Republicans Throw American Workers Under The Bus

The Republicans have once again proven that they simply don't care about American workers.   Their unanimous action in the United States Senate yesterday shows that.   President Obama and the Democrats were trying to make good on a campaign promise to stop the outsourcing of good jobs to other countries, but the Republicans refused to invoke cloture and limit debate on the bill so it could come up for a vote on final approval.

A few decades ago, the U.S. Congress passed a bad bill.   It gave tax cut benefits to companies that created jobs in other countries.   At the time, it was considered a good thing to allow American corporations to grow and prosper by taking advantage of poverty wages being paid in other countries.   Incredibly, the congressmen/women either could not see or didn't care about the effect this would have on American workers.

The effect was catastrophic.   It almost immediately had the effect of depressing wages for American workers.   Companies now had the advantage of being able to threaten workers who wanted their wages to keep up with inflation -- they could threaten to move those jobs to other countries if American workers didn't accept wages that feel further behind in buying power each year.   For those who refused to accept the declining buying power, they watched their jobs go overseas.

This depression of American workers' wages, along with the outsourced jobs that allowed corporations to bank ever growing profits, created over the years a division of wealth and income between the rich and the rest of America that had not been seen since the "Roaring 20s".   That vastly uneven division of wealth and income created the conditions that started the Great Depression, and today's equally uneven distribution is the reason the current deep recession happened and continues to hurt millions of Americans.

While the rich corporations and Wall Street bankers are doing well in the current economic mess (thanks to a huge bailout by American taxpayers), the loss of 12 to 15 million jobs in this recession continues to plague the rest of America.   America will not climb out of this recession until the uneven wealth and income distribution is brought into a much more manageable ratio, and many of the jobs lost are replaced by new good-paying jobs.

Even an idiot can understand that this country can no longer afford to ship good-paying jobs overseas and replace them with minimum wage jobs (or no jobs at all).   The Democrats understand that.   The bill they offered would not outlaw outsourcing, but it would remove the tax benefits of doing so, and hopefully convince some American companies to create new jobs in this country instead of some low-wage country.

But the Republicans long ago sold out to the giant corporations (and the huge donations these corporations funnel into their campaign chests).   They have decided that fattening the bank accounts of their corporate masters is more important than saving or creating jobs for American workers.   This policy of theirs is short-sighted and will result in the continuation of the economic recession for many more years, but they don't seem to care.

They are claiming that the bill would hurt job creation by making American corporations pay more in taxes.   What they won't tell you is that the jobs they are talking about are jobs to be created in foreign countries, and the American corporations can avoid the higher taxes by creating jobs in this country.

American workers need to remember this when they go to the polls to vote in November.   It is the Republicans who have thrown them under the bus.   It is the Republicans who want to continue the failed "trickle down" economic policies of Reagan and Bush.   It is the Republicans who think the status quo is acceptable.