http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2012/01/obamas-jobs-council-promotes-pro.html
“The report tacitly applauds the Obama administration’s bailout of the auto industry, which was accomplished through cutting wages for newly hired workers by 50 percent, as well as cutting pensions and medical benefits for workers and retirees. This is supplemented by another section on how “controlling health-care costs can boost manufacturing competitiveness.”
OBAMA'S HAS DEDICATED HIS ADMINISTRATION TO THE INTERESTS OF HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS, AND LA RAZA!
POLITICAL PARTY AS OBAMA'S IS WITH THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA!
HE HAS SUED FOUR AMERICAN STATES FOR LA RAZA, SABOTAGED E-VERIFY, KEPT OUR BORDERS WIDE OPEN FOR MORE ILLEGALS EVEN HAS HE'S SQUANDERED BILLIONS OVER THERE IN MUSLIM LANDS!
OBAMA'S SEC. OF LABOR, IS LA RAZA SUPREMACIST HILDA SOLIS!
IT'S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED FOR HIS CORPORATE PAYMASTERS...
DESPITE THEIR CRIMES, THE BANKSTER HAVE MADE MORE LOOT DURING OBAMA'S FIRST TWO YEARS THAN THEY DID IN EIGHT YEARS UNDER BUSH.
By Patrick Martin
30 January 2012
30 January 2012
The
report from the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, released in
mid-January, is a blueprint for the subordination of every aspect of American
society to a single goal, boosting corporate profits.
Obama
appointed the panel last year, under the leadership of Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of
General Electric. Among the companies represented on the council are Xerox,
American Express, DuPont, Southwest Airlines, Procter & Gamble, Boeing,
Intel, Citigroup, Comcast and UBS.
Two
union leaders, Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO and Joseph T. Hansen of the United
Food and Commercial Workers, also were appointed. So reactionary and
pro-corporate was the report that the two union executives had to issue a
public dissent in an effort to cover up their collaboration. This “opposition”
is of course combined with all-out support for the Obama administration, which
commissioned the report and now will implement its recommendations.
The
“Road Map to Renewal” issued by the council details specific proposals for
education, job training, tax credits and tax cuts for specific groups of
corporations, and deregulation of business, many of which were incorporated
into Obama’s State of the Union Address.
The report takes as its
starting point that the jobs and living standards of working people are to be
held hostage to private profit. It declares flatly, “government-led initiatives will not
create the jobs we need to reduce unemployment in a sustainable way. The
private sector must lead.”
There
is no examination of why private sector employment is actually lower today than
in 2001—a full decade of standstill in what is routinely referred to in the
corporate-controlled media as the “engine” of the US economy. Instead, the
report calls for more of the tax cuts and deregulation already enacted by the
Bush administration and then continued under the Obama administration.
The
report points to a consensus in the US ruling elite about “finally getting
tough minded about the barriers to competitiveness posed by our regulatory and
tax regimes… To start, we need to cut corporate tax rates, eliminate loopholes,
broaden the base and improve the competitiveness of our tax code.”
The call to “broaden the
base” is political code for increasing taxes on working people, particularly
those whose incomes are so low that they pay no federal income tax. Various
methods have been proposed, including a regressive “flat tax” that would be the
same for paupers and millionaires, or a national sales tax or value-added tax,
which would hit working class consumers the hardest because they spend nearly
all their income on consumer goods.
After
noting the declining education and skill level in the United States, the
byproduct of decades of budget cutting by federal, state and local governments,
the report calls for measures to “fundamentally realign workforce training
around the skills employers actually demand…”
Gone
is the principle, which once animated public education in the United States,
that a well-educated citizenry was a necessity for a democratic society, as
well as an inherent good in its own right. Instead, the council demands an
education system tailored to the requirements of US corporations.
The
report complains of “a postsecondary system that is frequently decoupled from
employer needs” and declares that “business has an opportunity to be an
essential voice in influencing the nation’s education policy, practice and
innovation” through “partnership between businesses and educational
institutions.”
