Obama holds summit on employment

VIDEO - President Barack Obama says a jobs forum he hosted at the White House generated many useful ideas for jump-starting job creation...

TheGrio Staff

Dec 3, 2009

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama says a jobs forum he hosted at the White House generated many useful ideas for jump-starting job creation, some of which can be put into action “immediately” by his administration.

The president said Thursday at the close of the jobs summit that other ideas will become part of legislation for Congress to consider. He said he was most struck by the overlap between the sessions on specific topics, leading him to conclude that job creation needs to be better coordinated.

Obama spoke to a gathering of academics, business executives and labor leaders on the eve of the government’s report, due Friday, on November unemployment. The jobless rate in October shot up to 10.2 percent.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama challenged an assortment of leading business and union leaders and academics on Thursday to help him come up with innovative ideas for putting millions of Americans back to work, saying he wants the “biggest bang for the buck.”

“We cannot hang back and hope for the best,” Obama told a White House forum on jobs. “What I’m interested in is taking action right now.”

Obama said the leading question of the day is “how do we get businesses to start hiring again” and asked his audience of about 130 guests to “bring their A-game.”

But, mindful of growing anxiety about federal deficits, Obama also tempered his upbeat talk with an acknowledgment that government resources could only go so far and that it is primarily up to the private sector to create large numbers of new jobs.

He said while he’s “open to every demonstrably good idea … we also though have to face the fact that our resources are limited.”

With unemployment levels above 10 percent, Obama said “We cannot hang back and hope for the best.”

After opening remarks, the guests broke into different working groups to brainstorm with administration officials.

Dropping in on a session named “Innovative Agenda and Green Jobs of the Future,” Obama said, “Not to tip our hand too much, but one of the things I would be surprised if we don’t end up moving forward on is an aggressive agenda for energy efficiency and weatherization. Because that is an area where we can get it up and running relatively quickly. You don’t need new technologies.”

Sitting at the head of a large table, Obama told the smaller group that clean energy was the nation’s best candidate “if we are to shift from the bubble and bust model that we have. … We want to make a push in this area.”

At one point, Obama lobbied business leaders in the group to speak out during the upcoming Senate energy debate. He urged them to help make the case that the energy bill “is not a job killer but a job grower.” He said members of two prominent business groups — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Round-table — who support clean energy need to speak out. “We’re going to need you there,” he said.

The forum was kicked off by Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, who called the present unemployment rate of 10.2 percent “a stark reminder of how much we have to do.” She said the administration “will not rest” until it had been successful at job creation.

White House officials then showed a video about small businesses in hard-hit Allentown, Pa., where Obama was to speak on Friday in an effort to reinforce his message.

Vice President Joe Biden also addressed an audience that included the CEOs of Google, Xerox, Boeing and General Electric, labor leaders and prominent economists. “Your presence is welcome, but quite frankly it’s not as important as your input,” Biden said. “Without you, it will not become a reality,” he said.

“Our task together is obviously not an easy one,” Biden said. And while the $787 billion stimulus package had helped kick-start the process, “the government’s capacity is still somewhat limited.”

Obama spoke a day ahead of the government’s release of unemployment figures for November.

The October jobless rate was 10.2 percent. A broader index that includes those who have given up looking for work and those forced to accept part-time jobs puts the rate at 17.5 percent. Economic forecasters expect the November figures to be at about the same levels, perhaps higher.

Republicans staged their own counterforum across town, inviting a team of mostly conservative economists to a round-table discussion on jobs.

“I think we have to move aggressively toward policies that actually promote jobs. And so far what’s been tried hasn’t worked very well,” said Lawrence Lindsey, a top economic adviser early in the first term of President George W. Bush.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former head of the Congressional Budget Office and a top economic adviser to 2008 GOP Republican nominee Sen. John McCain, suggested the single best thing Obama could do to create jobs was “to reverse course on a dangerous agenda of debt-financed spending, crippling regulation, expensive mandates and intrusive government expansion.”

Earlier, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., suggested that one way to create jobs is to use leftover money from the Wall Street bailout to pay for new spending on roads and bridges and save the jobs of firefighters, teachers and other public employees.

Perhaps unwittingly, Biden took the event a bit off-message at the start, painting a more dire picture of the nation’s economy than typically heard out of the administration.

He recalled an old Ronald Reagan line that people see the problem as merely a downturn when a stranger is out of work and a recession if it’s a relative who is unemployed — but a full-blown depression when they themselves lose a job.

“And it is a depression” for the nation’s more than 10 million unemployed, Biden added.