October 11, 2011
By Michael Snyder - BLN Contributing Writer
There are 27 members on Barack Obama’s job creation panel, and most of them are corporate executives. The formal name of the panel is the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which is kind of ironic considering the fact that many of the CEOs on the panel have been rapidly shipping jobs out of the United States.
So what hope is there that things are going to turn around if many of the folks that are supposed to be helping Barack Obama create U.S. jobs are actively destroying them instead? And how is the American middle class ever supposed to recover if corporate executives keep taking their jobs away and sending them to the other side of the world where it is legal to pay slave labor wages? These issues go to the very heart of America’s economic problems, and yet very few of our leaders are talking about them. But they should be talking about these things, because the economy is the number one issue for most American voters right now.
During most of the decades since World War II, the U.S. economy was a job creation machine.
But this past decade was different.
So how many total jobs do you think were created during the decade that just ended?
Would you believe zero?
Yes, it is true. A total of zero jobs were created last decade. The following is a quote from a recent article in Washington Monthly….
“If any single number captures the state of the American economy over the last decade, it is zero. That was the net gain in jobs between 1999 and 2009—nada, nil, zip. By painful contrast, from the 1940s through the 1990s, recessions came and went, but no decade ended without at least a 20 percent increase in the number of jobs.”But aren’t we the greatest economy on earth?
Don’t we have great success stories such as Apple and Microsoft and Google and Facebook?
How could we have created zero jobs over an entire decade?
Well, the truth is that globalism has fundamentally altered the relationship between the big corporations and the American people.
You see, they don’t actually need most of us anymore. They can just set up facilities on the other side of the world and hire workers for 10 to 20 times less money.
Over the last couple of decades, tens of thousands of manufacturing facilities and millions of jobs have been shipped out of the United States.
Even many of the corporate executives on Obama’s job creation panel are guilty of doing this.
The following facts were taken from a recent article in the Los Angeles Times….
*Ursula Burns, the CEO of Xerox, eliminated 4,500 U.S. jobs during the first six months of 2011.
*Kenneth I. Chenault, the CEO of American Express, got rid of 550 U.S. jobs earlier this year. But it wasn’t because American Express was not making enough money. According to the Los Angeles Times, “American Express announced it had made $1.1 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010, up 48% from the same period the previous year.”
*Antonio M. Perez, the CEO of Eastman Kodak, got rid of 9,200 U.S. employees between 2004 and 2011.
*Jim McNerney, the CEO of Boeing, announced in January that 1,100 U.S. jobs would be eliminated. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reports that “Boeing reported that profits rose 20%, to $941 billion in the second quarter of 2011.”
*Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of GE, has eliminated 22,000 U.S. jobs over the last four years.
And as I noted in a recent article on The Economic Collapse Blog, if you go back even farther the job losses at GE get even larger. The truth is that it is standard operating procedure at GE to look for ways to aggressively cut jobs in the United States and GE has been adding thousands upon thousands of new jobs overseas.
In fact, just check out the following quote from a recent article posted on the Huffington Post….
As the administration struggles to prod businesses to create jobs at home, GE has been busy sending them abroad. Since Immelt took over in 2001, GE has shed 34,000 jobs in the U.S., according to its most recent annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But it’s added 25,000 jobs overseas.So should we be disgusted by this?
At the end of 2009, GE employed 36,000 more people abroad than it did in the U.S. In 2000, it was nearly the opposite.
Of course we should be.
About the only thing that the “experts” on Obama’s jobs panel will be able to teach him is about how to ship U.S. jobs out of the country.
So it should be no great mystery as to why we have so many unemployed workers in the United States today.
And since we are now competing for jobs with workers on the other side of the globe, there is also substantial downward pressure on our wages and on the standard of living that we all enjoy.
The statistics tell us that incomes for middle class Americans just keep declining and declining and declining. Read more>>
