Obama’s jobs fraud

[Karmadillo]

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/jan2011/pers-j22.shtml

Obama’s jobs fraud
22 January 2011

The Obama administration on Friday announced the appointment of Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive officer of energy giant General Electric, to head the new White House Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

The announcement is a further demonstration that the Obama administration is a government by, for and increasingly of the corporate and financial elite. Immelt, whose pay is about $15 million a year, is one of the country’s most highly compensated executives. His appointment follows on the heels of the selection of multimillionaire William Daley—commerce secretary under Bill Clinton and most recently a top executive at JPMorgan Chase—to be White House chief of staff.

<edit>

The universal line promoted by both big business parties and the mass media is that job-creation is synonymous with the elimination of all restrictions on corporate profit-making. This is an extension of the poppycock, repeated endlessly by Obama, that the private sector is the true engine of job growth. This claim is belied by some stubborn facts: for example, the fact that over the course of the first decade of the 21st century, the US private sector generated no net increase in jobs. Today, the American private sector is keeping unemployment near 10 percent by sitting on a cash hoard of several trillion dollars and refusing to use it to hire workers.

Obama once again claimed that the basic problem with the American economy is that the working class is living beyond its means. It is necessary, he said, to “go from an economy that was powered by what we borrow and what we consume” to one geared to production.

The demand for reduced consumption does not apply to the wealthy, who, thanks to a deal worked out last month between the Democrats and Republicans, have received a massive windfall in the form of an extension of Bush-era tax cuts. Obama did not mention this in his comments in Schenectady, but he did take the opportunity to praise a number of corporate tax cuts that were included in the package as an example of his administration’s efforts to create jobs.

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[click_bullseye]

1. Immelt

Another appointment to the King's Czar list. Yup, this is the elites propping up the elites at the expense of you and I. Wait until the .gov is nothing more than the appointed ones who claim they can lead and the destroyed society which they rule over. This appointment should have gone to someone who doesn't live by the gilded spoon, but rather to a person who has worked hard at developing a business from the bottom up, a leader in the small business world, since that is where most of the jobs in America are, not in the GE's, IBM's and Boeing's. This country is so screwed with these "pat each other on their back" and feel good bunch while you and I middle America are suffocating under increasing taxes and higher prices with diminishing jobs.

[Swamp Rat]

15. Welcome to DU!

:hi:

The corpofascists have infiltrated our government, and divided America against itself.

[MilesColtrane]

2. The author is making things up.

"...poppycock, repeated endlessly by Obama, that the private sector is the true engine of job growth."

Just because George Bush's policies failed to add jobs and steered the economy into near total collapse, that doesn't change the fact that the private sector is where the vast majority of jobs come from.

53% of the workforce is employed by small businesses
38% of the workforce is employed by big businesses
8% of the workforce is employed by the government

That's 91% of jobs coming from the private sector

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States

Obama's position on deregulation is certainly debatable, but when an author makes such a bald-faced "mistake" in facts such as this, I usually stop reading.

[Karmadillo]

3. You shouldn't stop reading so early. You're misstating what the OP said.

Read the next sentence. Seems supported here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/01/AR2010010101196.html?hpid=topnews

Aughts were a lost decade for U.S. economy, workers

<edit>

There has been zero net job creation since December 1999

[MilesColtrane]

4. Yes, but that's 10 years out of 230+.

Misrepresenting would be taking that small sample and using it to make a broad implication that the private sector is not where most jobs have come from since the industrial revolution, and that the President is lying when he makes that assertion.

[Karmadillo]

5. Nice try.

The OP is pointing out how the Obama/Wall Street administration would have us forget there's another tool of job creation besides the spectacularly unsuccessful in recent years private sector:

<edit>

From the beginning of his term in office, Obama has rejected any government hiring program and the administration has now put an end to even the limited “stimulus” measures adopted early on.

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[obxhead]

6. How do you convert our economy to one geared to production

when you support outsourcing production jobs?

This is another case of Obama saying one thing and doing the opposite.

[CrispyQ]

7. Exactly.

Platitudes, offering empty hope to millions, who want to believe that the jobs are coming back. Just like the empty hope of change.

[Karmadillo]

8. If we don't believe, the jobs will die!

nt

[kenny blankenship]

9. All Hail The New Reagan

[ProSense]

10. Really?

<...>

The attempt to portray an unabashedly pro-corporate agenda as a “jobs program” is also designed to obscure the fact that the Obama administration has pursued a deliberate policy of maintaining high unemployment as a means of forcing workers to accept wage cuts and other concessions. From the beginning of his term in office, Obama has rejected any government hiring program and the administration has now put an end to even the limited “stimulus” measures adopted early on.

<...>]

Really?

WH: Keep Putting Them on the Job!

A Jobs Program That Works

Job Subsidies Providing Help to Private Side

Kerry Pushes TANF Extension to Save Jobs for Working Families

Still, what is the perceived "fraud," that the President doesn't intend to create jobs?

Seriously, that's a pretty weak accusation. One can claim the initiative isn't going to work, but what motive does the President have for not creating jobs?

