OBAMA'S TERRORISM SPEECH OFFERED NO STRATEGY FOR ELIMINATING ISIL, PUSHING GUN CONTROL

#Obama

OBAMA'S TERRORISM SPEECH OFFERED NO STRATEGY FOR ELIMINATING ISIL, PUSHING GUN CONTROL:

OBAMA CHIDES AMERICA FOR CALLING OUT RADICALIZED ISLAMISTS.

~ Obama on San Bernardino: 'This Was an Act of Terrorism'
The President addressed the mass shooting in a televised speech from the Oval Office on Sunday.

President Obama has called a mass shooting in California this week an “act of terrorism.”

“This was an act of terrorism designed to kill innocent people,” the president said Sunday of the rampage that claimed 14 lives and wounded 21 others.

He spoke from a lectern in the Oval Office, flanked by framed photographs of his wife and daughters on the desk behind him.

Obama said that investigators do not believe the killers “were directed by a terrorist organization overseas or that they were part of a broader conspiracy here at home.”

“But it is clear that the two of them had gone down the dark path of radicalization, embracing a perverted interpretation of Islam that calls for war against America and the West,” he said.

This week, a husband and wife killed 14 people and wounded 21 in a shooting rampage at a meeting of the county health department at a center in San Bernardino.

The killers, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27, died in a shootout with police hours later.

Farook worked as a health inspector at the department himself, and most of the victims were his coworkers, one of whom had shared a cubicle with Farook.

On the morning of the shooting, Malik pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in a Facebook post. Malik, a native of Pakistan, came to the United States last year to marry Farook, who was born in Illinois.

Both were devout Muslims. Farook’s coworkers said he rarely talked about his faith; Malik’s relatives in Pakistan say she grew more religious in recent years.

“As groups like ISIL grew stronger amidst the chaos of war in Iraq and Syria and as the Internet erases the distance between countries, we see growing efforts by terrorists to poison the minds of people,” Obama said Sunday.

The attack appeared to have been carefully orchestrated.

Farook and Malik wore masks and military-style vests and used assault rifles and handguns—some they had purchased legally, others they had reportedly gotten from someone else.

Investigators discovered the couple had turned part of their home into weapons stockpile.

They found thousands of rounds of ammunition, 12 completed pipe bombs, and materials to make more at their rented apartment in Redlands, less than a 15-minute drive from where the shooting occurred. Farook and Malik had smashed cellphones and deleted emails in an attempt to conceal their planning.

The FBI is investigating the attack as terrorism. The agency’s director, James Comey, said Friday the attack shows “indications of radicalization by the killers, and of potential inspiration by foreign terrorist organizations.”

Obama’s primetime speech was intended to reassure a public on edge in the wake of the Paris attacks last month, which were carried out by the Islamic State.

“I know that after so much war, many Americans are asking whether we are confronted by a cancer that has no immediate cure,” Obama said. “Well, here’s what I want you to know. The threat from terrorism is real, but we will overcome it.”

Obama outlined his current strategy for fighting the Islamic State, as he has done repeatedly in recent months: Launching airstrikes against targets in Iraq and Syria and helping Syrian and Iraqi Kurdish fighters on the ground.

He warned, as he has also done repeatedly in recent months, against sending Americans into combat, saying “we should not be drawn once more into a long and costly ground war in Iraq or Syria.”

The Defense Department States this month announced it would send special-operations troops to Iraq to aid local fighters, marking a public escalation in the Obama administration’s response to the terrorist group.

In the days after the San Bernardino shooting, the story developed into a wider conversation about terrorism, gun control, and even journalistic ethics.

California state lawmakers are consideringnew gun legislation.

Some Democratic members of Congress criticized their Republican counterparts for offering prayers in the aftermath of the mass shooting, and not legislative proposals for how to stop the next one.

The New York Timesran an editorial on its front page on Saturday for the first time since 1920, calling for greater regulation of guns.

Sources: The Atlantic, CNN, Whitehouse, Uptake Video, YouTube

SUICIDE IS DESTROYING BLACK FAMILIES IN AMERICA

#Suicide

Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

Why are so many BLACK Men in America giving up and completing Suicide?

More BLACK Men are dying from Suicide than from Police Brutality.

Suicide destroys BLACK Families in America.

The Federal Govt does not seem to care about the Mental Health of BLACK Men.

America's Corrupt Child Support system has contributed to the high rate of Suicide among BLACK Men.

Why are LIFE INSURANCE Companies releasing Checks to Survivors and Girlfriends for Suicide, especially in the state of NORTH CAROLINA??


Sources: The Root, YouTube

Ray Charles Sings "America The Beautiful" R.I.P. (Videos)

Sources: White House, Youtube

Pres. Obama Launches New Veterans' Jobs Initiatives: Putting America Back To Work!

It's A Shame When Our Men & Women Voluntarily Enlist In The U.S. Military To Serve & Protect Our Country, Then After Serving Not Be Able To Find Jobs. Of Course This Pertains More So To Minority Vets Than White Vets. It's True! Most White Vets Are Frequently Hired After Serving & Paid Good Salaries. While Qualified Black & Latino Vets Remain Unemployed Or Have To Settle For Low Paying Jobs. That Isn't Right!


Putting Our Veterans Back to Work

We ask our young Marines and soldiers to be warriors and diplomats, to deploy time and time again into harm’s way, but cannot help them when they ask something of us – even something as easy as leveraging their skills, talents and unparalleled experience into a job?

It’s time to do more for veterans seeking employment. We have an obligation to make sure our veterans are able to navigate this difficult labor market and succeed in the civilian workforce.

That’s why the President today announced a comprehensive plan to ensure that veterans have the employment support and assistance they deserve.

