Blame The Wall Street Bankers And Corporate CEOs For The "Jobless" Recovery

Now that President Obama's "recovery summer" has fizzled and it's clear we are in for a "jobless" recovery, it is worth examining who bears the responsibility for this predicament -- near 10% unemployment (with millions more so discouraged they have given up looking for work and are not even counted anymore) despite a trillion-dollar stimulus. The manufacturing jobs which were once the backbone of the American economy and fueled the job growth that pulled America out of prior recessions just aren't here anymore. In the name of "free trade," millions of those jobs got shipped overseas to unregulated markets where cheap labor is abundant, environmental restrictions are lax and working conditions are abysmal -- making the costs of corporate production there much lower.

Who bears the responsibility for this structural impairment of the American economy? The Wall Street banks and the multinational corporations, along with those who have done their bidding in Washington for the past few decades are responsible. The Republican politicians that these financial interests own -- and the corporate Democrats they have "seduced" with campaign money -- have been their willing instruments. While millions of ordinary Americans cannot find a decent job and our nation's economy sputters, the Wall Street bankers still make gobs of money, the multinational corporations are as profitable as ever and their political friends in Washington sit on top of stuffed campaign coffers.

Capital is liquid. Without restrictions money flows to where it can earn the highest returns, regardless of any burden its flow inflicts on those left behind, or the hardship inflicted upon the humans who will toil to create the return on that newly placed capital. If a corporation can build a factory in a Third World country where workers are not organized, wages are low and the cost of worker safety and environmental protections are nil and still sell its products here and in other wealthy countries, it will do so. The executives who decide to take capital to remote locations suffer no personal hardship from the fact that a factory that could have been built in America won't be -- or a factory that was in America will be closed and replaced by a Third World site.

This is equally true of Wall Street bankers. It makes no difference to them if a factory in Iowa is closed and the lives of the well-paid workers there are destroyed so that their multinational corporate client can build a replacement factory in Bangladesh. The rapacious bankers pocket the same huge fees for raising the capital required to fund the replacement factory regardless of where it is built, the new workers are located or what happens to the American workers left in the dust. Over two million American manufacturing jobs have been lost to overseas sites in recent years. No one can count how many jobs that could have been created here have not been.

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