The current congress has not merely practiced business-as-usual – but business-Far-More-Than-usual.
Congressional leaders have rammed through a blizzard of subsidies, favors, and giveaways for their corporate benefactors, cynically packaging these as benefits for the people. For example, two years ago congress loudly-ballyhooed a new program that sounded like something from the New Deal. It was named: “The American Jobs Creation Act.”
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Was it an actual jobs program? Of course not, Pollyanna! It was a multibillion-dollar tax giveaway to corporations that had been stashing their profits in tax havens so they could dodge paying their share of America’s upkeep. However, the corporate chieftains decided they needed to bring these profits home, so congress gave them a one-year tax holiday to repatriate the money.
To make it look good, congress promised that this gross giveaway would be used to build new factories and create jobs for America. However… congress’s “jobs” bill did not actually require the profiteers to create even a single job in exchange for getting the tax windfall.
So, rather than creating jobs, many corporate beneficiaries have been shedding them. The latest corporate flim-flammer to do so is Intel, the world’s largest chip maker. It hauled home $6.2 billion under the repatriation program and made a tax killing as a result of congress’s amnesty.
But, far from creating jobs, Intel announced last month that it was cutting some 10,000 of them from its workforce. It seems that its top executives have made a series of strategic blunders over the last decade, causing financial problems for Intel – and, once again, working stiffs will pay for management’s failures. The executives claimed that the firings were “essential to Intel becoming a more agile” company.
This is Jim Hightower saying… Oh, I’d say that Intel is already pretty agile. It picked taxpayers’ pockets while dumping 10 percent of its workers!
Sources:
“Cashing Their Chips,” New York Times, September 8, 2006.
“Intel to Cut Workforce by 10,500,” New York Times, September 6, 2006.
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