Building on the First Lady and Dr. Jill Biden’s work through Joining Forces, and on the President’s Veterans Employment Council, the proposals outlined by the President today use every available avenue to make sure that veterans have the skills employers want and that employers understand the value of hiring a veteran.

Here’s what the President’s proposal does:

Returning Heroes and Wounded Warrior Tax Credits: A new Returning Heroes Tax Credit for firms that hire unemployed veterans (maximum credit of $2,400 for every short-term unemployed hire and $4,800 for every long-term unemployed hire) and a Wounded Warriors Tax Credit which will increase the existing tax credit for firms that hire veterans with service-connected disabilities who have been unemployed long-term (maximum credit of $9,600 per veteran) and continue the existing credit for all other veterans with a service-connected disability (maximum credit of $4,800).

A Challenge to the Private Sector to Hire or Train 100,000 Unemployed Veterans or Their Spouses by the End of 2013: The President will challenge businesses to commit to hire or provide training to unemployed veterans or their spouses. Joining Forces will lead this work with businesses and industry.

Presidential Call for a Career-Ready Military: The Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, working closely with other agencies and the President’s economic and domestic policy teams, will lead a new task force to develop reforms to ensure that every member of the service receives the training, education, and credentials they need to transition to the civilian workforce or to pursue higher education. These reforms will include the design of a “reverse bootcamp,” which will extend the transition period to give service members more counseling and guidance and leave them career-ready.

Transition to the Private Sector: The Department of Labor will establish a new initiative to deliver an enhanced career development and job search service package to transitioning veterans at their local One-Stop Career Centers. The Office of Personnel Management will create a “Best Practices” Manual for the private sector to help businesses identify and hire veterans.

Sources: PBS, White House, Youtube

Horn Of Africa Famine Captures World's Attention! Help On The Way?

Horn of Africa famine: How to help

Somalia, already one of the world's poorest countries, is in midst of an epic humanitarian catastrophe, as a third of its popultion - 3.7 million people - face starvation. Throughout the Horn of Africa, in countries like Ethiopia and Kenya, as many as 11 million people are currently at risk of severe malnutrition or starvation as the region faces the worst drought conditions in 60 years.


The drought conditions, combined with an ongoing struggle between the Somali government and Islamic militants, as well as a recent rise in food prices, have all combined to create conditions that have stretched aid agencies thin.


The Horn of Africa region is now full of refugee camps, some with occupants numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Every day, countless families arrive half-dead out of the desert seeking help.


Many aid agencies say they have the capacity to address some of the worst results of the crisis, but they lack the funding to do so. Fortunately, there are many ways to help. Below is a list of some of the aid organizations with relief operations in the Horn of Africa, along with links to their donation pages.

UNICEF is among the most active charitable organizations supporting children in Somalia. They say as many 640,000 children are acutely malnourished in southern Somalia alone. Their programs support 16 stabilization centers, 201 outpatient therapeutic programs, and 325 supplementary feeding programs. To donate money to UNICEF, visit here. To learn how you can donate your time.

The U.N.'s World Food Program is the world's largest humanitarian organization fighting hunger, and is funded entirely through donations. Their work in the Horn of Africa is extensive and crucial. To find out how to donate to the WFP.

Save the Children is one of the world's leading independent nonprofit organizations. It has made an urgent call to donors to provide life-saving help to thousands of families in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. "Eighty percent of the refugees are children and the majority of the remainder are women," says Duncan Harvey, Save the Children's Deputy Country Director in Ethiopia. To find a list of the many ways to help Save the Children with their work in East Africa.

The International Rescue Committee responds to the world's worst humanitarian crises and helps people to survive and rebuild their lives. Founded in 1933 at the request of Albert Einstein, the IRC offers lifesaving care and life-changing assistance to refugees forced to flee from war or disaster. To support their work helping refugees in the famine.

Doctors without Borders, founded in 1971, provides independent, impartial medical assistance to those most in need in crisis zones throughout the world. They have been working actively with Somali refugees in northern Kenya since 2009. To find out about the many ways to support their medical mission.

CARE is a leading humanitarian organization that places special focus on working alongside poor women because, they say, equipped with the proper resources, women have the power to help whole families and entire communities escape poverty. Their immediate efforts for Somalia refugees in Kenya include safe water, sanitation, and emergency aid to newly arrived refugees. Individuals, especially children, who are suffering from malnutrition and medical problems are referred to supplementary and therapeutic feeding programs and stabilization units. Families are provided with emergency rations while awaiting access to general food distributions. To donate to CARE's East Africa program.

Mercy Corps is a global aid agency that works for long periods of time in areas that have experienced some kind of shock. They currently work with Somali refugees in Kenya, and plan on expanding their mission to alleviate the famine into Somalia and Ethiopia. To find out how to donate.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has operations in Kenya and parts of Somalia helping refugees. To donate to the Red Cross.

World Vision is a Christian humanitarian organization dedicated to working with children, families, and their communities worldwide to reach their full potential by tackling the causes of poverty and injustice. They are currently undertaking famine relief operations in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia. To donate to their effort.

American Jewish World Service is an international development organization that has a long-standing presence in East Africa and is working with humanitarian organizations already on the ground to provide critical aid to refugees, internally displaced persons and host communities, including food, water and sanitation, medical support and personal safety. To find out how to donate to AJWS' effort in the region.

Islamic Relief USA is a legally separate and independent member of a global family of collaborating relief organizations that was awarded its sixth consecutive four-star rating by Charity Navigator in 2009. They already had relief projects in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia prior to the current crisis. To find out about volunteering with or donating to Islamic Relief USA.


