On June 1, 2012, Mark Landler writes in The New York Times:
“Stung by a new report showing that the nation’s job market is sputtering, President Obama made a new appeal Friday for Congress to enact measures to revive the economy, not only to shake the United States out of its torpor but to act as a buffer against storm clouds in Europe.
“In a speech on a factory floor here that mixed familiar proposals with a new sense of foreboding about the coming months, Mr. Obama said that “our economy is still facing some serious headwinds” from high gas prices and the financial crisis in Europe, which he said was “having an impact worldwide and is starting to cast a shadow on our own as well.”
“We’ve got a lot of work to do before we get to where we need to be,” Mr. Obama said to a friendly crowd at a Honeywell plant outside Minneapolis. “The economy is growing again, but it’s not growing as fast as we want it to grow.”
“Mr. Obama did not dwell on the unexpectedly bleak May jobs report showing a rise in unemployment and a net gain of only 69,000 jobs, trends that could pose a genuine threat to his re-election hopes. As he has in the past, he searched for a silver lining in the data, noting that the private sector had generated 4.3 million new jobs since the depths of the recession.
“But the president conceded that the pace of job creation was too slow, and he tempered expectations that it would pick up any time soon.”
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!
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/02/business/obama-turns-to-congress-for-jobs-help.html?ref=business
