There is no swifter way to alienate working class voters than to name an outsourcing CEO to lead your jobs strategy. Yet that's exactly what President Obama is doing.
General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt has fooled the media and the White House into believing that he cares about American manufacturing jobs. I have a hard time imagining a worse pick, unless Obama would have tapped Immelt's predecessor Jack Welch, who seemed fine with the idea of putting factories on barges in search of the lowest wages in the world.
Let's look at GE's jobs record. You would have difficulty finding a company that has outsourced more jobs and closed more American factories than GE. While they have slashed their American workforce to fewer than 150,000, GE has dramatically expanded its global presence, now employing over 300,000 workers worldwide. Yes, GE has brought a trickle of jobs back to the U.S. over the past two years, but it still outsources more than it insources. And those executives at GE are not clueless--they realize the value of good publicity as it announces new hires at a time like this. But they do not devote nearly the same amount of publicity to their factory closings.
Immelt's prescription for boosting manufacturing harkens back to the days of bloodletting as a medical procedure -- bad policy with consistently poor results:
The result of policies Immelt has supported: one-third of our manufacturing workforce gone in a decade. 50,000 shuttered factories. At least $245 billion in real wage and salary losses for manufacturing workers. Record trade deficits with China. In short, our worst decade in manufacturing history--by most measures even worse than the Great Depression.
Blue collar workers in the industrial heartland--swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Wisconsin--will not be impressed. The president would have been well advised to select a business leader committed to pragmatic policies to revitalizing manufacturing. Intel's former CEO Andy Grove, U.S. Steel's John Surma, Nucor's Dan DiMicco, or Chandra Brown of United Streetcar--which built an industry out of nothing--would all have been far superior choices. And, leading thinkers on manufacturing strategy like Leo Gerard of the United Steelworkers should be intimately involved.
The White House jobs council will fail unless it embraces ideas that will get our economy moving again and that enjoy widespread support. Here's a good list for them to start with:
Some of these ideas have already been embraced by the President and Jeffrey Immelt, but key aspects of this plan have been summarily rejected by Immelt in the past. If the President really wants a game changer on jobs, he picked the wrong guy with the wrong ideas to lead the effort.
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Would people stand for the current head of Goldman Sachs, or another financial firm, leading a President's economic strategy?
Absolutely outrageous....
uneducated ?uninspired? milquetoast ? corporatist? throwing the base under the bus? all of the above?
No: you didn't read the fine print: "to create jobs in China" that is the mandate of Immelt. Perfect choice.
Amen
If the repubs had a single viable candidate, Obama would be toast.....
He clearly has no understanding of the "Supply-Side",
"Free-Trade" source of our economic, political and moral morass.
Seriously Scott.... did you really expect anything better?
I've said almost the same thing with virtually every cabinet and committee appointment made since Obama's general election win in 2008. They are ALL experienced enablers of the abuse of the nation and economy from monied corporate interests. The only appointments have been the Supreme Court nominees. I would include Elizabeth Warren in that list, but she was essentially appointed via squatter's rights.
This President has said on multiple occasions that our workers need to be re-trained for the "new economy" (a well-worn euphemism for "everyone should plan on service and retail jobs"). He is clearly sold on surrendering the rest of our manufacturing to other countries.
If this guy was appointed by a republican president, all of us on the left would scream. We would appropriately assume the worst was in mind. Repubs don't care - their interests are served either way (they will attack immelt publicly while they secretly still love him). The President's fan club continues to praise his courage and infallibility.
How much training do you need to say,
"Want fries with that???"
Soon to be replaced by:
“想要米球与那… ？” (Want rice balls with that...?)
** ... the only DECENT appointments have been the Supreme Court...
Attempts to express our needs and desires through phone calls and e-mails, multiple marches and demonstrations, false promises of favorable bills and amendments to bills, reveal the bitter truth that we have lost the power to affect our futures. Cooperation among workers in years past resulted in the creation of unions, resulting in the creation of a healthy Middle Class. Corporations will never accept a work force with economic power and thus corporations will never accept unions. The Middle Class was therefore declared obsolete.
The bitter truth is that our collective voices, strident as they may be, are not as respected as the dollars showered on our elected representatives. We have become the slaves to Big Business and the futures of our children and grandchildren are in doubt as never before.
I am beginning to think we will have to have a complete social and economic collapse before someone has the gumption to do the right thing.
And that is unfortunate.
Wall Street/City of London are determined to finish turning this nation into a third-world country and those that continue to make excuses for these Clinton/Wall Street appointments just love it.
Quote: “as Immelt alleges. Rather, trade enforcement is about removing distortions from the free market“
I am baffled as to how in the light of Immelt’s quoted statement, Mr. Paul can assert that Immelt is in favor or tolerating China’s trade cheating. Is that not a “distortion”??
According to some figures I have seen, the recent GE reduction in work force is less than 5 %.
I have not begun yet to digest a lot of Mr. Immelt’s business background. But I predict his advice in his new position is going to be entirely pro American in respect to foreign trade. Much of what Mr. Pa ul criticizes is a direct result of the respective laws of the US and of its foreign trade rivals. He has merely been guided by the hand Immelt has been dealt by those governments who have created the problems by commission and omission.
Moreover, he has gone on public record as favoring the adoption by the USA of some version of “industrial policy” in respect to US and foreign competition. That is what US workers badly need. Mr. Paul needs to do some further study.
In the coming century probably 3 billion or more people will want to move up to the middle class in their 'markets' and buy middle class things like cars, tv's phones, technology appliances and our 2% that runs corporate America will be there to finance and profit from it by the trillions, i.e. their manufacture - but it won't be made here. We will be using robots to do most of our manufacturing (new and old) so any BS about net new manufacturing jobs coming back or being created in the US is simply that - BS.
Nothing in Obama's rhetoric and now his actions (he voted as Senator to expand NAFTA), show he has zero interest in America '....rising from the ashes...' of NAFTA and corporate greed to 'win' (much less seriously compete) in the economic marathon that the Global Economy has become.
While you may be correct that this is the hand Obama and Immelt were dealt; it is most certainly the hand they want to play.
The rest of us want them to fold.
You seemed to have omitted any reference to the fact that Immelt favors adoption by USA of an "industrial policy and favors our government. "incentivising" those industries with great prospects for improving our trade balance with foreign rivals.
I sympathize with your skeptcism of so called "free trade" as it is currently structured.
If this is Obama's way of "listening to the people", then I think he is now tone deaf. No amount of polls or speeches can cover the way this administration has bowed down to the financial institutions that brought the economic crisis and the corporations that have outsourced jobs and built factories in other countries, contributing to the economic crisis.
Major corporations can now look for more leeway in outsourcing and also fewer taxes. After all, can't bite the hand that holds the donations - or, as I call them, bribes.