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Trumka Dissents from Jobs Council Report
The 72-page report, issued yesterday by the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, makes many solid suggestions for how to address our nation’s jobs crisis, says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. But Trumka says the fundamental focus is so flawed that, as a member of the council, he issued a dissent to the report. In sum, Trumka writes:
I believe the report downplays the need for a proactive role for the U.S. government in many of these areas; fails to address the significant additional revenues needed to address the challenges identified on an appropriate scale; and in many cases erroneously identifies the root causes of the underlying structural problems.
While agreeing with the report’s support for a vibrant and growing manufacturing sector, Trumka says the report does not address the fact that “our government’s own policies with respect to trade, taxes, and currency have created enormous competitive disadvantages for American-based producers.”
And while Trumka shares the report’s goal of attracting more investment and good jobs to the United States, he disagrees with its proposed reforms, which, he says, could instead result in providing tax subsidies for companies offshoring jobs while starving the government of the revenue it needs to create good jobs and upgrade infrastructure.
Trumka noted in his dissent that the 27-member council is ”simply too narrowly representative of our country to provide a balanced set of recommendations to the President in these critical areas.”
Primarily made up of corporate CEOs, the council supports reforming the U.S. regulatory system and reducing the statutory corporate tax as crucial to competitiveness. Trumka disagrees, saying empirical evidence does not “support the claim that significant net new job creation would result from such ‘reforms.’”
In short, says Trumka, the report fails to recognize that:
our country has become dominated by the interests of the wealthiest 1 percent at the expense of the remaining 99 percent. It turns out that a country run in the interests of the wealthiest 1 percent systematically underinvests in public goods; systematically silences, disempowers and underinvests in its workers; and in the end is less competitive and creates fewer jobs than a country that focuses on the interests of the 99 percent.
President Obama appointed the council in February 2011 to replace the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Its job is to offer “non-partisan advice” on how to strengthen the U.S. economy and ensure competitiveness while creating “jobs, opportunity and prosperity for the American people,” according to the executive order that created the panel.
Read Trumka’s full dissent here.
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8 Comments
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I would propose the following for the makeup of the council. Representatives of workers in all the major industries, small farmers, high school and college students, the unemployed, immigrants, Blacks and women in proportion to their percentage of the US working class, small farmers, and prisoners in proportion to the percentage of workers who find themselves incarcerated. Add a couple of lawyers, bankers and businessmen to the council of, say 500 workers. Their involvement should be proportional to their percentage of the population – 1 %, not proportional to the amount of wealth they have (30%), or the amount of political control they have (100%).
Everything that O’Bam-ya does is flawed, from his Open Doors homeless policy to his phony health plan to supporting the present anti-Democracy conspiracy act for apprehending U.S. natizens without any justification being required… O’Bam-ya is one big ball of twine in his lies and no substance in favor of serving the public’s better needs.
Did anyone expect O’Bam-ya to come out and say that technology and Globalization are the enemies to our domestic economy and to our diminishing employment opportunities? Of course not, O’Bam-ya is not a Democrat, he’s an infiltrator from The Establishment, hell-bent-for-leather in support of the tyranny that continues to lie to We The people so that The Establishment can continue to dismantle our Democracy and our society for commercial profit!
But there is a man, Jesse jackson Jr., who can work for us, all we need to do is to draft him for the 2012 Presidential Election before it is too late !!!!!
Hey Libris! When my friends spoke glowingly of Hillary I reminded them of how Clinton “triangulation” had been the core of all the ruin we’ve experianced and we didn’t need any more of that.
When they brought up Obama I reminded them that he taught at the conservative U of Chicago, the land of Milton Friedman and that he was a LAWYER and they don’t actually believe in much except money.
So, I held my nose and voted for him, but still was surprised when I saw how thouroughly he’d sold out and how the fix was in when he announced his “transition” committee that consisted of the same scumbags that had greased our slide into working class poverty! (Robert Rubin? Rahm Emmanuel?)
So I think a more appropriate reference for the Prez is Status Quobama because he is OWNED by the 1 % and is pretty much OK with what they want so long as it’s not enough to foment outright open REBELLION!
The fact that there was only one person on the council representing labor showed from the beginning that its conclusions would be flawed. It was a set-up and Trumka should have declined to even participate unless the panel included “workers in all the major industries, small farmers, high school and college students, the unemployed, immigrants, Blacks and women in proportion to their percentage of the US working class” as “occupy k street” suggested.
I’m sure there is an article in the archives here celebrating how great this jobs council would be and how wonderful the working class hero VP Biden is. This is what happens when the labor movement and unions keep supporting Democrats and make no real demands to have working class representation on all councils and commissions.
“Primarily made up of corporate CEOs…” That says it all right there.
In all these suggestions for councill composition, I see “immigrants.” Do we mean all of us as there is not an indigenous population in the Western Hemisphere. It just depends on the timeline at which one wishes to begin.
I can hardly see “immigrants” without wanting to place “illegal” in front of the word as the AFL/CIO, Democratic party and others seem to believe that all the intruders on the current time line should be represented. There are some 12 to 20 million illegal aliens in this country right now, taking jobs from the current (timeline) population.
There was a time when I objected to trying to form a third party, but as I see Bill Clinton holding hands with #41 I have come to realize that the only honest President we’ve had in recent years is Jimmy Carter and the next President we will have, probably stolen, will be Jeb Bush. (Have you, too, been noticing his name in the conversation as of late)?
Incidentally, I’ve been an IBEW member since the 1940s, a life-long Democrat, having served my apprenticeship as a precinct chair, county vice-chair, and state central committee member and an alternate delegate to the Democratic National Convention.
The Presidents Council on Jobs and competativeness sounds
like a commerical group for making profits.
The attack dogs on the far left want instant fixes to complicated issues, and the attack dogs on the extreme right(wrong) manipulate and twist facts and conjure up dirt to try to bring down the President. If it works (which it won’t), they would destroy everything in their path to achieve their self-serving goals. Republican greed, their religious and social extremism, and their far right(wrong) political extremism would swiftly mark the end of our Democracy, and the fall of the American Empire…reminiscent of the Roman Empire.
“Caveat emptor” “Buyer beware.” Vote in your own best interest.
OBAMA in 2012 with a filibuster-proof Democrat majority in both the House and Senate. Let Obama move America forward in a sane, fair, productive, unobstructed free and healthy environment where ALL men, ALL women, ALL children are special!