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Sources: CARE, CBS News, Youtube, Google Maps

Tea Party's Anti-American Agenda Revealed (Videos) Decision 2012

Treason! Secret Video Reveals Tea Party's Anti-American Agenda


I've never been to a tea party. Really. Not even as a little girl. Was never my thing. So when I decided I was going to infiltrate the Tri-State Liberty Summit of Tea Party activists, my first question was: What do I wear? Unfortunately, my frilly cocktail dress was at the cleaners so I had to go with my usual "Is she a boy or a girl?" attire. Good news is, the Tea Party activists were unfazed by my gender-bending sweater vest. All they seemed to care about was that I was white.

Because in the flurry of red, white and blue sentiment that filled the Italian American Center of Stamford, Connecticut, on May 23, 2010, the most prominent color was definitely white. White people with ghostly white faces fearing that our new black President is only one sooner-than-expected sign of the approaching end of white racial dominance in America.

Now, if you're a well-to-do, older white person (as all the recent polls suggest most Tea Party activists are, compared with the rest of the population), there are only two possible reactions to the growing reality of racial diversity in America.

Option 1: You can accept that white supremacy (and the disproportionate economic, political and cultural power that has come with it) is and has always been an unjust but convenient excuse for why a few elites hold all the cards and the rest of us -- including most white people -- are left empty-handed. But I guess that would require actually accepting that you will never be one of those supreme elites under the current system and that the only way for you to get ahead is to join with everyone else who, like you, has ultimately been left behind.

That's a lot of self-awareness for a class of folks who have generally thrived on denial.



This leaves us with Option 2: Reject the United States of America, a nation that -- though formed in the spirit of racial purity and the subjugation of others -- is somehow now trying to live up to words that the Founding Fathers never actually meant but wrote down for good measure. The idea of many people joining to form one nation was fine when all those folks were white -- or even white-ish -- but Mexican immigrants and a black President is just too much to swallow. We "patriots" are starting over.

In case you're reading this and thinking, "Forming a separate nation? That's not what the Tea Party stands for!" Well, think again.



I think most Americans are suffering with economic insecurity and many white Americans are genuinely struggling with a sense of cultural displacement as well. That's real. The Tea Party, and all political movements, should be helping Americans adapt to the changing world around them -- not inciting them to hateful separation. After all, inclusion, unity, moving forward together -- these have always been core American values. Secession, on the other hand, is treason.

Follow Sally Kohn on Twitter: www.twitter.com/sally kohn


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Sources: Fox News, Huffington Post, MSNBC, Youtube, Google Maps

GOP Spending Cuts Hurts Poor Black People Most: Two Americas!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Them That’s Not Shall Lose

“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”

James Baldwin penned that line more than 50 years ago, but it seems particularly prescient today, if in a different manner than its original intent.

Baldwin was referring to the poor being consistently overcharged for inferior goods. But I’ve always considered that sentence in the context of the extreme psychological toll of poverty, for it is in that way that I, too, know well how expensive it is to be poor.

I know the feel of thick calluses on the bottom of shoeless feet. I know the bite of the cold breeze that slithers through a drafty house. I know the weight of constant worry over not having enough to fill a belly or fight an illness.

It is in that context that I am forced to assume that if Washington politicians ever knew the sting of poverty then they have long since vanquished the memory. How else to qualify their positions? In fact, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, nearly half of all members of Congress are millionaires, and between 2008 and 2009, when most Americans were feeling the brunt of the recession, the personal wealth of members of Congress collectively increased by more than 16 percent. Must be nice.

Poverty is brutal, consuming and unforgiving. It strikes at the soul.

You defend yourself with hope, hard work and, for some, a helping hand. But these weapons grow dull in an economy on the verge of atrophy, in a job market tilting ever more toward the top and in a political environment that would sacrifice the weak to the wealthy.

On Thursday, the Pew Research Center released a poll that showed how disillusioned low-income people have become. Those making less than $30,000 were the most likely to expect to be laid off or be asked to take a pay cut. Furthermore, they were the most likely to say that they had trouble getting or paying for medical care and paying the rent or mortgage.

But at least those numbers include people with incomes. A vast subset is chronically unemployed and desperately searching for work. According to the Consumer Reports Employment Index, “In 23 of the past 24 months, lower-income Americans have lost more jobs than they have gained.” It continues, “Meanwhile, more affluent Americans seem to be gaining more jobs than they are losing.”

And the current election-cycle obsession to balance the books with a pound of flesh, which is being pushed by pitiless Republicans and accommodated by pitiful Democrats, will only multiply the pain.

Until more politicians understand — or remember — what it means to be poor in this country, we are destined to fail the least among us, and all of us will pay a heavy price for that failure.

Sources: ABC News, Fox News, HLN, MSNBC, NY Times, Youtube

Obama Stresses American Nation Building & Manufacturing Jobs (Weekly Address)

Obama: Invest in manufacturing


In his weekly address to the nation, President Barack Obama called on Americans to invest in the manufacturing industry, calling it a necessary step for spurring job creation and economic growth.

Speaking from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, which he visited Friday, Obama began by making the case that his plan to withdraw 33,000 troops from Afghanistan by summer 2012 — which he announced in a speech to the nation Wednesday — is not only in the best interest of U.S. security but also a smart move for the economy.

But turning the economy in the right direction is not enough, Obama said. “Many Americans are still hurting, and now is the time to focus on nation building here at home.”

Obama maintained that the economy can’t be fixed through spending cuts alone. He advocated investments in areas like education, infrastructure, clean energy and research and development in a bid to create middle-class jobs.

The president touted the accomplishments of a company called RedZone Robotics in developing advanced manufacturing techniques. “The folks at RedZone aren’t just solving problems; they’re working with unions to create new jobs operating the robots, and they’re saving cities millions of dollars in infrastructure costs,” he said.

