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Thursday, June 16, 2011

This is working America under corporate and bankster greed
Posted by Jill | 5:03 AM
From David Frum, of all people:



Any questions?

Of course the Republican candidates would answer his questions with more tax cuts to "unleash freedom" for corporations. Yesterday I read a column by the hacktacular Dana Milbank which contained the following piece of idiocy:

The private sector has stabilized, profits have returned, productivity is high, American competitiveness has improved, and large sums of money have accumulated on corporate balance sheets.

The most efficient way to produce jobs, then, is to give the private sector incentives to spend its big pile of cash on new hires. That’s why Obama, last week, was at a community college in Northern Virginia touting little-known policies such as “Skills for America’s Future” and the “Workforce Investment Act.”

Corporations are profitable again. Banks are ridiculously profitable again. All are sitting on what Milbank calls "piles of cash." Milbank makes the mistake of thinking that our nation's employment problem is that we lack the skills corporatins are looking for.

Two anecdotes:

1) Mr. Brilliant recently beat out dozens of other candidates for a job. That's the good news. The bad news is that the company for which he interviewed subsequently laid off a good chunk of its workforce so no offer was made. Back to square one.

2) The husband of a colleague of mine was let go from his job six months before he was supposed to fully vest in the retirement plan. He is in his late forties.

Both of these men are highly skilled people. Mr. B has been out of work for nearly six months. There have been interviews, but no offers. Sometimes it's been that they love him over the phone and the minute they take a look at his over-50 self, his candidacy for the job is over.

Don't tell me that there aren't skilled people in this country. Don't tell me there aren't people who can learn on the job. I got my current job right before the economy went into the crapper. My department was being rebuilt from scratch, and I don't delude myself for one minute that it's because of my great skills in the area in which my department focuses. At that point, I had a pulse and could put two sentences together and I think at that point it was enough. Six months later I was thrown into a coordinating role for the most difficult projects in the division, and nearly three years later I know an awful lot about cancer. I learned everything on the job. Hire smart people, and give them a bit of breathing room to grow, and they will work their guts out for you (which is why you don't see me blog lately -- I am trying to figure out how I will be able to stay awake for 48 hours straight to get my project to testing on time this Monday).

It's not about "incentives" or tax cuts. It's about greed and the destruction of the middle class The people running businesses in the government and in the chattering classes simply do not understand, or understand full well and don't give a rat's ass, that it is not stockpiles of cash that create jobs, nor is it the goodness of company owners and executives. Demand creates jobs. When people can afford to buy your products, or products that contain what you make, or require your service to be created, demand increases and so does hiring. I don't know why this concept is such a difficult one for our political and chattering classes to understand.

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2 Comments:
Blogger Pangolin said...
Options available to the chattering classes.

1) Propose that sharing the wealth might be a good idea. This ALWAYS results in the person making such a proposal being invited to share the poverty.

2) Take the money from their Corporate Masters and lick the, erm, hand, that gives it to them. This is obviously the preferred path to corporate glory. It's also slow poison for the majority.

Americans are morons that are unable to see that they've been sold out. As long as they continue to blame each other, as individuals, for social problems we will continue to decline.
6/16/11, 2:45 PM  
Blogger PurpleGirl said...
Mitt Romney was campaigning in Florida today (mainly for fundraising they say). He spoke with some people at a diner about unemployment. He said (paraphrase) "I should tell you my story, I'm unemployed too.")

The gall of that man to say that.
6/16/11, 4:15 PM  
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