Harold Meyerson

By accelerating Measure R's transit construction through bond sales, L.A. County could generate at least 165,000 jobs here and now with the 30/10 project.

The American economy is intractably stuck. No one is creating jobs.

Not corporations, even though they're earning record profits and are sitting on nearly $2 trillion in cash. Their profit surge, however, comes from renewed sales abroad and relies on increased productivity, reduced wages and a diminished labor force at home. Not small businesses, which still cannot obtain credit from the banks nor resume hiring until U.S. consumers resume consuming. And most assuredly not the federal government, whose stimulus package saved millions of jobs, but not enough to convince the public to support the second stimulus the economy now desperately needs.

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All things considered, American big business is doing just fine, thank you. Profits, productivity and exports are up. New hires, rehires and wage increases, as I have written, are nowhere to be seen. They're no longer part of the U.S. corporate business plan, in which higher profits are premised on having fewer employees. Sell abroad, cut costs at home -- the global marketplace that American business has created is paying off big-time.

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The governor vetoed a bill that would have paid farmworkers overtime for more than an eight-hour day and would have given them at least one day off every seven.

It's not really news when a bill fails to become a law in Sacramento. In this age of partisan gridlock, plenty of good ideas are never enacted.

Still, one bill that made it to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's desk last week, only to be killed by his veto, is worth looking at for what it tells us about how hard it is to clean out even antiquated moral rot, so long as powerful interests profit from it.

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Ain't no hiring. And ain't likely to be any for a good long time.

The problem isn't merely the greatest downturn since the Great Depression. It's also that big business has found a way to make big money without restoring the jobs it cut the past two years, or increasing its investments or even its sales, at least domestically.

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The Great Recession rolls on, but it's not too early to single out the major powers that have come through the wreckage in the best shape. They are the ones the other major nations implore for help -- to bail out weaker economies, to diminish their dominance of the world's production and start consuming more themselves. There are just two such nations: China and Germany.

Global unemployment might remain stratospheric, but in China, long-suppressed wages are finally increasing for millions of industrial workers. China's stimulus -- effectively the world's largest -- has funded bullet trains, airports and wind turbines. In Germany, unemployment has been running a point or two below ours, and exports remain high. Thanks to its favorable trade balance, Germany's finances are the strongest in Europe, which is why German monetary guarantees have been key to the future of both Greece and the euro.

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Liberal Democrats know what they're for: a second stimulus to create more investment and jobs at a time when the economy is still dangerously weak. Republicans ("conservative Republicans" is redundant) know what they're against: anything the Democrats are for. That leaves the centrist Blue Dog Democrats, who don't really know what they're for or what they're against.

Earlier this year the Blue Dogs, and many other Democrats, were saying they would welcome an end to the debate over health-care reform so they could turn their attention to jobs, jobs, jobs. But now that President Obama and Democratic legislative leaders have done that, the Blue Dogs have largely turned skittish.

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