President Obama was sworn in one year ago this past January. He was sworn in because he won an election, and he won that election on the basis of his promises to create jobs and to terminate our plundering and pillaging in the Middle East.

Jobs, jobs, jobs were his campaign promises … some three-and-a-half million of them, as we recall. Promises, promises, promises are the sum total of what he’s come up with, however. He was aware all along that neither he nor anyone else in his entourage had the foggiest notion about the creation of jobs, and to be sure, his administration has evaded the issue ever since his inauguration.

Smoke screens and hoaxes are what Americans are being served.
– First, there were the bailouts of the too-big-to-fail banksters and wolves on Wall Street. Job creation was on a back burner.
– Then they foisted the interminable and inane “health reform” scams on us. Job creation remained on a back burner.
– And let’s not forget about his Middle East “surge”, and his explanation that by widening wars we would be promoting peace. Jobs, of course, were still far down on his agenda.

A few days before president-elect Obama was sworn in Bob Herbert, the outstanding NY Times OP-ED columnist wrote:

“Another month, another half-million Americans out of work. The ranks of the unemployed have now stretched beyond 11 million, and millions more are underemployed – working part time, for example, because they can’t find full time jobs.

“As bad as this sounds, the reality confronting working men and women is actually significantly worse. Some 2.6 million jobs have been lost since December 2007, and as the Economic Policy Institute tells us:

– “‘Just to keep up with the ever-expanding labor force, the economy would have needed to create 1.5 million jobs over the past 12 months. This means that the 2.6 million jobs lost leaves us over 4 million jobs short of what the economy required to provide employment for the American work force.’

“We’re in economic quicksand. The official unemployment rate (a notoriously rosy statistic) is 7.2 percent. But more than one in every eight workers in America is jobless or underemployed. That’s 21 million people. And it’s not even counting the so-called discouraged workers who have given up looking fore a job …

“This is an emergency. There is one overriding mission for the incoming Obama administration when it comes to dealing with the economy, and that’s putting Americans back to work. Forget the G.O.P.’s mania for tax cuts.
“Forget, for the time being (but not forever), the ballooning budget deficits. Forget the feel-good but doomed-to-fail effort to play nice-nice with the rabid politicians of the right who were the ones most responsible for ruining the economy in the first place.

“Put the people back to work!”

So yesterday, more than a year after he was sworn in, here’s what we hear from the White House:

“Paring deficits as important as creating jobs, Obama says” … and the jobs, jobs, jobs that he promised to provide are still on a back burner.

“WASHINGTON (AP) – Trimming budget deficits is as important as creating jobs to sustain the economy recovery, President Obama said yesterday.

“The government reported Friday the economy grew at an annual rate of 5.7 percent in the final three months of 2009 … ‘A sign of progress’, Obama said …”

He should have known better than to make that silly statement because The NY Times had spelled out the reasons for this “growth” to their millions of readers earlier that same day. The economy had indeed grown at an annual rate of 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter, the paper admitted, but “well over half that growth came from large adjustments to business inventories that are unlikely to be repeated on a similar scale in the months to come …

“Another chunk of growth was due to government stimulus spending, which will wane in 2010,” the report continued. “Much of the recent upsurge in business purchases of equipment and software was likely due to a rush to take advantage of an investment tax break before it expired in December.

“So, what does it take to translate an incipient recovery into a sustained expansion?” the newspaper asked. “In a word: jobs. Employment leads to income and to spending.”

Now, where have you heard that before? Job creation is the very idea we’ve been promoting. We’ve been recommending the revitalizing of about 100 of our shipyards, as we did in the 1930s, and at about $ 100 million per facility ($ 100 billion) the cost would be much less than the $ 787 billion stimulus package shelled out last year by the fledgeling Obama administration.

When the President told us that 3.5 million jobs would be created by those misdirected bailout funds, he knew beforehand that he couldn’t produce those jobs. And in any event 3.5 million jobs is far short of the needed 50 million that an Emergency Shipbuilding Program would generate.

At the tail end of our Vol. XVII, Art. 30 commentary we wrote about the number of vessels our 50 million shipbuilders would be building; the positive effect that 50 million paychecks would have on the U.S. economy; and the effect that thousands of U.S.-owned and operated container ships would have on worldwide trade. We should keep all that in mind.

We ended by saying, “He who builds ships builds worlds”. We should keep that in mind as well.