On Friday, Obama launched the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, which aims to bring together the manufacturing industry, universities and the government. According to the White House, more than $500 million will be invested in the program, which was created from recommendations made by the president’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

In the weekly address, Obama said the partnership has a broader mission than to create jobs. “It’s to renew the promise of American manufacturing,” he said. “To help make sure America remains in this century what we were in the last — a country that makes things. A country that out-builds and out-innovates the rest of the world.”

To the workers and families struggling to make ends meet, the president said he felt hopeful seeing companies like RedZone in Pittsburgh, which he said developed from a small school to a global university.

“We are a people who’ve always adapted to meet the challenges of a new time; who’ve always shaped our own destiny, and I’m absolutely confident that that’s what we’re going to do one more time.”


Sources: Business Insider, Politico, White House.gov, Youtube

Black Wealth Is Still An American Reality! Decision 2012

Pres. Obama Was NOT Elected To Just Focus On The Needs Of Black People! The Man Was Handed G.W. Bush's Horrible Messes Wrapped In A Big Bow Because Bush Raped This Country! It Would NOT Have Been Right For Pres. Obama To Allow America To Fail Regardless Of Her Racist History.

Pres. Obama Can't Do It ALL For The Black American Community Because He Isn't God! There Are Some Things Black People Can STILL Do For Themselves. Like Unite, Mobilize & Create Black Wealth! And Yes! I Still Believe Pres. Obama Was Right For Choosing To Stop Gaddafi's Murderous Reign Over The Libyan People.

Unity, Creating Black Wealth & Helping To Re-elect Pres. Obama In 2012 Is What The American Black Community Should Be Focusing On! NOT Trying To Destroy Him! NOT Trying To Divide The Black Community!

Black Wealth Is STILL An American Reality!

Still A Part Of The American Dream!

Instead Of Criticizing Him Pray For The Man! Let's Unite, Mobilize & Create Black Wealth To Build Up Black America!

VOTE OBAMA IN 2012!!!


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Sources: Boston Globe, CBS News, Youtube, Google Maps

"God Bless America" By Kate Smith (Video)

Sources: Youtube

"The Star Spangled Banner" By Whitney Houston (Video)

Freedom Is NOT Free!

God Bless & Many Thanks To All Men & Women Who Proudly Serve Our Country In Uniform! And Many Thanks To Those Who Sacrificed Their Lives For Our Continued Freedom & Democracy!

Whitney Houston's Awesome Performance (Below) Of "The Star Spangled Banner" Reminds Of Us How Fortunate We Are To Have Such A Brave, Well-Prepared Military Force Protecting Our Nation.





Sources: Youtube

"India Is A Job Creator", Obama Ignores Bangalore; 2010 Asia Trip

Obama Calls India A Job-Creator For U.S.

Searching for help half a world away, President Barack Obama on Saturday embraced India as the next jobs-creating giant for hurting Americans, not a cheap-labor rival that outsources opportunity from the United States.

Fresh off a political trouncing at home, Obama was determined to show tangible, economic results on his long Asia trip, and that was apparent from almost the moment he set foot on a steamy afternoon in the world's largest democracy. By the end of the first of his three days in India, he was promoting $10 billion in trade deals — completed in time for his visit — that the White House says will create about 54,000 jobs at home.

That's a modest gain compared with the extent of the enduring jobless crisis in the United States. Economists say it would require on the level of 300,000 new jobs a month to put a real dent in an unemployment rate stuck near 10 percent.

Yet to Obama, the bigger picture was the lucrative potential of an unleashed trading relationship between India and the United States. He seemed comfortable and energized away from Washington, days removed from the GOP's election thumping.

"For America, this is a jobs strategy," Obama said of his emphasis on trade, although it could stand as a motto for his 10-day trip. He is spending Sunday with young people in Mumbai and then heading onto meetings in New Delhi, the capital, before shifting later in the week ahead to Indonesia and economic talks in South Korea and Japan.

In India for the first time, Obama quickly got a sense of riches and poverty, history and tragedy.

His helicopter ride into this bustling financial center took in some of the country's slums. His luxury accommodation for the night, the Taj Mahal hotel, was one of the sites of a terrorist rampage in Mumbai that killed 166 people. Obama and his wife, Michelle, paid quiet tribute to the 31 people slain at the hotel, looking over their names inscribed in a memorial before meeting with victims' families and survivors of the shootings.

"We visit here to send a very clear message that in our determination to give our people a future of security and prosperity, the United States and India stand united," Obama said from an outdoor plaza, the soaring Gateway of India and the Arabian Sea behind him. "We'll never forget."

Indian commentators seized on the president's failure to mention Pakistan, India's neighbor and bitter rival. Pakistan was home to the 10 assailants.



The president also celebrated the life of a personal hero, Mohandas K. Gandhi, a father of Indian independence and model of peaceful activism. The Obamas spent time at the home-turned-museum where Gandhi once lived. They signed personal messages into the guest book and pledged to bring their daughters, Sasha and Malia, back one day.

Obama directly addressed the belief in the U.S. that India is robbing Americans of jobs. He acknowledged that many Americans only know trade and global commerce as the source of a job shipped overseas.

"There still exists a caricature of India as a land of call centers and back offices that cost American jobs. That's a real perception," Obama said. He noted the real concern in India that American corporate giants, if welcomed, would run mom-and-pop stories out of business and upend Indian culture.

Seeking to dismiss all "old stereotypes," Obama said the relationship between the countries is "creating jobs, growth, and higher living standards in both our countries. And that is the truth."



