Posted on 05/31/2011 7:05:20 PM PDT by khnyny
To gaze upon the world of American corporations is to see a sunny place of terrific profits and princely bonuses. American businesses reported that third-quarter profits in 2010 rose at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion, the steepest annual surge since officials began tracking such matters 60 years ago. It was the seventh consecutive quarter in which corporate profits climbed.
Staring at such balance sheets, you might almost forget that much of the nation lives under slate-gray fiscal skies, a place of 9.4 percent unemployment and record levels of foreclosures and indebtedness.
And therein lies the enduring mystery of this Great Recession and Not So Great Recovery: Why have corporate profits (and that market thermometer, the Dow) spiked even as 15 million Americans remain mired in unemployment, a number without precedent since the Great Depression? Employment tends to lag a touch behind profit growth, but history offers few parallels to what is happening today.
“Usually the business cycle is a rising-and-falling, all-boats-together phenomenon,” noted J. Bradford DeLong, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a deputy assistant secretary for economic policy in the Clinton Treasury Department. “It’s quite a puzzle when you have this disjunction between profits on the one hand and unemployment.”
A search for answers leads in several directions. The bulls’ explanation, heard with more frequency these days, has the virtue of being straightforward: corporate profits are the economy’s pressure cooker, building and building toward an explosive burst that will lead to much hiring next year.
The December jobs numbers suggest that that moment has yet to arrive, as the nation added just 103,000 jobs, or less than the number needed to keep pace with population growth. The leisure industry and hospitals accounted for 83,000 jobs; large corporations added a tiny fraction.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Intersting. But since you delcare yourself a libertarian aren’t you of the idea that these corporations should be able to do as they please?
Do you go to bed at night dreaming of Ron Paul?
Well, so we can be green, don't you see. Maybe we can get China to pay some kind of tax, or something. Work on it.
Obama administration hands down rule limiting contract bidding to union shops
By Aleksandra Kulczuga - The Daily Caller Published: 3:28 AM 04/15/2010 |
It’s official — federal agencies can now require that contractors be unionized to bid on large federal construction projects. A ruling sent down by the White House on Tuesday finalized an Executive Order President Obama signed last year, which promotes the use of Project Labor Agreements (PLAs) on federal contracts. PLAs are pre-hire, collective-bargaining agreements with unions that establish terms of a large contract.
Supporters say PLAs ensure stability on large-scale projects by preventing strikes and delays. Economist Jared Bernstein blogged on the White House Middle Class Task Force Web site, “PLAs also help ensure compliance with laws and regulations governing workplace safety and health, equal employment opportunity and labor and employment standards.”
Critics argue they needlessly raise costs and are a handout to unions.
“Essentially the administration is picking winners and losers, and we have 25 percent unemployment in the construction industry,” said Ben Brubeck, director of labor and federal procurement at Associated Builders and Contractors, a construction trade organization.
More than 85 percent of the construction industry is not unionized. While the ruling is not a mandate, it encourages agencies to require union labor on any projects with more than $25 million in federal funding.
PLAs require that all contractors who want to bid pay union wages and benefits. They effectively prevent non-union shops from bidding.
“As a public works company we’re already required to pay a prevailing wage,” said Mark Compton, director of government affairs at American Infrastructure, a heavy construction company in Worcester, Pa. “It’s not an issue of us paying people less, the idea that you get away with paying employees less than federal wages is just inaccurate.”
Prevailing wage laws are set at the local level for employees in various industries. Employers have to provide certified payrolls for projects that have prevailing wage requirements.
“We work alongside unions a lot, they often subcontract to us — it’s not a matter of who is capable or not. We have a lot of respect for them and many contractors in the area choose to be union. Because our employees did not opt for union representation we are at a disadvantage,” Compton said.
American Infrastructure employs 1,500 people and says 80 percent of its contracts involved some level of state or federal funds.
Compton said PLAs stifle competition: “If it’s your home, would you rather have five bidding or two? I’m not here to tell you the unions aren’t qualified to do this work, we compete against them every day and sometimes they beat us and sometimes we beat them, but eliminating competition is discrimination.”
“PLAs raise costs — you’re looking at four schools for the price of five, or four bridges for the price of five,” he said.
“We have to go back to our employees, who are taxpayers, and tell them that they aren’t good enough to work on a project that is funded by their tax money,” said Compton. “Some of them have 10, 20, 30 years as a taxpaying employee of our company, and I have to tell them we can’t bid on these jobs now.”
There was not ONE of the Founders (not even Hamilton) who proposed unnecessary and destructive control of foreign trade such as you desire.
Hamilton’s “Report on Manufactures” proposed more federal involvement with the the development of the economy. That idea was roundly rejected by Congress and was never proposed again.
