expects to consolidate integration and social inclusion as a way to maintain economic growth and protect the continent form the current financial crises.

CELAC has proposed a “new international financial architecture,” more specifically the creation of a reserve funds bank that would guarantee stable source of funding for the Latin American countries. Predictably, the US media’s response to CELAC was less than enthusiastic. As Alex Main form the Center for Economic Policy and Research writes:

The minimal coverage that the summit garnered in the U.S. media was mostly limited to reports that downplayed the significance of the new regional bloc.  It was depicted in some articles as “Chávez’s baby” and – according to one U.S. pundit – “will probably last as long as Chávez is willing to underwrite it.”  Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer insisted in a headline that the “Group will have no Teeth.” Based on conversations with a White House official and a representative of a right-wing Latin American government, Oppenheimer was able to determine with certainty that CELAC “will hardly make it into the history books.”

Contrary to those reports, Main argues the organization has some very significant and historic momentum behind it:

There is a new geopolitical reality south of the Rio Grande which has created a fertile terrain for deep and effective Latin American and Caribbean integration.

Only a decade ago, nearly all of the governments of the region embraced the Washington Consensus dogma of free markets, deregulation, privatization and the downsizing of the state and its role in the economy.  By the early 2000s, however, the tide turned as the peoples of the region went to the ballot boxes and overwhelmingly rejected policies that had led to stagnant economic growth, increased inequalities, and decreased access to education, healthcare and other public services.

Having suffered centuries of colonialism, invasion, and economic strangulation, Latin American countries are beginning to take their future into their own hands and creating financial structures that work for people rather than banks. They are doing it by electing politicians who refuse to endorse neo liberalism or take orders from financial institutions – and looking at the regions staggering growth rate, it is working.

And if it is working in Latin America, there’s no reason it can’t work here.

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In response to the liberal media's hostile reaction to Cornel West's tirade against Obama, Chris Hedges counters with a withering critique of what he sees as the dissipating left in America:

The liberal class, by allowing radical movements to be dismembered through Red baiting and by banishing those within its ranks who had moral autonomy, gradually deformed basic liberal tenets to support unfettered capitalism, the national security state, globalization and permanent war. Liberalism, cut off from the radical roots of creative and bold thought, merged completely with the corporate power elite. The liberal class at once was betrayed and betrayed itself. And it now functions like a commercial brand, giving a different flavor, face or spin to the ruthless mechanisms of corporate power. This, indeed, is the primary function of Barack Obama.

In the scheme of things, I tend to agree with Hedge's analysis of the American political system – I don't necessarily agree with the tone or the vicious attacks against those who disagree with him, but the prevalent point that unfettered capitalism is now a major philosophical tenet of both political parties is deeply troubling. West's critique of Obama wasn't pleasant to listen to particularly for liberals who have religiously supported him, but it doesn't mean it wasn't true.

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