U.S. Senator: Keep creating those jobs in Asia

'Gotta keep creating jobs in China!'

This silly op-ed written by a member of Wyoming Sen. John Barasso's staff just jumped out at us. It's the old "regulation hurts job creation" nonsense. Predatory CEOs are pushing it because they want to keep on plundering American workers.

What we loved about the piece was "Barasso" citing Steve Jobs and Jamie Dimon as "job creators:"

From our newest entrepreneurs to titans of industry like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase and Steve Jobs, America’s job creators have made it clear that the president’s policies are making it harder and more expensive to hire workers. (Just wondering: Does Barrasso or his staffer know that Steve Jobs, um, died?) 

Here's where Apple creates jobs: Asia. Hundreds of thousands of workers -- including child laborers -- make iPods, iPads and iPhones in FoxConn's silicon sweatshops. In China. There are fewer American workers making computers today than there were when the first personal computer was put together in 1975.

JP Morgan, like most big banks, isn't doing such a great job of creating jobs for Americans either. It's sitting on its assets. When it does create jobs, it looks to India. As ABC News reported in 2009,

Michele Brown ... lives in hard-hit Florida, spent 20 years in the real estate business and recently had her days as a nanny cut back after her boss had his own hours reduced. 

But nothing prepared her for what happened one day when she called a toll-free line to inquire about her food stamps. 

"The woman who answered the phone -- it's not like she wasn't nice or anything -- but it was kind of evident that she wasn't in the States," Brown said. 

It turns out the woman was at a JP Morgan Chase call center in India.

This is what creates jobs, according to Nick Hanauer, founder of aQuantive:

...a healthy economic ecosystem surrounding the company, which starts with the company's customers. 

The company's customers buy the company's products, which, in turn, creates the need for the employees to produce, sell, and service those products. If those customers go broke, the demand for the company's products will collapse. And the jobs will disappear, regardless of what the entrepreneur does.

Today's Edition of Lies from Scott Walker

Wisconsin Koch whore Gov. Scott Walker says his budget helped schools:

Even Fox News says it did not.

Walker Republicans say Democrats are intimidating voters.

This video shows Republicans doing the intimidation.

So ends today's edition of "Lies from Scott Walker."

Today's Teamster News 12.13.11

Oakland port workers stay home as protesters rally  San Francisco Chronicle   ...Despite calls to desist from Oakland politicians and union officials, Occupy protesters succeeded Monday night in shutting down operations at the Port of Oakland for the second time in less than two months...
No Draghi Ex Machina  New York Times   ...So last week European leaders announced a plan that, on the face of it, was pure nonsense...
Long-term jobless eye bleak future as benefits end  Reuters   ...nearly 7 million Americans (are) receiving jobless benefits under seven different state and federal programs. Around a quarter of those will fall off the rolls in January if Congress does not renew an extended benefits program that expires at year end...
NPR Reports that Debtors' Prisons Are Alive and Well  Credit Slips   ...Illinois debtor Robin Sanders in Illinois ... was stopped by police for a loud muffler but taken directly to jail on an arrest warrant for failure to appear at a hearing on an unpaid medical bill, all in a lawsuit she was unaware of...
Walker Announces Tax Credits to Assist Company That Hopes to Create “at least 3 new jobs”  blue cheddar   ...Scott Walker today announced that WEDC, a public/private corporation created by Walker to hand out taxpayer money to private companies, has approved two tax credits for investors in a company called OnScreenBrands, Inc., of Milwaukee. According to an announcement on the WEDC web site:  “OnScreenBrands has projected creating at least three new jobs in Milwaukee over the next three years...”
Radio ad: 'Liu wants to give Wall Street bankers your money'  Capital New York   ...Teamsters Local 237 President Gregory Floyd, who is one of many people considering running for mayor, is out with a radio commercial criticizing Comptroller John Liu's plan to merge the management of five city pensions...

Today's Edition of Lies from Scott Walker

During his campaign for governor of Wisconsin, Koch whore Scott Walker said,

I’ll get government out of the way and lower the tax burden so Wisconsin business owners and factories can create 250,000 jobs and 10,000 businesses in our state by 2015.

Not gonna happen.

He said recall petitioners are being paid.

They aren't.

So ends today's edition of "Lies from Scott Walker."

Port drivers have this to say about Occupy the Ports

In NY, an Occupy the Ports news conference was held with a translator who speaks Squid.

Today the Occupy movement is trying to shut down West Coast ports to show how a Goldman Sachs company exploits port workers and destroys the environment. Goldman Sachs, aka "the great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity," owns a stake in the largest cargo terminal operator in the U.S.