[Karmadillo]

11. I share you bafflement as to why Obama is so loath to create jobs.

FDR provided a good model, but the Obama/Wall Street administration doesn't seem to like it. It's hard to understand why the administration has been so slow in dealing with unemployment when it has had no problems acting quickly to transfer public funds to the rich or continue the criminal war in Afghanistan.

http://www.slate.com/id/2209781

Wrong Harry
Four million jobs in two years? FDR did it in two months.
By Charles Peters and Timothy Noah
Posted Monday, Jan. 26, 2009, at 7:00 PM ET

The PWA was the Public Works Administration, led by Harold Ickes Sr. The CWA was the Civil Works Administration, led by Harry Hopkins. Both were New Deal agencies created in 1933 to get Americans quickly back to work at a time when unemployment reached 25 percent, its highest point in U.S. history. The PWA failed. The CWA succeeded.

The strategy behind Obama's stimulus bill resembles that of the PWA. Like the stimulus, the PWA tackled unemployment indirectly by spending money largely through private contractors. That handicap—worsened by Ickes' cautious-to-a-fault management style—resulted in only $110 million of the program's authorized $3.3 billion getting spent during the program's crucial first year. Frustrated by Ickes' poky pace, Roosevelt yielded to the pleas of his relief administrator, Harry Hopkins, to help get unemployed workers through the coming winter by putting them directly onto the federal payroll. Roosevelt had been reluctant to create a federal work program for fear of alienating organized labor. Hopkins overcame that worry by pointing out that Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor, had in 1898 proposed essentially the same idea. Roosevelt diverted not quite one-third of Ickes' PWA budget to Hopkins' CWA with the goal of putting to work 4 million people. As a percentage of the population, that would be the equivalent of putting 10 million people to work today. In his first weekly radio address, Obama pledged that the stimulus package would "save or create 3 to 4 million jobs over the next few years." (His budget director estimates that 75 percent of the money will be spent within 18 months.) Hopkins got there within two months.

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[dionysus]

12. yes obama wants to destroy jobs. ou are absolutely right.

:eyes:

[Karmadillo]

13. Why do you think he wants to destroy jobs?

Do you have anything to back up that claim?

[ProSense]

14. Well

these are different times.

"Four million jobs in two years? FDR did it in two months."

Clinton has one of the best jobs records in recent times, and his average was about 2.5 million per year.

FDR's average was about 5.5 million per year for his first term and 2.6 million in his second term.

The stimulus created or saved 3 million jobs. The problem is that the hole created is deep. In 2010, the economy created 1.1 million jobs. More jobs than Bush did in his entire Presidency.

If President Obama can bring the economy to create 2 million jobs this year, it will make a dent. More is better.

[Karmadillo]

16. What do you mean by "these are different times"?

Please let Dan Froomkin know as he seems to think an FDR solution would work and may be in need of your (unsupported, so far) insight.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/08/america-needs-jobs-time-f_n_754859.html

Job Creation Idea No. 8: Time For A New WPA
(No. 8 in Huffington Post's America Needs Jobs series.)

There is, of course, a precedent for the country facing a massive, sustained unemployment crisis.

There is also a precedent for solving it.

So why won't President Obama at least try to do what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did during the great Depression?

Back then, of course, the federal government directly employed millions of Americans, most notably through the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Government paychecks went to men and women who planted trees, constructed state parks, created great works of art and built bridges, dams and other structures that remain to this day among the nation's finest and most inspiring public works

Today's WPA could do some of that -- as well as turn abandoned neighborhoods into urban parks, clean up the Gulf region, care for senior citizens and young children, bury utility lines, kill kudzu and tutor students.

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[dionysus]

17. as in it's not the 1930s, we don't have 70ish senators, or any sane republicans

to pass sensible legislation.

:shrug:

[Karmadillo]

19. You mean Obama tried and failed to pass legislation to create an FDR solution?

I don't remember that. Or do you mean he wanted to embrace an FDR solution but was forced to abandon it by all the Wall Streeters he voluntarily hired to run his adminstration? Regardless, do you have any link that supports your implication that Obama secretly desires an FDR solution to unemployment?

[Octafish]

20. Must've missed that vote, too.

Krugman was among those who tried to warn Franklin Delano Obama was too cautious.

[dionysus]

22. actually you're attempting to put words in my mouth. fail.

[ProSense]

18. These are different times

economically and politically.

For example the FDIC has been given powers that they have never had before. Some of the problems, including the mortgage crisis, that need to be addressed didn't exist in the 1930s.

Congressional Republicans are not the same as the Republican who supported the New Deal. Sixteen Republicans voted for Social Security.

Today's Republicans want to repeal health care, and concessions had to be made to the stimulus package just to get three of them to support it.

[Octafish]

21. This article makes me like Bernie Sanders' ''Robin-Hood'' approach a lot.

That's the most Democratic there is: Using the powers of government to make life better for ALL Americans -- not just the well-to-do.

Truth be told, there already is a party to protect Wall Street's interests. It's called the Republicons. They invented the "Reverse Robin-Hood" approach.

[Karmadillo]

23. Me, too. If only we had a Democratic Party that wanted to take that approach.

nt