The Job Creators Strike Out

[Jefferson23]

November 23, 2011

By Thomas Frank

On September 15, House Speaker John Boehner announced that the nation’s “job creators” — a flattering euphemism for “business owners” — were on strike. This was the proximate cause of the nation’s unemployment woes, Boehner maintained. Until those business owners received the low-tax, deregulated world they wanted, they would continue to keep their wallets in their pockets.

Boehner is not the first to imagine a strike by society’s well-to-do, but he is certainly the first conservative political leader to make a formal statement on the matter. In times past, a “capital strike” was a thing to deplore, not something to be announced proudly with the obvious expectation that the world would promptly surrender to capital’s demands. But times have changed.

Herewith, a brief history of the capital strike.

There were two distinct “capital strikes” during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. The first, which is still referenced on the website of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s historical society, consisted of a decline in new stock and bond issues in the first years of the New Deal.

The second was a more general revolt of business interests, which were supposedly struggling to preserve laissez-faire political conditions by withdrawing investment from the economy in 1937, sabotaging the recovery and the chances of President Roosevelt. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes delivered a ferocious iteration of this theme in December of that year, warning that “the United States is to have its first general sit-down strike — not of labor, not of the American people — but of the sixty families and of the capital created by the whole American people of which the sixty families have obtained control.” Should Americans yield to the demands of the walkout, Ickes warned, “then the America that is to be will be a big-business Fascist America—an enslaved America.”

in full: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/11/hbc-90008323

[midnight]

1. The job creators don't sound like they got the message... The country

needs jobs... They picked an un-American time to picket... shame on these hustlers.... Time for our Govt. to bypass these fakes and implement the full employment act...

[geardaddy]

2. They're already keeping their wallets in there pockets re: jobs.

They shipped all the jobs overseas.

[RickFromMN]

3. Any corporation that can "blackmail" is too big and must be broken up.

We need to start with the banks that are too big to fail.

We need to fix any other corporation that is too big to fail.

If a corporation, that is too big to fail, wants to stay big,
it must accept regulation. It must be regulated like a utility.
Alternatively, it must accept being nationalized.

I don't know how we can do it,
but we have to break up, and prevent, interlocking dependencies between corporations.
A group of corporations should not be so interconnected they act like one corporation,
they prosper as one corporation, they fail as one corporation.