Robert Reich: America’s Economy will never recover

Companies have used the downturn to aggressively trim payrolls, making cuts they've been reluctant to make before. Outsourcing abroad has increased dramatically.

Companies have discovered that new software and computer technologies have made many workers in Asia and Latin America almost as productive as Americans, and that the Internet allows far more work to be efficiently moved to another country without loss of control.—Robert Reich

Robert Reich is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and former secretary of labor under President Clinton. In his article, The Jobs Picture Still Looks Bleak, he shows how corporate greed for low wages, low overhead and maximum profits led to decades of outsourcing of good paying middle class jobs to Asia, India and Latin America. (see article)

With fidelity to only the bottom line American Corporations left millions of Americans unemployed, underemployed or faced with working the same job while conceding benefits and wages just to stay employed.

As Corporations eye world markets that were once off limit Communist regimes, like China for instance, and as these regimes open to the idea of capitalism the two resources that corporations needed to survive are no longer exclusive to the United States of America. Those two things are consumers and workers.

These cost-cutting moves have allowed many companies to show profits notwithstanding relatively poor sales. Alcoa, for example, had $1.5 billion in cash at the end of last year, double what it had on hand at the end of 2008. It managed this largely by cutting 28,000 jobs, 32% of its work force. But for workers, there's no return. Those who have lost their jobs to foreign outsourcing or labor-replacing technologies are unlikely ever to get them back. And they have little hope of finding new jobs that pay as well.—Robert Reich

The change that America faces is the very real prospect that she has been forsaken by corporations.

The very same corporations that she has always protected by law and nurtured by tax breaks and benefits. American has protect corporations only to be left behind has her corporate babies mature into unappreciative ingrates who see new vistas in the over one billion people of China and the rest of the post communist world thus the outsourcing of the American economic infrastructure of jobs and consumerism to governments that were previously hostile to Capitalism.

The only way many of today's jobless are likely to retain their jobs or get new ones is by settling for much lower wages and benefits. The official unemployment numbers hide the extent to which American workers are already on this downward path. But if you look at income data you'll see the drop.

America will never be the same according to Mr. Reich. We are in a post American world. A world where American corporations have divested themselves of America, not completely only enough to make America more profitable for Corporate interest while corporations have made it less likely that the American people will ever again enjoy the standard of living that most Americans have become accustom to.

To which Mr. Reich ends his thesis by saying, “Americans will once again be employed, but they will also be back on the downward escalator of declining pay they rode before the Great Recession.”

Thus America will never recover its standard of living. According to the corporation plan we aren’t supposed too.