On June 1, 2012, Shaila Dewan writes in The New York Times:
“For a third year, the economic recovery in the United States is floundering, stoking fears of a global slowdown as the European crisis escalates.
“Last month, the nation’s employers added the fewest jobs in a year and the unemployment rate actually rose, the Labor Department reported Friday. May was not a fluke either. It was the third consecutive month of disappointing results.
“The weakening recovery is a serious vulnerability for President Obama as he faces re-election and it provides traction to his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, who says the administration has not done enough to strengthen the economy. Because Washington remains deeply divided over how best to stimulate growth, the report increases the pressure on the Federal Reserve to take further action on its own.”
Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich offers a plan of action steps based on borrowing at low rates to fund hiring of the unemployed and underemployed for a major physical infrastructure program to fix America. This is a good idea, even though it would create and even larger deficit, and no doubt the work is necessary. But realistically, once the physical infrastructure is addressed the amount of jobs will fall substantially, yet the physical improvements will last long-term. So, while the short-term produces ‘temporary” jobs, it is not the BIG CHANGE solution we need to empower ordinary Americans to earn a viable income and support the growing economy with demand for products and services long-term.
With such infrastructure proposals the one aspect that is never addressed is the contract nature of the infrastructure implementation. These are the companies that will receive the government contracts and actually employ the people. We need a requirement that to receive the contracts that the companies commit to broadening ownership of their companies among their employees as well as create jobs.
The BIG CHANGE that we need is a policy and program direction that deters further concentration of ownership of the future productive capital assets represented by the wealth holdings of our business corporations and companies. We need to empower ordinary Americans to acquire ownership in the future productive capital simultaneously with the growth of the economy with financial mechanisms that facilitate their acquisition out of the future earnings (future savings) generated by the investments––the same mechanisms used by the top 1 percent to finance their continued accumulation of ownership.
Until we acknowledge the concepts of binary economics––two factors of production (human and non-human)––we will continue to be stuck in one-factor labor worker thinking, which is not the path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice for the 99 percent in the face of tectonic shifts in the technologies of production in which there is an ever-accelerating shift to productive capital as the means of producing products and services, and thus a corresponding destruction or degradation of job opportunities.
We need to create real economic growth in the production of products and services, whose underlying productive capital means is financed to simultaneously broaden private, individual ownership among ALL Americans. The result will be far greater affluence for everyone and the creation of “real” job growth as the economy revs up to produce more as a result of simultaneous growth of consumer demand.
This should be the national GOAL agenda!
