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White House: Insource Jobs, Decrease Inequality
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Is it patriotic to ship America’s jobs overseas? President Obama doesn’t think so. He’s right, of course. We live in a globally connected world, but let’s face it: Home-grown corporations must first focus on their own back yards—a novel concept all to many, it seems.
Obama implicitly raised the question yesterday during his Insourcing American Jobs Forum, which featured representatives from more than a dozen large and small businesses that have made decisions to bring jobs to the United States and to increase their investments here.
Pointing to the CEOs in the room, Obama said they ”take pride in hiring people here in America, not just because it’s increasingly the right thing to do for their bottom line, but also because it’s the right thing to do for their workers and for our communities and for our country.
I don’t want America to be a nation that’s primarily known for financial speculation and racking up debt buying stuff from other nations. I want us to be known for making and selling products all over the world stamped with three proud words: “Made in America.” And we can make that happen.
I don’t want the next generation of manufacturing jobs taking root in countries like China or Germany. I want them taking root in places like Michigan and Ohio and Virginia and North Carolina. And that’s a race that America can win. That’s the race businesses like these will help us win.
In the coming weeks, the president will put forward new tax proposals to
reward companies that choose to invest in America.
Lack of job creation in industries that pay solid middle-class wages is in part behind our nation’s rising inquality, and today White House Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Alan Krueger addressed the issue in detail.
TPM’s Sahil Kapur says Krueger blamed inequality on economic policies “tilted to favor top earners—including income tax reforms (presumably during the Bush era) and the ‘drastic cut in the estate tax.’ Central to the message is that inequalities in the system are jeopardizing our tradition of equality of opportunity,” as Krueger put it.
“If we had a high degree of income mobility we would be less concerned about the degree of inequality in any given year. But we do not,” he argued. “Moreover, as inequality has increased, evidence suggests that year-to-year or generation-to-generation economic mobility has decreased.”
Applauding the White House Insourcing Forum, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka makes clear the connection between job outsourcing and the nation’s escalating inequality—according to the Congressional Budget Office, the top 1 percent saw their incomes skyrocket by 275 percent between 1979 and 2007, compared with 18 percent for the bottom 20 percent. Says Trumka:
For too long, the 1 percent have sought and received tax breaks that actually created subsidies for corporations exporting good American jobs overseas.
America’s workers are not looking for handouts, they are looking for a chance to work hard and apply their best in the world skills in order to provide their families a middle-class life.
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11 Comments
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Just a Question. AFL-CIO considers American workers MORE important than their counterparts across the Atlantic or Pacific?
I mean, doesn’t “insourcing” infer that workers in other countries will loose their jobs? This is NOT FAIR!!
KompisBoy,it is high time the U.S. takes care of it’s own diseases before we try and cure other countries.We are a great country and have proven how generous we are but it is time to fix ourselves first.
KlompisBoy, What Union Brat said is absolutely true.
There is nothing wrong with our country helping other societies above and beyond their country to achieve their Democracy and economic development, BUT NOT AT THE EXPENSE OF OUR OWN COUNTRY BY SHIPPING OUR COMMERCE AND OUR ECONOMY OUT TO THOSE OTHER COUNTRIES!
It is also wrong for O’Bam-ya and others to continue to patronize as prostitutes the Globalization conspiracy. The reason corporations are not Global is because they are chartered in the states or provinces where they are created, and that is their sole authority. I know I qualify “foreign” (as in out-of-state) corporations as a registered agent, however, the prime authorization comes from the initial incorporating state.
What has happened is that corporations have created non-legal but legally-empowered international commercial consortiums that operate in any country which will accept them. And that means these international commercial entities which exceed the authorities of mere corporations can exchange their assets and wealth between nations to hide their actual wealth and incomes from their incorporating governments. And that has resulted in the disloyal artificial competition between the societies of the countries within which the corporations are chartered and the lower-standard-of-living societies of the undeveloped countries within which the corporations are fleeing to hide their wealth and cheat their home country’s population and government of their prosperity.