Once again your ignorance of history trips you up when you are not arguing with a dumbass. And it is obvious that your lack of knowledge extends to industrial organization since you want to punish the most successful and productive elements of our economy.
Bob, this is not a “free trade” project. Free trade is not traitorous.
I’m not sure what you are referring to, but Bush, sr. didn’t arrange for the coal to be traded to China, it just freed the Powder River Basin coal from EPA regulations and decertified it as a coal region.
I think you misdirected your post. I have been arguing with these turkeys who do not understand what free trade is and attempting to educate them regarding its virtues. They prefer crackpottery rather than reality.
No, I knew that I didn’t misdirect the post. I was replying to a direct post from him. He didn’t really make any sense, so I was just ignoring it.
Wise decision ;-)
Free Traitor, the Founders RATIFIED the Constitution, with the exact wording I posted.
You are manufacturing BS dear traitor, to promote your economy destroy global agenda.
You see the words exactly stated in the United States Constitution and YOU object!
YOU want to destroy the country and the Constitution. YOU oppose the United States Constitution and argue against it, free traitor.
There was no objection to any words in the Constitution. As I showed you the first Congresses refused to do much to regulate foreign trade since it was understood that the “regulation” was intended to be very light.
Here you are pretending that there was ANY desire to create a Big Government when anyone knowing anything about our founding knows very well that FEAR of government was the overwhelming principle of that day. Hamilton attempted to expand its powers over the economy by proposing a system of development using bounties and government subsidies. It was rejected by Congress.
So he created the Society for Promotion of Useful Industries, a private corporation, to do what Congress refused to do. Learn a little history.
So you believe our problem with free trade started with Reagan like hedgetrimmer and al...?
Yes as long as their interests support the betterment of the USA as they once did before globalization became their creed. The new breed of trans-national corporations interests will prostitute themselves to any nation on Earth that might make them more profits. The USA represents just another government to compromise.
Doesn't sound very libertarian to me. And who decides what activity does and does not support the betterment of the USA?
You? Libertarians? The government?
I'd define that as dictating.
Industry in the USA was killed by a cabal of traitorous elected officials who remain on the take from the international lobbyists who bought them off for peanuts, while destroying the greatest nation on Earth. Our decline had nothing to do with unions and regulations only politicians willing to sell out the security of our nation to banksters and Chinese Communists. They are traitors that deliberately gave away our nation to the Chinese at the expense of the people that they represent, just to get reelected.
The only reason to be in business is profit.
Huh - so that is corporate citizenship version 2011?
When corporations became international they lost the concept of patriotism and they went from an asset on our nation's balance sheet to one of liability. The CEOs... hungry for profits will now invest in China before the USA. Their efforts will make China more powerful than the USA. That makes said corporations more of an enemy than ally. That makes them subversives to our national interests because they are undermining our nation.
We regularly expect our fellow Americans to have a sense of patriotism and willing to give their lives in service to country, but we don't expect the international corporations that now have a bigger say in our elections based upon the anti-conservative recent Supreme Court ruling, to do the same?
Sorry it doesn't make any sense to me, for a USA business to put profits before nation. In WW2 they would have sent those types to a firing squad at Ft Leavenworth and called them traitors. They should start doing the same to the globalists that connive move our economy offshore.
My father started the business durring the depression and always ran it for profit, never for anything else!!!
There is no other reason to be in business!
Business should be run for profit, with American values and as a proud USA company. We didn’t win WW2 through multi-national corporations that put profits before nation.
We’d never win another WW2 based upon our culture of greed first, gimme more now, and country is irrelevant.
Under Mr. Obama's plan, "patriot employers" qualify for a 1% tax credit on their profits. To finance this tax break, American companies with subsidiaries abroad would have to pay the U.S. corporate tax on profits earned abroad, rather than the corporate tax of the host country where they are earned. Since the U.S. corporate tax rate is 35%, while most of the world has a lower rate, this amounts to a big tax increase on earnings owned abroad. Put another way, U.S. companies would suddenly have to pay a higher tax rate than their Chinese, Japanese and European competitors. According to research by Peter Merrill, an international tax expert at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, this change would "raise the cost of capital of U.S. multinationals and cause them to lose market share to foreign rivals." Apparently Mr. Obama believes that by making U.S. companies less profitable and less competitive world-wide, they will somehow be able to create more jobs in America. He has it backwards: The offshore activities of U.S. companies tend to increase rather than reduce domestic business. A 2005 National Bureau of Economic Research study by economists from Harvard and the University of Michigan found that more foreign investment by U.S. companies leads to greater domestic investment, and that U.S. firms' hiring of more offshore workers is positively, not negatively, associated with the number of American workers they hire. That's in part because often what is produced overseas by subsidiaries are component parts to final, higher-value-added products manufactured here. Obama's 'Patriot' Act http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120407121574294919.html
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