Faux-Jobs-Summit 6-13-11: Obama HEARTS Corporate CEOs

RE-POST from 6/19/11

Barry Grey’s “Obama promotes corporate profits in the name of job creation” is a depressing update on Obama’s recent Durham, North Carolina meeting with his “Jobs and Competitiveness Council.” The money paragraph:

The reality is that corporate America, with the support of the government, is using mass unemployment as a bludgeon to drive down wages, destroy working conditions and force workers to accept poverty wages and sweatshop conditions. The same process is unfolding internationally, as the bourgeoisie utilizes the crisis of its own making to destroy social gains won by the working class over more than a century of struggle.

May’s jobs report revealed the continuing jobs crisis in America.

So what is Obama doing? Reassuring the private sector fat cats that they are safe from regulation and that massive cuts to social spending is the way his regime will go.

Barry Grey’s attendance list for the summit:

That group included the CEOs of GE, Intel, Xerox, American Express, Southwest Airlines, DuPont, Eastman Kodak, Comcast, Facebook, and the banking giants Citigroup and UBS. It also included Obama’s longtime financial backer Penny Pritzker, a multi-millionaire Chicago real estate mogul, and Joseph T. Hansen, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, who is also on the council, did not attend the event.

Grey reports that Obama fawned: “I cannot think of a better group of people to help us tackle it [how to create jobs] than those who are sitting around this table.”

Apparently at their first meeting in March the very same CEOs and bankers demanded reductions on business regulations from Obama. Obsequious Obama to them this past Monday: “I took this very much to heart. So what we’ve done is to initiate a full-scale review not just of spending regulations, but actually looking back for the first time at all existing regulations.”

I’m thinking it is more than a little obvious Obama doesn’t care about jobs or the lack thereof for the citizenry, but is very, very, very busy securing support for the continuation of his own job come 2012 and for other prospects thereafter.

Obama concluded, “As Jeff [Immelt] said, ultimately job growth is going to be driven by the private sector.”

Time, sadly, for Robert Reich to give it up. His appeals to Obama for WPA- or CCC-type programs to rescue the American worker. The Obama cabal just doesn’t give a proverbial shit about the citizenry.

And speaking of Jeff Immelt, Grey reveals:

Council Chairman Immelt’s company, GE, is a case in point. It made a profit of $14.1 billion in 2010, and yet it paid no federal taxes. On the contrary, the government paid it $3.2 billion in tax credits.

Immelt himself saw his compensation double to $15 million. Meanwhile, GE earlier this year sought to impose a 25 percent pay cut on new-hires at its River Works plant in Lynn, Massachusetts as the price for keeping a section of the complex open. When the workers balked, GE finalized the facility’s closure.

Grey contends that when a shameless Obama met with LED factory workers in Durham, where the meeting took place, he proudly asserted that a new engineer-training program was to be launched for 10,000 citizens each year. To Mr. Grey the fact that nearly 14 million are unemployed made this grandstanding over such a comparatively modest number downright insulting.

Obama also boasted of a proposal to bring together community colleges and companies for high level training programs. Grey points out such hypocrisy during this time when Obama’s regime is assaulting public schools and its teachers. Grey goes on:

Obama also announced an utterly vague Better Buildings Initiative that will supposedly put construction workers back to work upgrading buildings for energy efficiency.

In a Wall Street Journal column published Monday, Jobs Council Chairman Immelt and American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault, another council member, listed deregulation and four other proposals which they said could generate 1 million jobs over two years. Even were this figure accurate, it would barely make a dent in an economy that needs to create 11 million jobs to make up for those lost combined with the normal growth in the labor force.

Entirely absent from Obama’s remarks was any acknowledgment of the social crisis and worsening human suffering in America. Words such as “poverty,” “foreclosure,” “homelessness” and “hunger” were not uttered.

White House officials who accompanied Obama were, if anything, even more transparent in their indifference toward the American people and servility toward big business. White House adviser and Chicago real estate multi-millionaire Valerie Jarrett said in a briefing with reporters: “We have had 15 straight months of private sector job creation and seven straight quarters of growth. We are moving in the right direction… There is broad agreement that the recovery will be driven by the private sector.”

Obama’s subservience and accessibility to the moneyed class is impressive. Grey:

The complete subordination of the Obama administration to Wall Street was further documented in an article published Monday by the New York Times on the feverish efforts of the White House to make amends with bankers and financiers alienated by the very minor restrictions contained in the financial regulatory bill passed last year. The campaign is being led by his chief of staff, William Daley, the former JPMorgan Chase executive Obama appointed last year to replace the outgoing Rahm Emanuel.

The article reported that Obama hosted a White House dinner last March for two dozen Wall Street executives, which was followed in April by back-to-back meetings of his 2012 reelection campaign manager with Wall Street donors in New York. This month Obama will travel to New York to host a dinner with bankers, hedge fund executives and private equity investors at the exclusive Upper East Side Manhattan restaurant Daniel.

Daniel is one of the 5 top 4-star restaurants in Manhattan according to the New York Times. Kinda puts a bit more salt in the wounds of the unemployed, dontchathink?

Obama may be representing the “Democratic Party” in the Fall of 2012. Don’t anyone try to convince me he is representing real, flesh and blood people other than his opportunistic self and that small but mighty circle of bloodsucking, fabulously wealthy cronies.

Where’s my vomit bucket?

[re-posted on correntewire and sacramento for democracy]