The following is in response to President Obama's call for participation in the Community Jobs Forum, which I believe is timely, important and good. First are the questions the Administration asks, beneath each line, then a response.
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From what you have seen, or seen reported about the President’s Jobs Forum on December 3rd, what seems relevant to your community?

My 'community' is one consisting of working scientists. I have not heard anything about the outcome of the Jobs forum at the White House.
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What parts of your local economy are working or thriving? What businesses and sectors are expanding and hiring?

I don't know of any, but I hear rumors of possible research funding coming in phytoremediation research and development.
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What are the opportunities for growth in your community? What businesses and sectors seem poised to rebound?

Bicycling support industries? I don't have much insight here, sorry.
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What do you see as the “jobs of the future”?

As far as 'jobs of the future' I see tremendous opportunity in shifting from research and development of 'labor-eliminating' technology to technologies which eliminate resource use and waste/pollution production. I must acknowledge that this insight is not originally mine, but comes from the brilliant and accomplished Hazel Henderson, the economist who declared conventional economics 'a form of brain damage' in that it it only acknowledges value for the easy-to-price things, unlike air, clean drinking water and other essential but hard to price things.

Please replace Geithner with Henderson, or at least see: http://www.hazelhenderson.com/

Also, if scientific grant-giving foundations like NIH and NAS, etc. were to, in the evaluation for funding of grant proposals, increase the score, to even a slight degree, of proposals creating jobs, and furthermore if the foundations were to increase the score of such proposals in proportion to how many person-years of work they would create, then enormous numbers of positions could be created very rapidly, yet in well-thought-though scientific efforts by leading scientists.

Additionally, devising a sliding scale of the extent of tax-exemption for R & D done by corporations which favored, by exxempting form more taxes, those r & D efforts which would create, or at least not eliminate, jobs could also rapidly both expand employment while also shifting from labor-elminating technologies to the more needed waste-eliminating ( or pollution-eliminating) and resource-use-eliminating technique.
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What are the obstacles to job creation in your community? What could make
local businesses more likely to start hiring?

Basically the inordinate international strength of the dollar. A correction in the valuation of the dollars global purchasing power downward would lead to import replacement, resource efficiency and export industry growth, which would induce USA to lead the world again in the globally-needed cutting edge technologies, now to be energy efficiency, pollution control, appropriate energy generation, etc.

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What other issues and ideas should the President consider?

Al Qaeda is out of Afghanistan, and riven with internal divisions (see: _The New Republic_ June 2008) the USA should declare victory in Afghanistan and return victorious to home, and should wrap up Iraq as either a draw or the previous regime's mistake.

In Copenhagen, the USA should acknowledge First World climate reparation debt, and pay for it with future appropriate technology transfers. Our only acceptable future can include us The current alliance between the pseudo-Christian fanatics in the USA and the pseudo-Zionist fanatics in Isreal serves the needs of neither nation. The USA should now support efforts towards one-nation solutions, via a single election held in both Israeli and Palastinian areas, including Israel, West Bank and Gaza, as well as among Palastinian refugee communities in Jordan, Lebanon and elsewhere. In such elections centrist peace-oriented candidates will win, leaving devisive extremist out of power.

Also, we should follow the thinking of the great USA citizen Henry George in instituting a national property tax akin to local taxes, to better fund government. Sales taxes hit the poor too disproportionately hard, and income taxes discourage employment in comparison to resource and energy use. Ownership is imaginary, but useful because it encourages stewardship. Ownership requires government, and should therefore support government, as stated elsewhere at the blog 'Envision Hope or Perish', which please see.

Brian Cady