Capitalism's Dirty Secret: Corporations Don't Create Jobs, They Destroy Them

[MrScorpio]

April 3, 2012 |

Corporations are not working for the 99 percent. But this wasn’t always the case. In a special five-part series, William Lazonick, professor at UMass, president of the Academic-Industry Research Network, and a leading expert on the business corporation, along with journalist Ken Jacobson and AlterNet’s Lynn Parramore, will examine the foundations, history and purpose of the corporation to answer this vital question: How can the public take control of the business corporation and make it work for the real economy?

For the last four decades, U.S. corporations have been sinking our economy through the off-shoring of jobs, the squeezing of wages, and a magician’s hat full of bluffs and tricks designed to extort subsidies and sweetheart deals from local and state governments that often result in mass layoffs and empty treasuries.

We keep hearing that corporations would put Americans back to work if they could just get rid of all those pesky encumbrances – things like taxes, safety regulations, and unions. But what happens when we buy that line? The more we let the corporations run wild, the worse things get for the 99 percent, and the scarcer the solid jobs seem to be.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/154821/capitalism%27s_dirty_secret%3A_corporations_don%27t_create_jobs%2C_they_destroy_them/

[RKP5637]

1. K&R !!! n/t

[Sarah Ibarruri]

2. I've been saying this too, but every time there's always 1 capitalism lover who gets scared

reading these truths.

I think it all goes back to McCarthyist beliefs.

[malthaussen]

3. You ever watch the film "Modern Times?"

That "secret" has been out for about a century.

-- Mal

[Sarah Ibarruri]

6. Yes, but the propaganda to hide this, and fool our population is pervasive

And let's face it, Americans are not very clever when it comes to analyzing the reality that surrounds them.

[Vehl]

4. And Trickle down does not work

I for one an really gobsmacked to see republicans claim that Trickle down works. Human greed will ensure that whatever that trickles down will be just that...a trickle.

[Sarah Ibarruri]

5. These paragraphs in the article are pretty telling:

The U.S. Department of Commerce found that from 2000 to 2009, U.S. transnational corporations, which employ about 20 percent of all American workers, cut their domestic employment by 2.9 million even as they boosted their overseas workforce by 2.4 million. The result was an enormous loss of jobs nationally, as well as a net loss globally.

In the 1990s, these companies added more jobs at home than abroad. What changed? 1) The rise of India and China, with 37 percent of the world’s population, as hotspots for off-shoring; and 2) the availability of tens of millions of workers in these places, many with college degrees, to do the jobs previously done by American workers.

[malthaussen]

8. In another thread elsewhere today on DU

... someone posted a graph demonstrating that "low-wage" employment has shifted from the uneducated to the educated, which immediately raises the question, "and what are the people without diplomas and degrees doing now?" The answer, of course, is... starving.

-- Mal

[Sarah Ibarruri]

9. Exactly. But right wingnuts want to hide this truth at all costs. nt

[Agony]

7. Yup...