The
report calls for the federal and state governments, as well as universities, to
discourage students from choosing liberal arts programs rather than technology,
science and engineering.
The
goal is not an educated population, but “to effectively align labor demand with
supply.” In other words, the council proposes an education system that produces
skilled engineers and technicians in the quantity required by business, with
the rest of the population consigned to low wage service and production jobs
for which education is, to use the business terminology, not “cost-effective.”
In
one chilling passage, the report proposes, “longer work-based training and conditional
employment to displaced workers,” suggesting such programs “yield better
outcomes, especially for low-income adults.” To put it bluntly, this is a plan
for state-supported indentured servitude for laid-off and low-paid workers, who
will work as cheap labor for the corporations (“work-based training”), to be
hired and fired at will (“conditional employment”).
For
K-12 education, the report calls for stepped-up use of “performance metrics”
and “teacher accountability,” buzzwords for accelerating the testing mania
promoted under the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind program and
continued under Obama’s Race to the Top initiative.
While
public education will be straitjacketed to the requirements of business,
corporate America would be showered with credits and tax cuts to subsidize US
companies against their foreign rivals. The report complains of higher levels
of state funding for corporate research and development in Japan, China and
South Korea. It demands “a competitive tax policy that incentivizes innovative
companies to locate their R&D, production and employment in the United
States…”
The
report details a variety of changes in the tax code to benefit hedge funds and
private equity firms, endorsing the bipartisan Senate bill proposed by Democrat
Mark Warner and Republican Jerry Moran to provide 100 percent corporate income
tax exemption and 100 percent exclusion from capital gains taxes for various
forms of start-up companies funded by venture capital.
It
calls for similar “performance-based tax policies” to promote energy efficiency
and development of so-called green energy companies. Among the proposals are
making the research and development tax credit permanent and extending
production tax credits for new energy technologies.
The
manufacturing section of the report calls for an offensive on the world market
against the major rivals of American capitalism, particularly Germany and
China, a goal embraced enthusiastically in Obama’s State of the Union speech.
Proposals include the inevitable tax credits and subsidies for exporters.
The report tacitly applauds
the Obama administration’s bailout of the auto industry, which was accomplished
through cutting wages for newly hired workers by 50 percent, as well as cutting
pensions and medical benefits for workers and retirees. This is supplemented by
another section on how “controlling health-care costs can boost manufacturing
competitiveness.”
The
report also notes the significance of manufacturing for military purposes,
calling for “retaining and bolstering a robust advanced manufacturing
capability in such key industries as airplanes, automobiles and biologics.”
That
last term is both ominous and revealing, since it suggests a commitment by the
Obama administration to developing biological warfare capabilities despite US
treaty obligations not to do so, and such debacles as the 2001 anthrax attacks
on US targets, allegedly carried out by a scientist at a US Army laboratory.
Another
section of the report calls for sweeping regulatory “reform,” by which the
corporate CEOs mean eliminating many regulations and gutting the enforcement of
most. It hails the effort already undertaken by the Obama administration
through Executive Order 13563, which Obama issued one year ago, directing every
agency of the executive branch to review regulations on business and scrap as
many as possible.
The
council called for a particular focus on limiting “economically significant
rules,” including retrospective review of past regulations on the “cost-benefit
analysis,” which presumes to weigh the cost in lives from anti-pollution and
workplace safety rules against the cost in dollars to corporate America.
The
report concludes with a call for sweeping “tax reform,” claiming that the
United States will soon “have the highest statutory corporate tax rate
(including federal and state taxes) among the 34 OECD countries.” Here the
critical word is “statutory.” US corporations pay only a small fraction of the
prescribed tax rate, because of the myriad loopholes and tax avoidance strategies
available to billion-dollar companies, but not to small businesses or
working-class taxpayers.
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