To End Jobs Crisis, Take the Profits, Forbid Exec Bonuses & Dividends

Feb 7, 2010

“Jobs must be our number one focus in 2010,” declared President Obama in his State of the Union address on January 27.

Yes, what’s needed is jobs. The recession has destroyed over nine million jobs in 26 months. And that’s not counting the 125,000 jobs that should have been created every month just to keep up with the growth of the workforce. And the Labor Department admitted that almost 700,000 people left the “job market” last month because there were no jobs. The job crisis is getting worse, not better.

“I am calling for a new jobs bill,” promised Obama.

No, he’s not.

The most immediate and effective attack on unemployment would be for the government to give a very large and permanent boost to programs like unemployment insurance, Social Security retirement benefits, welfare, food stamps. That would put more money into peoples’ hands, which would boost consumer spending, leading to hiring.

Obama’s not calling for that.

Nor is he calling for what would be the most efficient government jobs program – hiring workers directly, putting them to work to repair and rebuild the vital, but aging and decrepit infrastructure, the roads, water and sewage systems, parks, schools, hospitals. This would in turn create more jobs that produce machinery, equipment and materials – and it would also boost consumer spending, leading to more hiring.

But Obama is proposing to freeze domestic programs for three years – which can only cost more jobs.

Obama’s new “jobs” bill has no jobs in it. It’s just another excuse to give more tax breaks and subsidies to corporations.

Obama claims these corporate gifts are “incentives” for companies to hire more workers.

That’s not true either. Every study done by the Federal Reserve and the Congressional Budget Office has demonstrated that giveaways to business have little or no effect on unemployment. Business just takes the money and runs away with it.

Obama’s “jobs” bill is a corporate bailout disguised as a jobs bill, giving billions more to the very companies and the very executives who created the jobs crisis by slashing jobs, right and left.

We’ve seen this before. Bush, Obama and Bernanke played the same kind of game with the bank bailout. They promised that the bank bailout would save the economy, boost lending and stop the foreclosures, keeping people in their homes.

But it did none of that. All it did was reward the very bankers who had caused the financial crisis. The bankers took our tax money and began to speculate with it, driving up prices of oil and other commodities, driving up the stock market. They paid themselves big bonuses. And they paid billions in interest and dividends to big stockholders.

Neither of these two parties, Republicans or Democrats, have done anything that tackled the real problems of unemployment. The jobs crisis is getting worse.

If we want jobs, we are going to have to fight for them – setting the only kind of goals that have any chance of getting us out of this crisis.

Stop all further job cuts or layoffs.

Force companies to divide up the available work among everyone who wants to work – with no loss of pay to anyone.

And if this cuts into corporate profits, then let it. We’re in a crisis today. We need drastic action.

In any case, we shouldn’t believe the lies the corporations and their bankers tell us about their profits. Let the working class look at the accounts – all of them, not just the fake ones the companies and the bankers provide.