By 3:30 PM ET, the U.S. Senate had voted on two competing government operations bill this fiscal year. Both would cut spending. One which would lead to a loss of as many as one million jobs. The other relatively mild bill would not cause as much pain, but certainly would not create any jobs either.
After both failed to achieve the necessary supermajority to advance, congressional negotiators resumed talking about how much to cut. A plan that would increase public investment and create jobs immediately is not on the table.
By 7:30 PM, the Wisconsin Senate appears to have violated the law just so it could ram through Gov. Scott Walker's legislation to strip civil servants of their right to negotiate their contracts and cut their pension benefits, even though Wisconsin's public worker pension system is one of the most secure in the country, according to the Pew Center on the States.
Reducing the overall compensation for approximately 300,000 public-sector workers won't create a single job, nor will it raise wages and benefits for any private-sector workers.
While all this was going on, 23 million Americans were still unemployed or underemployed.
Some would call that a crisis.
Yet the debate in Washington, and in certain statehouses taken over by grandstanding conservative governors, has literally nothing to do with how to solve the jobs crisis.
Today, we plan to change that.
Campaign for America's Future opens the "Summit For Jobs & America's Future" at 9 AM this morning at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.
Featured speakers will include AFL-CIO Richard Trumka, who I'm betting will have something to say about what went down in Madison last night.
We'll hear from elected officials who actually have ideas about how to create jobs: Rep. George Miller, Rep. Keith Ellison and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
We'll hear from Van Jones who has launched a major grassroots effort to reclaim the "American Dream."
And many more powerful speakers who will lay out their vision for solving the immediate jobs crisis and laying the foundation for sustainable and robust recovery.
If you can't attend this free event today, keep checking out OurFuture.org throughout the day for blog updates, as well as our Twitter feed (and the #jobsummit hashtag) and Facebook page.
Together, we can bust open the debate, and get our leaders to start focusing on the real problems facing Americans.