In the fallout of the U.S. elections, in which Democrats lost control of the House and Obama's ability to connect with his country was called into doubt, the president said one lesson learned was the need to set a better tone with business leaders. He was effusive on that front in Mumbai, gathering with top U.S. executives and studying up on their commerce with India.

"Just around this table you're seeing billions of dollars in orders from U.S. companies, tens of thousands of jobs being supported," he said. "We're a potential that has barely been scratched."

The White House arranged for four American chief executives who are in India for the occasion to brief reporters traveling with the president. They played up the importance of India as a trading partner and praised Obama's decision to come to the country to underscore that point in person.

"India represents the 14th-largest trading partner of the United States. Why? With all of the opportunity, it should be so much bigger," said Terry McGraw, chairman and chief executive of the McGraw-Hill Companies.

Obama said, "There is no reason this nation can't be one of our top trading partners."

To that end he said the U.S. would put forward a package of reforms on export controls that resulted from past administrations' concerns about India's nuclear industry. The changes, which have been much sought-after in the business community, include relaxing controls on India's purchase of so-called "dual use" technologies that could be used for civilian or military purposes, and removing a few of the last remaining Indian companies on a so-called "entities list" of groups that face restrictions on doing business in the U.S.

The Commercial deals include the purchase of 33 737s from Boeing by India's SpiceJet Airlines; the Indian military's plans to buy aircraft engines from General Electric; and preliminary agreement between Boeing and the Indian Air Force on the purchase of 10 C17s.

For the most part, the deals were already pending, but the White House contends Obama's visit to India helped finalize them. Officials said the deals would support 53,670 U.S. jobs, but it was not clear how many, if any, new jobs would be created as a result.

Progress will take much more than public understanding. India's infrastructure remains an impediment to progress. And Obama's challenged India on the sore spot of shrinking its own barriers to trade and foreign investment. But his larger message was one of the united values and missions of the two largest democracies in the world.

Making that point, Obama even generated some laughter at his own expense, offering a reminder of the troubles at home.

"Our countries are blessed with the most effective form of government the world has ever known: Democracy," he said. "Even if it can be slow at times. Even if it can be messy. Even if, sometimes, the election doesn't turn out as you'd like."

Onkar Kanwar, chairman of India's largest tire manufacturer, Apollo Tyres, said he appreciated the symbolism of Obama's coming to India during his first term and choosing to visit Mumbai first.

"Ties are getting closer and closer, which needs to be done. ... This demonstrates his commitment to another large democracy where he sees a lot of synergies," Kanwar said. "He's done all right."


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Sources: AP, CNN, Huffington Post, MSNBC, Wall Street Journal, Youtube, Google Maps

Jobs! Where Are They? America's Small Businesses!

The Workforce: Where Will The New Jobs Come From?



Later this year, a marketing manager will sit down for his first day of work at HomeAway, a company that helps people rent their vacation homes online. In the firm's sleek Austin, Texas, headquarters, a glass-wrapped building decorated with travel souvenirs, the marketer will flip on his computer and do his job — a job no one has done before. This, you see, will be a brand-new job, one of the most coveted commodities of economic recovery.

How this job will come to exist is at the heart of the most pressing problem in the economy today. Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the U.S. has shed 8.4 million more jobs than it has gained. The unemployment rate hovers near 10%, and broader measures of labor-market woes that include underutilized workers are as high as 16.8%. Go down the nation's list of economic problems — from mortgage defaults to state-budget shortfalls — and joblessness lurks in the background.

Even as other economic signals have started to turn positive, the jobs situation has remained bleak. In February, the economy lost a net 36,000 jobs, which is leagues better than the 726,000 lost in February a year earlier but points in the wrong direction all the same. Were the economy to magically start generating jobs at a healthy clip — say, 200,000 a month — it would still take 3½ years to return to where we were, never mind the jobs we need for new entrants to the workforce.

This reality has triggered a nearly convulsive political response, given that elections are won and lost over the state of the economy and the mind-set of wage earners.

That's why President Barack Obama, in his State of the Union address, called jobs his "No. 1 focus" and proposed repurposing bank-bailout money to lend more to small businesses, which would then, presumably, generate jobs. On March 17, Congress passed a job-creation bill that includes, among other things, an estimated $13 billion worth of tax incentives to coax companies into adding to their payrolls.

The cold truth of the matter, though, is that there's not much Washington can do to gin up permanent jobs on such short notice. The federal government is a key player in engendering job growth in the long term — by establishing smart policy in areas such as trade, education, immigration, health care, energy, infrastructure and taxes — but over the course of months or even a few years, there's little it can effectively do besides hiring directly or stepping in as a buyer of goods and services.

The great American job-creation machine always has been and will continue to be private enterprise.

The problem is that companies are beat-up from the longest economic contraction since the Great Depression. Plenty of economists think the worst is now behind us, but firms are still plagued by uncertainty about how fast the economy will recover.

Nor can they plan responsibly without knowing the bottom-line costs of the massive new initiatives out of Washington on health care reform and carbon-emission regulation. Even companies that are financially fit often don't feel like taking the risk of ramping up operations and hiring more workers. There's been political pressure on banks to lend, but the problem for some bankers, like Frost Bank CEO Dick Evans, is that many businesses are debt-shy. "I'm aggressively trying to make loans, but right now they don't want to borrow," he says. "At this point," says Harvard Business School strategy expert Michael Porter, "the No. 1 thing that will create jobs is the perception and confidence that the economy will start growing again."

The good news is the perception as well as the reality is improving in some areas of the country. Just 12 out of 384 metropolitan areas ended 2009 with more jobs than they had at the beginning of the year, but more recently, the numbers have been looking better. Over the past six months (through January), 72 cities gained jobs, according to a Moody's Economy.com analysis of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That may seem like a slow start, but it's a meaningful one to people being hired in places like Flagstaff, Ariz., Augusta, Ga., and Lansing, Mich.

