Jobs

Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Jobs Council Fraud?

Posted by on July 19, 2012 at 2:54 pm. NO Comments :

The headline story on Fox Nation today calls the President’s Jobs Council a fraud. There is nothing in the story that indicates what the nature of the alleged fraud is, but the charge stills hangs there like rotting fruit.

Fox Nation

The root of the complaint has something to do with the frequency with which President Obama meets with the White House Jobs Council. The Fox Nationalists appear to be upset that he doesn’t do it often enough. Coincidentally (wink), that’s the same theme that Mitt Romney has been pitching on the campaign trail recently.

But here’s the thing. The Jobs Council has mostly done its work already. They issued a report with some specific recommendations. Those recommendations have been addressed by both the administration and Congress. The White House has acted on 54 of the 60 recommendations for executive action. Congress passed the JOBS Act which contained many of the ideas proposed by the Council. There are many other proposals that Republicans in Congress are blocking because they are more focused on making Obama a one-term president than they are on helping Americans get back to work.

It’s ironic that Romney and Fox are so concerned with the meeting schedule of a Council that they so fiercely opposed. They have rejected many of its recommendations and they were never particularly fond of its formation. Fox News in particular was maniacally critical of its chairman, Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric. Bill O’Reilly called him “a despicable human being” on the air. So it’s rather peculiar that they are now upset that Obama hasn’t spent more time with them. Of course, if he did meet more often they would be crticizing that.

Occupy Messaging: Who Are The Real Job Creators?

Posted by on December 13, 2011 at 10:53 am. 8 Comments :

For too long now, right-wing propagandists like Frank Luntz have been manipulating language to distort the real issues that impact so many lives of American citizens. They engage in dishonest wordcraft that disguises their true meaning in order to shape public opinion and deceive voters. It’s time to counter that rhetorical offensive by restoring definitions that actually reflect reality.

One of the most recent and insidious examples of this practice is the conservative effort to replace references to “the rich” with the phrase “job creators.” It is of no interest to these hacks that no evidence exists to validate the claim. In fact, NPR’s congressional reporter, Tamara Keith, asked members of congress and representatives of conservative business groups to refer her to business people who could substantiate the assertion that tax cuts for the wealthy would induce them to increase hiring. They were unable to come up with a single name or example to affirm their half-baked theory. However, Keith found several examples of her own that utterly refuted it. This caused Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to note that “Millionaire job creators are like unicorns. They are impossible to find and don’t exist.”

The agenda that Republicans have adopted has literally no popular constituency. Every poll taken on the subject reveals that majorities of Americans (including majorities of Republicans) favor increasing taxes on the rich. Even polls of the rich show that they believe that they are not presently sharing the sacrifice required to restore the nation’s economic health. An independent group of Patriotic Millionaires released a video beseeching Congress to raise their taxes.

So the next time you hear some GOP flunky whining about the plight of the rich whose only desire is to be unburdened from the shackles of what are the lowest taxes in decades, remember that they have not, and cannot, certify any claim that lower taxes will spur hiring. In fact, the evidence is all to the contrary. And whenever possible, we need to recapture the phrase “job creators” and use it in a manner that is more in line with reality. Here is a handy, shareable chart that illustrates who the real job creators are:

(click to view larger)
Job Creators

[Addendum] President Obama asked these questions in his economic address last month:

Are you going to cut taxes for the middle class and those who are trying to get into the middle class? Or are you going to protect massive tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, many of whom don’t even want those tax breaks?

Are you going to ask a few hundred thousand people who have done very, very well to do their fair share? Or are you going to raise taxes for hundreds of millions of people across the country – 160 million Americans?

Are you willing to fight as hard for middle-class families as you do for those who are most fortunate?

What’s it going to be?

A Hire Power: The Local Approach To Resolving The Job Crisis Nationally

Posted by on September 5, 2011 at 3:59 pm. 3 Comments :

Hire PowerAmerica is at a crossroads on this Labor Day. We can sit back and wait for greedy, impersonal corporations, or politicians with conflicts of interest and hyper-partisanship, to come to the rescue of middle and low-income citizens, or we can submit to a Hire Power!

About two and half years ago the United States hit a boulder in the economic road. Venerable money center banks were crushed under the weight of spurious investments and barely legal schemes. There was a broad consensus that absent some dramatic response there would be a catastrophic failure of the nation’s financial foundations which, of course, would spread throughout the world.

The markets panicked, plummeting 5,000 points (45%) from September 2008 to March 2009. Home foreclosures skyrocketed and the unemployment rate rose from 6.2% to 8.6%. In the meantime, Washington scrambled to legislate bailouts and stimuli for banks, insurance companies, and auto manufacturers, somehow neglecting to provide aid to millions of middle and low-income victims of this banking-driven disaster.

