The following is an excerpt from The Huffington Post.

Bio: Chairman
U.S. Economy/
Smart
Globalization
Initiative
at the
New America
Foundation

All that matters now — for businesses and workers alike — is restoring vibrancy to the middle class, and bringing back to all families and workers the American Dream of equal opportunity and fair employment. A vibrant American middle class growing from the bottom up has always been the very best thing for American business.

* Policy-wise, this means creating jobs and spurring investments here at home, balancing our trade and the effects of globalization, and, over time, materially reducing the federal deficit.

* Tactically, it means, for the Obama administration, no more muddled attempts at triangulation of the sort that leads to op-eds like the one in yesterday’s Financial Times entitled “Obama has angered the centre by not disowning the left”. There is no large “center” or middle — rather, there are mostly only “progressives”, “conservatives” and, most important right now, almost 30 million effectively unemployed women and men.

Using a pro football analogy, it’s past time for the President to rethink his economic game plan, change some of his key players if need be, and call some audibles, lots and lots of audibles, until he finds most of those missing jobs and greatly reduces the plague of persistent income inequality.

Leo Hindery, Jr. is Chairman of the US Economy/Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Currently an investor in media companies, he is the former CEO of Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI), Liberty Media and their successor AT&T Broadband. He also serves on the Board of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund.

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