That is exactly what Mal-Wart and Caterpiller and T-Mobile et. al. are doing.
Trumka and the rest of the AFL-CIO leadership is quick to knee bend and praise Obama everytime he even whispers something about American business providing jobs for Americans but the fact is that American business will only provide jobs for Americans when they are guaranteed a profit by Obama or any other Administration of this capitalist government. If that means continuing to utilize anti-labor laws like Taft-Hartley, Landum – Griffin, RICO or calling out the U.S. Coast Guard to escort a grain haulding ship up to and away from the docks in Longview, Washington.
Instead of clamouring “American Jobs for American Workers” the U.S. labor movement needs to be the champions of the immigrant popullation in this country and launch an organizing drive that organized the unorganized. As long as Trumka and his ilk grovel for the Democrats there will not be much chance of that.
Dump the pro-capitalist labor fakers. Build a fighting workers party, strugggle for a workers government, exporprate the capitalists.
Frisco Worker you have got that so wrong that you are pathetic, because you are being disloyal to the rest of us.
Immigrants, who are legal residents of our country, need to be inclusively amalagamated into our society, not made to be a special group. If they are or are to be U.S. natizens by legally entering our country, then legal immigrants need to be treated NOT as a separate class within our society but as an inclusive membership within our society.
And again, America is not a country, America is a vertical hemisphere almost 300 years older than our nation of United States -OF- America, we are only one country IN America. So let us get our perspective straight.
Yes, we do need US jobs for US natizens, we DO need to concentrate on that, and to penalize the transfer — actually outright abandonment of our country – of our US commerce to be RELOCATED in other countries as an ecaping abandonment of our country wherein these businesses were created and grew large enough to be able to abandon us.
Obama? take a look at the Obama cabinet: it’s a veritable annex of JP Morgan-Chase, Look at the GE presence who lay-off 20,000 US workers to export their jobs to the far-east. Obama is no friend of the worker and doesn’t care about US jobs. We need to find a Presidential candidate who represents the American Worker.
N.Y. Senator Calls For USA-Made Military Steel
Tue, 01/10/2012 – 1:38pm
ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP) — Sen. Charles Schumer of New York is calling on the Defense Department to restore the requirement that all steel used in military contracts be made in the United States.
Schumer is visiting Klein Steel in Rochester, N.Y. this morning. He says the military got all of its steel from domestic producers like Klein for 35 years until 2009, when the Defense Department dropped the made-in-the-USA requirement as demand soared due to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Please support senator Schumer’s bill.
http://www.manufacturing.net/news/2012/01/
There was a time when a non union built or foreign made automabile was not allowed in the parking lot of our local unions. There was once a time when the workers of America proudly exhibited union made work wear on construction sites. I can also remember a time when union brothers and sisters honored each other’s pickets and respected the rights of others. That time could be now. Pride in one’s work, and pride in one’s union go hand in hand. We the people are the ones responsible for the mess our country is in, and we the people can get us out of the mess we are in. We must elect people favorable to Labor, and those union members that helped elect our republican US House members must get right and vote Democrat.
You know, I really love that graph and one other from a while back in this News Blog. But Tulia, why didn’t you give a source for this graph? I presume it was the Congressional Budget Office ????
Note how the graph depicts with the 2007 numbers that the top 9% in the Highest Quintile make almost 55% of our nation’s income after taxes etc, whereas the 4th Quintile makes about 20%, the 3rd Quintile about 15%, the 2nd Quintile about 10%, and the lowest bottom Quintile madkes only about 5% which roughly rounds out to 105% total. But the portrayal is quite accurate for the facts of what the graph depicts, that it is the top 9% of our society who makes the most income to aggrandize their wealth.
As I have been saying, I am part of the 91%, NOT the 99% !!!! And this graph more closely depcits the statistics that I have been subscribing to.
Good point, Mr. Libris:
We neglected to so so.Yes, the source is the CBO.
“the top 1 percent saw their incomes skyrocket by 275 percent%
How many in the 1% made their money through government connections?
Getting elected or appointed seems to be the easiest way to get into the 1% club.