According to the twittersphere, the ports of Oakland, Long Beach and Portland are at a standstill. Neither the Teamsters nor the longshoremen's unions officially support the direct action. Four port drivers, in an open letter, explained how they feel about the shutdown:

It may be tempting for media to ask questions about whether we support a shutdown, but there are no easy answers. Instead, we ask you, are you willing to listen and learn why a one-word response is impossible?
...
Poverty and pollution are like a plague at the ports. ...the market is run by con artists. The companies we work for call us independent contractors, as if we were our own bosses, but they boss us around. ... We cannot negotiate our rates. (Usually we are not allowed to even see them.) We are paid by the load, not by the hour. So when we sit in those long lines at the terminals, or if we are stuck in traffic, we become volunteers who basically donate our time to the trucking and shipping companies. That’s the nice way to put it. We have all heard the words “modern-day slaves” at the lunch stops. 

There are no restrooms for drivers. We keep empty bottles in our cabs. Plastic bags too. We feel like dogs. An Oakland driver was recently banned from the terminal because he was spied relieving himself behind a container. Neither the port, nor the terminal operators or anyone in the industry thinks it is their responsibility to provide humane and hygienic facilities for us. It is absolutely horrible for drivers who are women, who risk infection when they try to hold it until they can find a place to go. 

The companies demand we cut corners to compete. It makes our roads less safe. When we try to blow the whistle about skipped inspections, faulty equipment, or falsified logs, then we are “starved out.” That means we are either fired outright, or more likely, we never get dispatched to haul a load again.

Even the few of us who are hired as legitimate employees are routinely denied our legal rights under this system. Just ask our co-workers who ... were axed after wearing Teamster T-shirts to work. They were protesting the lack of access to clean, indoor restrooms with running water. 

...The brothers and sisters of the Teamsters have our backs. They help us make our voices heard. But we need your help too so we can achieve the day where we raise our fists and together declare: “No one could stop us from forming a union.” 

In solidarity, 

Leonardo Mejia
SSA Marine/Shippers Transport Express
Port of Long Beach, 10-year driver

Yemane Berhane
Ports of Seattle & Tacoma
6-year port driver 

Xiomara Perez
Toll Group
Port of Los Angeles, 8-year driver 

Abdul Khan
Port of Oakland
7-year port driver

Sign here to end corporate personhood

Sen. Bernie Sanders last week filed a constitutional amendment to take away corporate personhood and prevent corporations from making campaign contributions. You can support the measure by signing this petition here.

Economic Populist offers this observation:

...Assigning human rights to a corporation is an oxymoron. Corporations are simply business entities from which to maximize profits, or in real human terms, sociopaths. They have no loyalty, no sense of nationality, and especially no morality and ethics. Clearly corporations are not human beings and therefore should not be afforded the rights of human beings. Corporations also have way more money and power than single individuals for the most part. 

...Constitutional amendments are tough to pass, but once they are, except for prohibition, have not been undone, which is why we're seeing constitutional amendments instead of regular legislative bills appear in Congress. They know, corporate lobbyists will undo anything but a constitutional amendment. It does take a Populist ground swell to get a constitutional amendment passed and ratified by the States.

EP makes another important point:

Notice when it comes to anyone or anything which challenges corporate power, you....never hear about it? That's how powerful corporations have become, they literally can black out candidates and news from most media.

Banks: The new dictators?

Graphic by Tracy Knauss

Two angry writers argue that democracy is dying at the hands of greedy bankers. It's pretty strong  stuff.

Michael Hudson, writing about the European debt crisis in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, calls it war:

The kind of warfare now engulfing Europe is thus more than just economic in scope. It threatens to become a historic dividing line between the past half-century’s epoch of hope and technological potential to a new era of polarization as a financial oligarchy replaces democratic governments and reduces populations to debt peonage.

He compares the banks' attack on the people of Europe to corporate raiders:

Public-sector labor is to be privatized – and de-unionized, while Social Security, pension plans and health insurance are scaled back.

This is the basic playbook that corporate raiders follow when they empty out corporate pension plans to pay their financial backers in leveraged buyouts. It also is how the former Soviet Union’s economy was privatized after 1991, transferring public assets into the hands of kleptocrats, who worked with Western investment bankers to make the Russian and other stock exchanges the darlings of the global financial markets.

Robert Fisk at the Independent takes the same argument to the Middle East -- and points out that the Arab Spring and Western protests are about democracy:

What drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then their millions on to the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal to accept that the local family-ruled dictators actually owned their countries. The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and the Gaddafis and the kings and emirs of the Gulf (and Jordan) and the Assads all believed that they had property rights to their entire nations...

And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are indeed against Big Business – a perfectly justified cause – and against "governments"... they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties – which then hand their democratic mandate and people's power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of "experts" from America's top universities and "think tanks", who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.

The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. ... Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people's wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine. 

We just call it the War on Workers.