Austin lands on that list too. The central Texas city of 760,000 has a few built-in advantages over other cities. The University of Texas and the state government — Austin is the capital — provide some economic stability. And as the Southwest's technology center, Austin is home to many high-growth (though high-risk) companies.

It is also a music mecca and the gateway to Texas hill country, attributes that help it attract desirable workers. For all these reasons, it hasn't been battered quite as hard as other cities by the recession; the unemployment rate was nearly 3 points below the national average at the end of last year.

Still, the metro area has seen big job losses from major employers, including the computer maker Dell and semiconductor manufacturers like Freescale and Advanced Micro Devices. It's not hard to find the desperate stories here that you find throughout the rest of the country: the woman laid off from book publishing two years ago who hasn't been able to find a permanent job since; the interior decorator who used to have a six-figure salary and now sells furniture for $30,000 a year.

Yet Austin also offers a model of hope. The city's surfeit of computer-programming talent allowed a video-game outfit to hire 50 developers and designers in the past two months. A manufacturer is building a new plant north of town to take advantage of the growing commercial-lighting industry even as its construction-related business falls off. A pharmaceuticals start-up is looking for new lab workers.

Some companies are expanding, and others — markers of the city's entrepreneurial spirit — are starting from scratch. Austin is emerging as one of the first pockets of the country where people are getting back to work, showing that even in this dreary economic environment, job creation can happen — and illustrating how it will eventually take root around the nation.


One Created Job

To start to understand the process, swing by HomeAway's downtown Austin headquarters. This is where, sometime in the next nine months, a marketing manager will show up for his first day of work at one of the economy's newest jobs.

The story of how this job will come to exist starts five years ago, with one man's frustration at how hard it was to find and rent a beach house for his family vacation. Brian Sharples, who was between jobs at the time, didn't understand why he couldn't go to a single website — as he would go to Expedia for airline tickets — to find a comprehensive list of houses for rent. So, with a business partner, he started such a site. Five years later, the company has $120 million a year in sales, employs 600 people in five countries and is ramping up its marketing push to grow even larger. That's why it needs a new marketing manager in Austin.

HomeAway is hiring for a very simple reason: people who own houses and want to rent them out are happy to pay $300 a year to have the company spread the word — which it did in a Super Bowl commercial. "Jobs get created by providing a product or service that's better than what's out there," says Sharples. "There was an existing market for vacation rentals, and we've created efficiencies in that market. Now that it's cheaper and more efficient, more people are doing it, and the market is expanding."

In other words, to create jobs, start by creating something people are willing to pay for.

That's not as self-evident as it may sound. There is no shortage of theories about why companies aren't adding jobs faster. Banks won't lend to enable them to expand. Extra workers are too expensive because of taxes and health care costs. But the real clog in the nation's job-creating machinery is much more basic: a lack of demand for goods and services.

Just ask small businesses. American Express did that in a January survey, asking, What would most spur companies to go out and hire? An increase in customer demand, according to 42% of the respondents. Tax credits and better access to loans trailed, at 11% and 5%, respectively.

To see that dynamic in action in Austin, cut diagonally across the street from HomeAway and pop into the headquarters of Whole Foods. For a decade, the upscale grocery chain saw sales grow at about 20% annually. Last year, sales barely budged up 1% — and the 30 stores that executives planned to open around the country were trimmed to 15. Those 15 stores added nearly 4,000 jobs — just half as many as would have been gained had people kept buying organic peppers and salted caramels at the same pace. "There's too much thinking about how to create jobs," says James Manyika, a director of the economics-research outfit McKinsey Global Institute, "and not enough about how to create demand."

Why is that? Well, focusing on demand is a tricky thing to do. For decades, the economy's engine of demand has been American consumers — a population now overindebted, underemployed and endowed with a newfound sense of thrift. The explosion in credit-card and home-mortgage debt before the recession tells us the demand that was there was never sustainable. This is why the President now talks about doubling exports over the next five years and the importance of passing trade agreements with countries like South Korea, Panama and Colombia. If we can't sell to ourselves, there is at least partial salvation in selling to others.

It's also the reason the job-creation bill passed by Congress includes an accelerated tax break for companies buying equipment. Companies that sell equipment need people to build it, and companies that buy equipment need people to run and maintain it. Many firms outside of financial services have surprisingly solid balance sheets, Manyika points out, and might be wooed into investing sooner rather than later. That would drum up sales for the firms they'd be buying equipment from.

That prime-the-pump logic is also behind the use of the government to create demand — what we know as stimulus spending. Last year's $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has received its fair share of criticism for funds being dispersed too slowly and for not doing enough to stem unemployment. But in Austin, Bruce Matous has a different point of view. "This saved my family business," says the president of Matous Construction.

Matous is referring to a $28 million contract to upgrade the Hornsby Bend Biosolids Management Plant, a city-owned facility that recycles sewage sludge and yard clippings into lawn fertilizer. The city desperately needed to upgrade its 1980s-built anaerobic digesters (you can see the foam insulation chipping off) and now has the money to do so, thanks to a 30-year interest-free loan from the federal stimulus package. To get the project funded, the city applied to the Texas Water Development Board, which had been handed stimulus money by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Driving around Hornsby Bend, Matous points to a group of half a dozen workmen and says, "We would have laid off all those guys." The construction industry has been brutalized in Austin, as it has been nationally, and by the end of last year, Matous was looking at just a few more months of work in the pipeline. Then he won the Hornsby Bend contract. Now the company is fielding job applications from people 200 miles away and is creating business for other firms, from the equipment maker Caterpillar to R&R Industries, a California outfit that makes yellow safety vests and just sold a couple hundred of them to Matous.

