Economic Fairness demands a coherent and reasonable Jobs Policy. In Washington today, our leaders argue about what's not important and ignore the fact that America's unemployment situation is the worst we've seen since the Great Depression. It's time to get the dialog on the right track and start talking about what's important. It's time for new ideas. This presentation is brought to you by The Fairness Coalition and is part of a series covering our principles and key policy positions.

2. An Introduction The Unemployment situation right now in the U.S. is the worst it’s been since the Great Depression. No other Recession over the past 75 years has produced as many job losses or slower job growth. We are in a desperate economic crisis. No other issue is more important. Without jobs and without job growth nothing else in the economy will work properly. Without jobs and economic growth there will be no way to overcome trade deficits, budget deficits or national debt problems. Our leadership in Washington on both sides of the aisle have thusfar failed to come together to solve this.

4. We’ve seen the consequences before when unadulterated greed drove economic policy; however our leadership chose to ignore those lessons and enacted policies that put millions out of work so a handful of people could become billionaires. That’s Not Fair…

5. Fair is Smart One of the main principles of Fair Economics is that the Fair policy is also the Smart policy. This applies to Fair Jobs Policy as well. The engine that drove the expansion of our economy through the majority of the 20 th Century was consumer spending. The great majority of that consumer spending came from working class and middle class Americans. That model was based upon opportunities for upward mobility, rising standards of living and wage growth. That model worked so well that we extended it to Western Europe, Japan and Korea – it worked like a charm there also. If something worked that well, why change it?

6. If it Ain’t Broken … Don’t fix it – right ? What was the motivation for the great neo-conservative transformation that has been underway since 1980? In a word, greed . Another way to view it though is the “ abandonment of fairness .” Fairness is a policy approach that put people first and the interests of the powerful few second. Those powerful interests still made enormous sums of money in a Fair Economy – but that wasn’t good enough for them. They decided they wanted to make all the money by changing the rules of the game. They decided to turn labor into an international commodity and turned their backs on the same consumer engine that made them wealthy in the first place.

7. Since 1980, a significant number of economic policy advocates chose to cross over to the ethical “Dark Side” – we are living with the consequences of that action today…

8. What Now ? How do we reverse 30 years of really bad policy? How do we get America back to work and how do we begin raising the standard of living for ordinary Americans once again? We start by focusing on the real problem – and the real problem is not the debt. The real problem is that our leaders and our industry no longer value the American employee. Workers are now viewed merely as a commodity that ought to cost less, work more and can easily be replaced by cheap labor from third world nations on a moment’s notice. We need to declare that Globalization has not worked as advertised and in fact has destabilized our economy.