The Real Job Creators: Everyday Americans, Not the 1%

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/economy/155288/the_real_job_creators%3A_everyday_americans%2C_not_the_1/

_310x220

Republicans have made it official: “The wealthy” must be called “the job creators” in any debate about tax policy. Democrats are playing their own word games: Centrists insist the 2012 campaign shouldn’t focus on “income inequality,” or whether the worst concentration of riches since the Great Depression might have to do with what Paul Krugman has taken to calling the Lesser Depression. “Income inequality” is a downer, the centrists say; better to talk about “growth” and “prosperity.”

But it’s becoming increasingly clear that growth and prosperity are threatened by the declining share of income going to the non-wealthy over the last 35 years.

Friday’s disappointing jobs report confirms that “the job creators” should be fired, since they only created 115,000 new jobs in April, which isn’t even enough to employ new entrants to the workforce. And while the unemployment rate ticked down from 8.2 to 8.1 percent, that’s only because more unemployed people gave up and left the labor market entirely. Romney advisor Eric Fehrnstrom (Mr. Etch-A-Sketch) blames President Obama, and he even pretends his candidate cares that “people are so discouraged they are dropping out of the workforce all together.”

Let’s get one thing straight: Even with this anemic recovery, the economy under Obama has replaced all of the jobs lost under the Bush administration. NBC’s Chuck Todd deserves kudos for noting to Fehrnstrom Friday that British austerity policies have sent that nation into a double-dip recession – and that Mitt Romney supports the same policies. Fehrnstrom performed the standard Romney pivot – whatever you’re asked, insist on talking about the U.S. economy only – brushing off Todd’s question about how Romney would improve the economy more than Obama has, with his “cut, cap and balance” austerity policies that have failed elsewhere.

[MrYikes]

1. I am starting to tire

of being in a street brawl with bullies with a baseball bat hitting us and our only defense is wagging a finger saying, "tsk, tsk, tsk."
I understand they are morally corrupt and we shouldn't stoop to their level, but I sure do get tired of it.

[orpupilofnature57]

2. This is what made me a DUer

http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/04/09/03_hard.html

[TBF]

3. Great article -

These sentences especially:

It's hard to be a Democrat because we have to be so many things to so many different people. We're undisciplined, disorganized, and we're up against billionaires who don't like to share and don't play well with others.

These billionaires own the corporations and sit on the boards of all the major media outlets. They control the message and they use fear to divide us, so many will vote against their own best interests. They embrace the uninformed, paranoid and gullible among us, and they call themselves and their minions Republicans. They are well funded, organized and unified around the basic emotions of fear and greed.

I knew this at a young age because my dad worked in a steel mill and belonged to a union. I knew the union wasn't perfect but as my dad said "it's all we've got". I'm middle-aged now and my dad is close to 70. We still have conversations about this occasionally. Last year when I called back home to Wisconsin and said "Dad, what's going on there?" "Oh this Scott *expletive* - he just wants to break the unions". Clear as a bell. It would be great if we had that kind of clarity everywhere but unfortunately most people just watch the mainstream media and hear the wealthy's view on what is happening. There are fewer folks belonging to unions because we don't have as many manufacturing jobs now and the big corporations have fought tooth and nail to keep union organizing out of the service professions.

And that's where we are.

[JDPriestly]

4. +100000

[orpupilofnature57]

7. Cooley Hurd turned me on to DU

and that article made me a beliver ,Thanks Al

[6502]

5. Great article...

While reading it all I could think was OMG.

This article should be perma-linked from the home page.

[Tennessee Gal]

8. Great article! Thank you for posting it.

I saved it for future reference.

[Honeycombe8]

6. I'm a job creator. I buy stuff and services.

Countertops, remodeling, groceries, cars, houses, vet services, health care services, household supplies, electrical repair services, painting services, roofers, a/c repairmen, appliances, haircuts, Starbucks, lunch out with the gals, clothing, etc.

Without the 99%, there would be no jobs. We are the job creators.

[orpupilofnature57]

9. Bingo !!!!!!

They're the vacuum ,we're the generators.

[Igel]

10. Lenin learned otherwise.

All power to the councils and power to the workers were good slogans. He even believed them. Then after nationalizing everything the economy collapsed when the workers were all gung-ho. They had the power. They ran into a brick wall. Lenin bifurcated his rhetoric. The workers were all powerful, all knowing. But they were idiots.

Lenin had a lot of demand but lacked the ideas, capital, and expertise to set up firms to sell and produce the goods that were in demand. He had put workers in charge of shops and factories and you know what happened? Economic collapse. The bourgeoisie didn't take the factories home and put them in their attic. The shops housed the same fixtures. But there was a pretty severe collapse.

His new solution that he arrived at, the one that he had later always planned for before, was to bring back all the class enemies and have them train his class friends. Took years. And after years of training, when Stalin finally disposed of the NEP he also watched an economic downturn.

Here's a pretty good parallel: You buy food, meat (I assume) and vegetables (I also assume). You create the farm jobs.

It's not the farmers who create the jobs. They have no need for initiative, expertise, planning. They run no risks, they have nothing to do with it. Their jobs spring into existence fully formed, as do those of the people they hire.

Why, if all farmers died tomorrow, within a week a new crop of them would spring into existence to do their work. Because we created the jobs in the first place and we would just re-create them. Ex nihilo. The reason that we didn't have kiwis 50 years ago when I was a kid had nothing to do with their not being introduced, nothing to do with no demand having been created. One day there was demand and the kiwi vineyards and kiwi farmers existed. We created them.

Except in the case of kiwis there was no demand. There were demand-creators who, presumably, created the consumers that created the jobs. It's the same with cars and everything else.

(Why, strictly speaking Obama couldn't have saved the auto industry jobs. Only demand could do that, right? Not new administration, not an influx of pointless capital, not legal protections. It's all about us, the consumers. Obama in this case was a glory hog taking away from us the credit we so richly deserve. Buy that?)