Disappeared News

by Larry Geller

You could listen to President Obama promise to do something about jobs, or you could check the reality on the ground.

And that is: Billions for banks and bubkis for jobs.

Remember now, that corporations are people too, and that they run our government. They don’t necessarily want Americans to have jobs. General Motors felt burdened by having to employ actual workers, pay salaries, benefits and pensions, remember. So with the assistance of our sympathetic government, their cars will soon be produced in Mexico and probably later in China. No more worker problems for them if they can do that.

And now this: companies are recruiting and hiring cheaper employees from overseas and even displacing American workers—right here in the USA, and at a time when Americans are scrambling for any jobs they can get.

Danny Schechter’s guest this morning on his Progressive Radio program (I’ll put the link here when the audio is available to download) described how the Internet is full of “H1-B only want ads,” that is, US employers recruiting overseas for jobs in the USA.

That’s right, whether the recession is over or not, many US employers don’t want currently jobless workers back in the workforce. And just wait until they tell their buddies about this neat trick.

Danny’s guest has a website, Bright Future Jobs, where you can read about this and about a bill introduced to make it illegal. Of course, corporations will oppose making it illegal, and now that they can spend as much money as they like to kill the bill, let’s see how it goes.

But why shouldn’t Congress pass this bill, and others to create jobs and protect American workers, still un-bailed out even as bankers cash huge bonus checks over in New York? Remember: we send the actors to Congress but corporations write their lines.

I don’t know if a protectionist bill would itself be legal or a wise course of action. What is needed is to rethink our government and our economy and question the authority exerted by corporations over both.

It will take an overhaul of government to put voters back in the drivers seat. I wonder how long it will take for us to see that.

Meanwhile, while you wait, read and support Danny’s daily News Dissector blog. He was way ahead of the rest of the press in reporting on the dangers of the coming financial crisis. He is still the most astute commentator on economics and the condition of ordinary people, a voice not heard anywhere in the commercial press.

Going back to Obama’s speech, I’ll end with the beginning of Danny’s article today, which I hope you’ll read, Did President Obama’s State of The Union Speech Change The Fate of the Union??:

The State of the Union oration was classic Obama. It had no resemblance to the text we imagined and perhaps hoped for yesterday. It was positive, upbeat, even humorous at times, designed to charm, show compassion and seduce, It made you want to believe, believe in him, not necessarily in his recommendations. He went after the banks, but without a knockout punch, without really explaining his financial reform package and what’s required to wrestle this behemoth—there was no mention of pervasive financial crimes or the new Consumer Protection Agency.

He seemed most concerned with unifying the Congress, with reclaiming the moral high ground of the center without giving much to the right or the left. As the NY Times put it, “he tried to recapture the magic of the “Yes We Can Campaign” after a year of “no we can’t governing.”

There’s no way out of the recession, out of the foreclosures and the bankruptcies, unless Americans can find jobs. Corporations don’t care about jobs, that’s not what they are about. If everything were made in China it wouldn’t bother the companies that profit from selling these things. Not for a moment.

I am pretty sure the next election will be very interesting, as voters awaken to what we’ve been given by our Congressional incumbents. Bubkis.

Permalink posted by Larry @ 1/28/2010 06:55:00 AM