Who Broke America's Job Machine?

Unemployment is the single greatest threat America now faces. Job growth, anemic before the recession, is now non-existent, and promises to be weak for years to come. Some blame foreign competition; others, a lack of investment. But in the current issue of the Washington Monthly, Barry C. Lynn and Phillip Longman point to a different culprit: corporate consolidation, brought on by decades of weak antitrust enforcement in Washington. Industries from banking to retail to microchips are now so dominated by a few big firms that small businesses -- the source of most new jobs -- have less and less opportunity to thrive, expand, and challenge the behemoths. The result is a less innovative and dynamic economy.

If this argument is right, then it's going to take a good deal more than tax breaks and stimulus spending to get America's jobs machine working again. It's going to require a federal government that will enforce the nation's antitrust laws, bring more competition back into markets, and unleash the creative energies of America's entrepreneurs.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Unemployment
• Employment
• Jobs
• Creation
• Destruction
• Monopoly
• Monopolies
• Antitrust
• Competition
• Lobbyists

[Mangina9000]

@emotionalinvalid Oil is in no danger of running out, it's the cost of getting it, the environmental challenges, water shortage, and the logistics of developing the sources that's the problem. We need to invest heavily in new infrastructure in the hundreds of billions of dollars no matter what energy path we take, and none of the solutions will be clean and easy.

[Mangina9000]

I wish you guys could hire me as a video tech. Somethin' was wrong with the codecs you used here, hence the motion delays desynching.

[crazyalcayne]

Great video!

[emotionalinvalid]

@emotionalinvalid why? because the gas and oil that powers the transportation across the world to deliver our necessities is going to run out any moment. Better start your own city states, localize food and necessary hard goods, and medicines manufacture locally. Or when the last drop of oil drops: civil unrest, neighbors killing each other for a crust of bread, a liter of gas, dieing of disease that old sulfa antibiotics could save you from death, mass human die off, etc.

[emotionalinvalid]

Better start re-localizing our economies now. Our global supply chains for basic necessities will just stop dead. The market knows nothing and cares nothing about humanity, community, society. Better re localize our basic necessities economy now. search Richard Heinberg(sp?), Julian Darley, Zeitgeist Addendum(video on u tube), post carbon institute, etc

[emotionalinvalid]

"Error try again" my asz. glitch or censorship?!

[jorgandar]

Great video. Sadly it only receives just over 1,000 views.... while lady gaga gets several million. its clear people wont start to wake up and demand change until they are starving in the street, homeless and jobless. It's only a matter of time though. :(

[eatandtravel]

tex,

The blue bloods are in control. Get a slice and deal with it.

[exenrontexas]

At 1:24m "The lobbying for the natural gas industry is pretty inept."

The largest natural gas producer in the US is Northern Natural Gas, a former part of ENRON, and now a part of Warren Buffett Berkshire Hathaway, the second wealthiest man in the world and the owner of Burlington Northern Railroad, the largest diesel user in the US after the US Navy.

[exenrontexas]

Benito Mussolini, the father of Italian fascism, said that fascism should more properly be called corporatism, where government exists for the sake of large corporation.

The Chicago school that they talk about came out of Leo Strauss the father of the NEOCONS. Strauss came to America on a Rockefeller grant arranged by Carl Schmitt who was the German lawyer for Fritz Thyssen, Prescott BUSH and...ADOLF HITLER. NEOCONS are fascists without the anti-semitism.