If the US fought for the post-carbon economy the way it fights for nebulous state-building goals in foreign wars, the future would be brighter, cleaner, safer and cheaper, with more jobs and perhaps – because it would need to secure less of that foreign oil -fewer wars. If the country built new classrooms with the same urgency it built armored vehicles, more American teens could be choosing between colleges instead of choosing between minimum and sub-minimum wage jobs – and fewer would eventually need public assistance. If the government spent more on blackboards and less on bullets, it would create more jobs today and more innovation in the future.

With unemployment still high and job growth anemic, finding jobs for Americans should be the top priority of our elected officials. To deal with this serious crisis, I propose the creation of a National Cooperative Administration to encourage the creation of worker-owned businesses.

CBS News has released a new poll and, not surprisingly, with official unemployment around nine percent, it found that an overwhelming 51 percent of Americans said jobs/economy is the most important problem facing the country. By comparison, the national debt comes in second with a mere seven percent of Americans saying it is the most important problem, followed by health care with five percent.

Fresh off Obama imploring the country to “win the [vaguely defined, and definitely not defined as preventing climate change] future,” Calculated Risk has a new chart, showing the decline in unemployment by state. It’s useful to show not just which states are unemployment clusterfucks (Michigan remains near the top, though CA and FL passed it in overall unemployment last month), but also where it’s getting better.

Todd Tucker with Public Citizen will be liveblogging the House Ways and Means Committee full committee hearing on the pending free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea, and job creation. You can find more details about the panelists scheduled to testify today at the Committee’s site at this link.

>Tonight is the kickoff of the “Steel on Wheels” tour, featuring MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan and Nucor Steel CEO Dan DiMicco, who are leading a “Get America Working” townhall in Seneca Falls, NY – the home of the Suffrage Movement and the inspiration for “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The townhall is designed to start a “Jobs Movement” that tackles what Ratigan labels as the four biggest obstacles to job creation. You can watch the townhall live here starting at 7pm EST.

The stimulus package passed earlier this year provided $750 million for the National Park Service to address infrastructure and deferred maintenance. That’s a pittance, compared with the need — and the state parks are in even worse shape because of state budgets.

Closing parks, even sporadically, hits the local economies of the neighboring areas hard. On the other hand, spending money to revitalize the parks brings back jobs in large numbers. Hopefully some of the dusty heads in DC will get a clue.

Meanwhile, enjoy the parks this weekend. If you can.

Despite at least $3 trillion in government spending aimed at stimulating the economy, a multitude of economic indicators now show that the economy is poised to slip into a double dip recession. In order to stave off another dip into further recession Congress and the Obama Administration need to direct federal funds to small businesses.

The Small Business Administration released its Procurement Scorecard late Friday afternoon, showing that once again, the government did not achieve its mandated 23 percent small business procurement goal. Several weeks ago, I made several predictions about this, lets see how accurate I was.