Blame the Economy on Welfare Queen General Electric

Blame the Economy on Welfare Queen General Electric
By John Ransom
6/14/2011


With data showing that the housing market has gone into reverse, another of Obama’s blue ribbon panels is about to report to the president on ways to get the U.S. economy going.

Heading up the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness is corporate welfare queen GE’s Jeffery Immelt.

Expect, then, Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness headed by Immelt to recommend more of the top-down central planning where Big Business, Big Labor and Big Government connive to divide up the jobs pie at the expense of the rest of us, the little guys.

The program will kind of be like Obamacare, only for our whole economy. The council is liitle more than a way-and-means commmittee for Obama's academic views of the economy. It will contain nothing new or notable.

Maybe they’ll let us all apply for a waiver now.

“General Electric Chief Executive Jeff Immelt and 25 other business, labor and academic leaders on Monday will present President Obama with five ‘fast-action steps,’” writes the Los Angeles Times, “to create 1 million jobs through such moves as increased worker training in advanced manufacturing skills and streamlined visa procedures to boost tourism spending.”

Amongst the recommendations, according to the LATimes (my comments in notes):

1) Develop training partnerships with community colleges and vocational schools to help fill what they said were more than 2 million job openings in advanced manufacturing in the United States. (Note: More pork barrel spending. This program is nothing new. It's already in existence. Note the Times use of “what they said were more than 2 million job openings.” I asked the National Association of Manufacturers to verify the 2 million job openings. They could not. It’s an estimate based on retirements over ten years, not jobs right now.)

2) Increase travel and tourism industry jobs by making it easier for foreigners to get visas to visit the United States. (Note: More illegal immigration.)

3) Streamline the federal permit process for construction and infrastructure projects. (Note: More high-speed trains and union transport jobs. This one’s for Richard Trumka.)

4) Make it easier for companies to obtain Small Business Administration funding. (Note: More too-big-to-fail loans)

5) Encourage retrofitting of commercial buildings to be more energy-efficient, creating additional construction jobs. (Note: More green jobs.)

Also on the council are labor leaders Richard L. Trumka of the AFL-CIO, Joseph T. Hansen of the UFCW, plus academic heavyweight Laura D'Andrea Tyson of UC Berkley. According to the White House, “Dr. Tyson is a chair for the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Gender Gap.”

I can almost feel the jobs rushing back into the country’s gender gap.

As I detailed in a previous column, Obamanauts Flunk Word Problem, the problem with the economy isn’t a lack of high-skilled workers; rather it’s a lack of jobs, especially in small business.

Corporate welfare queens like Immelt only make the problem worse.

As Townhall contributor David Malpass told Steve Forbes in a recent interview, “More and more, [CEOs] want to align their company’s interest with the government interest….[O]ne that comes to mind is General Electric, who’s been rather explicit that their strategy globally is to align their products with what governments need around the world.”

Can’t wait to see what happens when you get the government workers’ union and the government contractors together to come up with a plan to give us jobs. You can bet that the last thing on the minds of the C-level executives at G.E., American Express, Facebook and other conglomerates is competitiveness. Just like unions, big businesses tend to prefer closed shops.

The federal government is only too happy to oblige.

As Malpass observed about rationing in our credit markets, “We basically shifted from a price-based monetary policy, where companies could borrow if they were willing to pay what the bank asked, to more of a regulated or rationed credit policy.”

In short, the big guys come out on top, while the rest of us suffer.

We’re rationing healthcare, gas, food and, now, credit under Obama.

And soon with the super-high tech job training program Immelt and Obama will propose- you know, the one that teaches you how to work on high-speed trains?- we’ll be able to ration jobs too.

Right now Big Business, Big Labor and Big Government are dividing up the jobs pie.

And you better believe that when it comes to passing out the slices, you’re going to get the crumbs, if even that.

“The government… is designating through the Fed, very low interest rates. But only big guys can really get that,” says Malpass. “And so that’s transforming our country more and more into a corporatist state, aligned with the government interests.”

Obama promised that he’d transform our economy.

And he did.

Now in addition to too-big-to fail, we’ve got too-small-to succeed.

And good luck to you.
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To read another article by John Ransom, click here.