I wrote a comment in bubbanomics excellent diary Wall St to Dems: Don't Vote or the Country Gets It.
MinistryofTruth recommended that I turn the comment into a diary. So here you go:
The top corporations are sitting on $1.8 trillion and are refusing to hire. They claim it is because of the uncertainty coming from Washington. There is no uncertainty. Wall Street reform passed and so that uncertainty is over.
We have been told that capitalism seeks efficiency so that it is naive to expect corporations to hire in this environment, when it's more cost-effective to demand greater productivity from a smaller staff.
And yet:
WASHINGTON -- American companies experienced the largest drop in workplace productivity this spring in nearly four years and a rise in labor costs, suggesting businesses may no longer be able to squeeze more work out leaner staffs.
Productivity dropped at an annual rate of 1.8 percent in the April-to-June quarter, the Labor Department said Thursday. That's double the 0.9 percent decline originally reported a month ago.
http://www.wmur.com/...
So corporations were lavished with tax breaks and lax regulations for the last 30 years. They received a renewed commitment to fewer taxes for nearly a decade under Bush and a Republican congress. They were allowed to create dotcom, derivative and housing bubbles during all that time.
They were able to create Enron, Adelphia, Countrywide, MCI, Lehman Brothers and Bernie Madoff cooked books for decades before the country said enough.
But they say no it's not enough. They need more tax breaks. They need even less regulation. They claim the last 20 months have driven them into a near-Depression, even as this chart shows they are sitting on record profits, $1.8 trillion and workers doing the job of 2 or 3 people.
Corporate profits, which stood at $1.5 trillion in 2007, fell sharply to $1.26 trillion and essentially stagnated in 2009. But since the Obama presidency started, the trajectory in quarterly profits has reversed. Quarterly profits (reported at an annualized rate) rose from $1.18 trillion in the second quarter of 2009 to $1.42 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2009 to $1.64 trillion in the second quarter of 2010. In the second quarter of 2010, corporate profits were up 39.2 percent from the year-before quarter.
Corporate profits aren't just rising in absolute terms, they're rising in relative terms. Corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are back up to nearly record highs.
http://www.newsweek.com/...
You have the CEO of Intel claiming that it costs $1 billion for him to build a factory here and its because of that and President Obama's oppressive regulations that they refuse to innovate here.
But that doesn't explain why Intel laid off workers in the Philippines, Malaysia and Ireland. They gave you everything you wanted Intel.
They may not have gone as far as China, where they manufacture motherboards for you at Foxconn, the company where employees jump out of buildings and 13 workers have taken their lives because of the working conditions.
Apple, which relies on Foxconn for production of products including the Mac mini, iPod, iPad, and iPhone, isn't the only mega-tech brand to rely on the supplier.
Foxconn also produces Intel-branded motherboards for Intel; a variety of components for Dell and HP; motherboards for UK’s Zoostorm; PlayStation 2 and 3 for Sony; Wii for Nintendo; Xbox 360 for Microsoft; cell phones for Motorola; Amazon’s Kindle, and Cisco equipment.
snip
Employing a small city, its 800,000 workers live on two Foxconn campuses in Shenzhen, where they live and sleep in dormitories—about eight to ten per room, reports the New York Times. The monthly turnover rate is 5%, with 20,000 workers leaving each month.
At Foxconn’s Shenzhen complex, one anonymous worker outlined conditions that make its worker bees into drones: no conversation while working; supervisors routinely yell at employees; bathroom breaks of 10 minutes are permitted only every two hours.
snip
Concerned about any potential loss of revenue, Foxconn has installed netting around outdoor stairwells of all dormitories to prevent workers from jumping.
http://www.brandchannel.com/...
The other countries gave you enough of what you wanted and you still laid their workers off.
Corporations are as full of crap as a Christmas turkey and they are still manufacturing crises just as Enron did with their fake California energy crisis and the man-made derivative disaster that brought down the global economy.
The question is, will America reward these crooks in November, who are refusing to hire them or are they going to let them know that there are more of us than there are of them and if we cut off all demand, your supply is worth about as much crap as you are full of.