Obama’s Job Creation? Lower US Wages Below Mexico/China!

Obama is now promising jobs to American workers. But there is a COLOSSAL catch. Savaged wages and benefits.

Repeat: SAVAGED!!!

Exactly what the one percenters have been lusting after and now enjoy coming to fruition from a DEMOCRATIC President, of all creatures, who has managed to hoodwink the American citizenry into not seriously noticing. You put the rhetorical emphasis on JOBS .... yadda yadda yadda ... then who seeks more reality-troubling negative details as to how this will come about. Who seriously applies individual critical thinking in this hysterical climate of political gamesmanship and mass corporate disinformation?

Apparently our Democratic president thinks he can keep up the big lie beyond his election in November. Sadly, I wouldn't make book against that.

Obama’s plan is exactly the kind of plan Mitt Romney would implement. It’s not a lesser evil plan at all. It is just as evil as what the pro-corporatists Republicans quest after. Easier for Obama to slide it by, of course, given the fog of denial still enveloping an incredibly large percentage of the original 80 million who put him in office. Such a perfect front man for oligarchy. Enough betrayal mojo in him for a whole next term.

This from Obama about job promotion in his first official re-election campaign speech:

“American workers are becoming more efficient, companies are becoming more and more competitive, so for a lot of businesses, it’s now starting to make sense to bring jobs back home.”

Andre Damon of wsws explains what is behind Obama’s shameless “job creation” rhetoric:

By “efficiency,” Obama means nothing more than the increased exploitation of the American workforce as a result of the economic crisis. Even though the workforce has shrunk by millions of people during the recession, industrial output has surpassed 2007 levels.

This has been the policy of the Obama administration from the start. During the bailout of the auto industry, Obama made clear that he would provide the big three automakers with government funds if they imposed cuts to wages and benefits of autoworkers.

The lack of any meaningful measures to deal with the unemployment crisis is part of this program. Far from seeing unemployment as a social evil, the administration, together with the corporations it represents, has used mass unemployment to drive down wages, slash benefits, and impose workplace speedups.

As a result, corporate profits are at their highest levels in history, while the labor force participation rate is down to its lowest level since the 1980s.

Here we go again with the proverbial “jobless recovery”. Recovery for Obama’s corporate BFsF and not the American worker. Not even a molecule of pro-citizen consideration. No rising tide raises all boats in terms of trickle down profits sharing. The profits stopped trickling down beginning thirty years ago and Obama has no intention of restoring the flow. American workers are “efficient” enough now according to Obama, which translates to workers having been beaten down and desperate enough from the Bush/Obama regimes’ ongoing economic terrorism. “Efficient” meaning willing to work for non-living wages and crap or non-existent benefits. Corporate media and the rest of our corporate pimped out Congress have no problem with this screw-the-people jobs policy.

Obama is now effectively coaxing corporations to deign not to “outsource” for cheap labor in say Mexico or China since Obama is helping to arrange “cheap third world labor” for them domestically. What a guy! I mean, the corporatists already get VERY cheap labor domestically thanks to the scandalous ever-escalating exploitation of prisoners through privatization. The corporatists of course want more. Greed addicted and sociopathic. I suppose short of shoving all of us in prison to work for 23 cents or so an hour 24/7, they’ll settle for making us work for peanuts. Or in this case in the skillful hands of Barack, more like for the shells!

Obama spoke Tuesday at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at the State University of New York in Albany. His assuredly golden-tongued proposals according to Damon will do NOTHING to improve the lot of millions of unemployed people in the U.S.:

Three of Obama’s five proposals are simply tax handouts for businesses. One would create a ten percent income tax credit for companies that “create new jobs” in 2012, and the second would expand the current tax subsidy for “investments in clean energy manufacturing.”

Under the guise of helping homeowners facing foreclosures, Obama is proposing to “cut red tape in the mortgage market,” meaning further deregulation of the mortgage industry. This under conditions in which home prices continue to plummet, and hundreds of thousands of families are on the brink of foreclosure.

Only one of his proposals is not a hand-out to corporations. As such, it is predictably trivial: He called for a program that would put 20,000 military veterans to work on an environmental conservation program over five years and provide an “online training program” in “the fundamentals of small business ownership” for 10,000 veterans.

Obama also called for a government tax cut to corporations that “in-source” jobs to the United States. It would allow corporations to write off all of their costs for setting up production facilities in the US, plus provide a tax credit of 20 percent on investment in the country.

This is of a piece with Obama’s entire economic program, which has aimed to drive down wages to the point where workers in the United States can be exploited more cheaply than those in countries such as China and Mexico.

Damon concludes:

... Immediate measures must be taken to put people to work. This includes a multi-trillion dollar public works program to rebuild infrastructure and meet all the needs of a complex society.

The basic problem is the capitalist system itself. So long as the economy is run in the interests of private profit, and the financial elite exercises dictatorial control over economic and political life, the most basic rights of the working class, including the right to a job, cannot be addressed.

We are getting royally screwed as workers by Obama. As much as we probably would be getting screwed by Romney. But wiith Obama you get the rhetorical faux-caring flourishes.

Don’t call it lesser evil, fogged in rationalizers for Obama. It is so not. The knife may be going into our back from Obama not into our front as it would from the Romneys of this world, but it is sliding in to the same critical degree nonetheless!

[cross-posted on correntewire and open salon]