Injecting money into the system — whether through consumer spending, business investment or stimulus funds — is a short-term fix designed to get the gears moving again. That re-establishment of momentum is an important part of economic recovery. But getting things moving isn't the same as keeping them moving. In the long term, there is only one way to create enough jobs for the economy: innovation.


Start-up Nation

Twenty miles south of Austin, in a nondescript industrial park, sits a bland, corrugated-metal building with a roll-up door. Inside the building sits the future of the U.S. economy.

Or at least part of the future. Five and a half years ago, the lights went on at Xtreme Power with half a dozen employees and a vision to make wind power an easier sell. One of the big stumbling blocks in persuading utilities to buy wind is its unpredictability. The wind blows, and then it stops, while utilities' customers demand a constant flow of power. Xtreme's solution: a shipping-container-size power-management system that takes in energy from wind farms, stores it and then smoothly releases an uninterrupted supply of it out the other end.

That innovation carries real economic value. Wind-farm operators want to sell more power, and they'll pay for something that helps them do that. As a result, jobs are created. Xtreme, which employed 57 people at the beginning of 2009, installed its first major system in Hawaii over the summer and now has $100 million worth of orders in the pipeline. The firm currently employs 105 people and is again looking to grow. Its plan is to buy a factory in Wixom, Mich., that Ford shut down in 2007.

It's the dream scenario of the green-technology revolution: a plant that used to make Lincoln Continentals starts churning out the mechanical apparatus of wind-power storage. Michigan autoworkers, knocked off their feet by a collapsing industry, put their skills to use in the quintessential "industry of tomorrow." Once those high-value manufacturing jobs are in place and a group of workers has money to spend, other jobs follow — at doughnut shops, hair salons, real estate brokerages and law firms.

Green jobs are hardly the economic cure-all they are often made out to be. They currently account for only about 0.5% of the U.S. workforce, and plenty of the industry's job growth is likely to happen overseas. China is already the world's largest manufacturer of solar panels. But the model provided by green-energy players is the right one: create new products and new markets, and watch new jobs flow. Without the personal computer, we wouldn't have Google and its 20,000 employees. Without everyday low-cost pricing, we wouldn't have Walmart and its 2.1 million.

Austin provides a useful lesson in how to stay on top of the innovation game. Start with an educated population (43% of Austin residents have a bachelor's degree or higher), mix in a robust venture-capital scene (one of the best outside Silicon Valley), add a supportive community of peers (groups like Bootstrap Austin band together hundreds of entrepreneurs) and wrap all that up with a state government unafraid to throw money at companies that need a little help getting off the ground.

Over at the University of Texas, the nonprofit Austin Technology Incubator houses fledgling firms, plying them with business-plan advice, contact with financiers and lots of coffee over which to share ideas and solve problems. The incubator's 20-year record: more than 200 companies and thousands of jobs created. "Companies don't start unless they're resourced," says Rob Neville, who launched one company with the help of the incubator and is now scaling up another, Savara Pharmaceuticals, in anticipation of support from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund.

These new companies are key to job growth. People talk about small businesses being such great generators of jobs, but a more precise assessment is that young businesses are. John Haltiwanger, an economist at the University of Maryland, has been studying government data for 25 years and has determined that about a third of all new jobs created come from start-ups. Furthermore, young companies add jobs faster. From 1980 to 2005, the typical 15-year-old firm added jobs at a rate of 1% a year, the typical three-year-old firm at a rate of 5%. "These are the rocket ships of the economy," says Haltiwanger.

Of course, young firms are also more likely to flame out and vaporize their jobs — but job destruction is, perhaps surprisingly, par for the course no matter what the size of a company. Even in the recession, about 4 million people a month have been landing jobs. We just don't feel the impact of that because more people have been losing them, leaving us with fewer employed people overall. That constant churn can be jarring for individual workers, but it represents one of the key strengths of the American economy: flexibility. That's certainly true for established companies too.

To see why that matters, stop by Ringdale, a company in the northern Austin suburb of Georgetown. One of Ringdale's main business lines used to be security systems, but as the construction of new buildings has remained depressed, so have sales of things like the ID-card readers that go inside them. Ringdale's response: throw more resources, including employees, at its burgeoning line of light-emitting-diode products, for which it holds a number of patent applications, thereby answering increased demand for low-energy commercial lighting. "We've redeployed," says CEO Klaus Bollmann, whose firm will open one plant expansion in a few months (accounting for an additional 10 to 15 jobs) and a second, larger one next year (120 more jobs). As the economy shifts, reinvent.

That good advice isn't just for companies.


Rewiring The Workforce

In northwest Austin, in cubicles packed with toys and rock-band posters, people in T-shirts and jeans are hard at work creating a video game that someday will be played online by thousands of people at a time. It takes years to produce such a complex game, representing a major investment for California-based Electronic Arts. Why is this happening in Austin? Simple. "The talent pool is here," says local BioWare studio co-head Gordon Walton.

In the national job-creation discourse, jobs often start to sound like things that companies one day decide to hand out. In reality, job creation is also a function of the labor supply. It's not just about firms wanting to hire but also about having people they can usefully employ. There are only four or five cities in the U.S. where Electronic Arts would be likely to develop such a complicated product. Austin is one of them partly because it has a tech-savvy population and a history of fielding such work — and also because it's an easy place for people to train for the profession, with local colleges offering courses in game design and programming.

