Economy

On the campaign trail Romney says we shouldn't ship jobs to China and should "crack down" on China trade problems. But he refuses to help or even meet with the Sensata workers whose jobs are being shipped to China right now.

Today there were six more arrests at the Sensata factory in Freeport, IL as people hold sit-ins and try to block trucks moving equipment out for shipment to China.

What Is Sensata?

Did Mitt Romney really "create 100,000 jobs" with Staples? Simple answer: only if no one else was selling office supplies, stationery, etc. before Staples came along. What Staples did was force many competing stationery, office supply and computer stores out of business, probably shifting their employees into lower-wage jobs.

Democracy Corps distributed a polling memo Monday that put its finger squarely on a frustration among progressives with President Obama's campaign for re-election that had been simmering long before his disastrous first debate.

If you go to MittRomney.com/JobsPlan you see an ad in which Romney says:

In Wednesday's debate Mitt Romney repeated his claim that cutting individual and corporate income taxes creates jobs. But when you look at what actually happened, the periods when we had the highest tax rates were the periods we had the greatest job and economic growth. And the periods with lower taxes had lower job and economic growth. (And we all know what happened in the Bush years...)

The September jobs report is more of the same. We witness slow growth, with job creation barely at levels needed to keep up with workforce growth.

As Wednesday’s presidential debate approaches, the pundits are starting to handicap the event. There’s much talk about the horse race: Romney needs a knockout; Obama has to avoid a big mistake. Much talk about styling: Romney is practicing zingers; Obama is too professorial. Will both men turn to face each other when they are making a point?

In the wake of an anemic jobs report that his Republican challengers are laying at his feet, President Obama could rightly respond that if he could have signed into law a jobs plan along the lines of what the House Progressive Caucus has proposed for the past two years, we would likely see 2 million more people employed today, and unemployment would be closer to 7 percent rather than above 8 pe