Today the Dow Jones average is back above 11,000, about where it was in September 2008, and nearly double its low. Investment firms like Goldman Sachs have fared well also. Goldman’s stock today is 150% above where it had bottomed out. Automakers like GM and Chrysler are once again profitable and paying back their government loans. And the unemployment rate has … well … it’s gotten even worse, rising to 9.1%.

So by almost every measure the economic recovery has been swift and robust with one exception: Jobs. The nation is experiencing what analysts call a “jobless” recovery. The companies that have been enjoying renewed success thanks to consumer support are still hesitant about hiring. They are hoarding their resources to either avoid new risk or to reward themselves with higher salaries and bonuses.

It’s clear that the American people cannot rely on big business to address the jobs deficit that is still burdening so many families. It’s time to take matters into our own hands. Small businesses have the power to effect a massive change in the current economic environment. Some estimates show that more than 70% of new jobs are created by small businesses. It is within that market that ordinary citizens can bypass the greedy and insensitive corporations who are only interested in enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of us. They have already demonstrated that they couldn’t care less about American workers by their refusal to create new jobs, or when they do create jobs, it’s for workers in other countries.

So what can we do about It? We can promote the creation of new jobs by small business in our own communities. If small businesses with fewer than 100 employees were to commit to hiring one person – just one person – the effect on the community could be significant. Take Rhode Island, for example. The state has about 6,200 businesses with between 10 and 100 employees. If each one of them hired a single new employee, that would be 6,200 Rhode Islanders with a job that previously did not have one. It would reduce unemployment in the state by one percent. It would mean that 6,200 fewer people would be receiving unemployment benefits and other government aid. 6,200 more people would be contributing to, rather than draining, public resources.

More importantly, it would mean an additional 6,200 people would have income with which to patronize other businesses in the community. Restaurants, dry cleaners, book stores, etc., would prosper. Suppliers and manufacturers who service those businesses would see increased demand. And all of those businesses would then be able to explore hiring more people as well, continuing the cycle of prosperity.

Make no mistake about it. The right-wing myth of trickle-down economics is a proven failure. For ten years corporations have enjoyed the supposedly temporary tax cuts implemented under the Bush administration, but they have not been creating jobs. The reason is simple. Companies do not create jobs for the heck of it. Lowering their taxes or repealing regulations will not produce a single new job. After all, why would a company hire people to make more of something that they aren’t selling just because their taxes went down? Companies hire people when they have increased demand for their products or services. Increased demand occurs when consumers are buying things. So when people have good paying jobs and money in their pockets they will make purchases which will spur companies to meet the new demand by hiring more workers.

But maybe there is a way to prime the jobs pump. The goal should be to put more people to work so that they can distribute their income back into the economy. This effort may take some measure of faith on the part of the businesses who take the initial step to hire a new employee. Some businesses may not be able to fully justify a new hire. Do it anyway! The potential upside for the business and the broader economy makes it a reasonable risk. There is a sort of patriotic duty to assume such a risk on behalf of the welfare of our country. If enough of your neighbors join in, the rewards will be substantial. In the worst case scenario, you may have to let the new employee go in a few weeks or months. But at least he or she would have been employed briefly, and the cost to the business would have been negligible. It’s the sort of speculative investment that is worthwhile even if it does not guarantee a return.

On the other hand, if it does succeed, the nation’s economic health can be restored community-by-community. We can build out this program and spread it across the country. Neighbors helping neighbors. No dependence on government programs that do too little and are too difficult to implement. Medium-sized businesses can participate by hiring two or three new people. Big businesses would eventually recognize the momentum and loosen up their own purse strings to hire in even greater numbers. And the spending by all of these newly employed citizens would finance the economic rebound that everyone has been hoping for.

Does this seem too idealistic? Too fanciful and unrealistic given the harsh dimensions of our economic hardships? Let’s ask the city of Atlanta whose “Hire One Atlanta” program is already in progress and showing promising results. So far, nearly 1,500 businesses have added more than 13,000 workers. They are aiming for 150,000 jobs over the course of a year. They make a compelling argument on their web site:

“Hire one new employee and you’ll start a chain of events that can positively impact individuals and our entire economy.  According to one analyst, a single new hire can (on average) increase U.S. GDP by about $100,000. Imagine if 150,000 businesses each hired just one person.”

That’s a $15 billion boost to the economy, and that’s just in one city. Last week the city of Greensboro, North Carolina announced that they will implement a program similar to the one in Atlanta. Why not spread this across the nation and put hundreds of thousands of Americans back to work? The spike in spending, investing, and consumer confidence could be just what is needed to finally bring the economic recovery to the job market. And rather than just the top 1% of the nation’s wealthy elite enjoying the benefits of a rebound, all Americans can share in a growing and healthy economy.

The best part is that all of this can be accomplished by ordinary citizens inspired by the power unleashed in the simple act of of hiring their neighbors. So let’s get started. This is what we call Hire Power!