In a down economy, plenty of people assume responsibility for reinvention. Lindsey Spratt lost her job as an assistant audio engineer and is now studying to be a chef at the Texas Culinary Academy. Rob Carruthers was laid off from a job as a project manager at a software company and is putting his dual engineering-business background to use as a consultant to tech start-ups and schools.

Austin also illustrates a systematic approach to making sure people have the right skills to match what companies need. For the past two years, Workforce Solutions, a government-funded not-for-profit, has been partnering with businesses and local schools like Austin Community College to develop a series of training courses to help people upgrade their skills and earn certifications. The modules are built to be accessible to people well into their careers — recognizing that a 40-year-old isn't likely to have two or four years to return to school full time — and focus on Austin's up-and-coming industries, like biotech, renewable energy and video-game development. "When these jobs come, we'll have the people with the skills to move into them," says Workforce executive director Alan Miller.

Employers are stepping up too. A few blocks east of the state capitol stands a hospital, one of 10 in the metro area owned and run by the not-for-profit Seton Family of Hospitals. An adjacent building that used to be a children's hospital now houses a clinical-education center. Wards and operating rooms are filled with patients — sophisticated, computer-controlled dummies that nurses-to-be can use to receive valuable training. One dummy even gives birth.

Health care as an industry is booming in most places, and Austin is no exception. Over the past three years, Seton has built three medical centers and hired 2,300 people. But getting people into those jobs — nearly 30% of which are for nurses — is a multipronged process. A few years ago, there was a waiting list to enter nursing school in Austin. Seton had to hire nurses trained in the Philippines. Now, with the clinical-education center's extra capacity and new partnerships with nursing programs at local colleges, Seton can hire locally.

That sort of coordination among workers, educators and companies is vital, considering that it can be difficult if not impossible for individuals to know which job to train for next. Even the head of Workforce Solutions admits that focusing on biotech, green energy and video games is really just an educated guess based on Austin's historical strengths and industries that seem poised to grow. One of the reassuring things about capitalism is that over time, workers and companies are pretty good at figuring out the most productive ways to get together. In the short term, though, that realignment can be a struggle.

Even so, there is a clear trend emerging: tomorrow's jobs will require people to add more value than ever before. Consider Samsung's only semiconductor-fabrication plant outside South Korea, which sits in northeast Austin. Since the fall, the factory, which makes flash memory for devices like smart phones and iPods, has been undergoing a $500 million upgrade. In advance of the plant's early-summer reopening, Samsung will hire about 200 engineers and technicians to run and service the new, more sophisticated equipment inside. But with the new factory and those new jobs, 500 other positions have been eliminated: robots, not people, will now transport silicon wafers.

That's actually not so awful, economically speaking. Innovation and increased efficiency are the lifeblood of any economy. But it does mean that as we tackle the topic of creating jobs, we must realize that the sustainable ones will be those that build from a human being's unique abilities, like problem solving and creativity. If we want to encourage high-quality-job creation, we need to find a way to enable economic evolution. We need to set the stage for companies to create tomorrow's goods and services, and we need to be prepared to support workers in their quest to adapt.


Washington Isn't The Answer

In Washington, the bulk of the response to job loss has been to drum up short-term demand. Last year's stimulus package kept the economy from spiraling further downward. Current proposals to extend unemployment benefits and send $100 billion to struggling local governments would have a similar effect — allowing consumers and cities to keep on spending.

Tax cuts for businesses that hire — and then retain — workers will likely wind up doing more of the same. No businessman in his right mind is going to add the long-term liability of a worker simply for the short-term benefit of a tax break. On the other hand, such incentives may accelerate some hiring that would have eventually happened anyway, and that would put more money into consumers' pockets faster. Of course, extra spending and tax cuts contribute to the $1.5 trillion federal deficit, and that drags on the economy.

Easing the flow of credit, especially to small businesses, has also been a major policy push — and a tricky one to size up. The efficient reallocation of capital is key to any economy but especially to one like the U.S.'s, which counts on dynamism as a competitive advantage. Lending to businesses is down; that much is true. But is that because banks are overly cautious and asset-impaired or because businesses are uncertain about the future — or just aren't creditworthy borrowers? A recent survey by the National Federation of Independent Business found that companies that couldn't borrow typically had declining sales or depressed real estate values. Simply opening the lending spigot doesn't seem to be the answer.

All these ideas are short-term. That's understandable. People who are out of work want immediate solutions. Politicians wouldn't be doing their jobs if they didn't try to give voters what they want.

The conundrum is that the most useful things government can do to encourage job growth aren't flashy initiatives with quickly visible results. "There's no magic wand we can wave over companies that will induce them to go out and hire people," says Matthew Slaughter, an economist at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. "We need to think long-term."

If Congress wants more and better jobs in the U.S., it should do things like create a permanent tax break for companies that invest in research and development, make it easier for foreigners who get science and engineering Ph.D.s at American universities to stick around after graduation, and spend serious time and money improving the nation's infrastructure, including the electric grid and broadband network. Such initiatives will not create many jobs that can be tallied on a spreadsheet. What they will do is more important: lay the groundwork for businesses to innovate and grow.

The same is true on the worker side of the equation. If the key characteristics of the American economy are flexibility and forward motion, then we would all be better off if people felt more support — both financial and social — to invest in their education, switch jobs and industries and venture out to start new firms.

Establishing job creation as a discrete goal is a misleading enterprise. Beyond cyclic swings in demand, what we're really talking about creating is not jobs but ideas and technologies and more efficient ways of producing and selling goods and services. If that sounds like a harder goal to set, let alone achieve, that's because it is.

Yet as Austin richly illustrates, in the wake of the worst economic downturn in generations, that sort of innovation is starting to happen. And from that, the jobs will follow.


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Sources: CNN, TIME, Google Maps