Automation Has Nothing to Do With It

I am glad this article sees through the latest neoliberal meme which states that all of these robots and technology are eliminating instead of changing entire industries, and that there isn't one goddamned thing we can do about the destruction of jobs.

Of course this meme is a lie; there has always been automation, and jobs have changed and new occupations have sprung up to take the place of any occupations that have been eliminated. The problem we have now isn't with robots or with workers not having the "skills" necessary for the jobs of the 21st century--a common neoliberal lie spewed about--but with Washington policies which have encouraged the transfer of wealth upward and have also encouraged the offshoring of literally millions of jobs with ruinous trade policies. "Technology" has nothing to do with this--bribery and corruption of politicians and their slavish devotion to the crackpot economic theories of Uncle Miltie Friedman have everything to do with the mess we are in.

Furthermore, the corporate crooks aren't investing in research and development; they are pocketing the profits for themselves.

It's so obvious why this meme is cropping up all over the place. It's anything to divert attention to what needs to be done, and that's to reverse thirty years of ruinous economic policies and for the federal government to jumpstart the economy by scrapping those trade policies and create jobs programs that would stimulate demand for goods and services.

To repeat, automation is not the problem. The three-decades long erosion of middle-class jobs in the United States is the result of, as stated earlier, permanent plant closings, layoffs of older employees, and the globalization of employment – none of which have been the result of automation. In the process, many US industrial corporations have become very profitable (for now, but by no means forever). The question that needs to be asked is why US corporations are failing to reinvest these profits in new products and processes that can create large numbers of new high value-added employment opportunities in the United States.

The problem lies in the ideology that corporations should be governed to “maximize shareholder value,” which became prevalent in boardrooms and business schools in the 1980s, and has become totally dominant since. In the name of shareholder value over the decade 2001-2010, the 500 corporations in the S&P 500 Index (representing about 75 percent of US stock-market capitalization) expended not only 40 percent of their profits on cash dividends – the normal mode of rewarding shareholders – but also another 54 percent on stock buybacks, the purpose of which is to give a manipulative boost to a company’s own stock price. Large established companies did hardly any buybacks in the early 1980s. Over the past decade, buybacks by S&P 500 companies totaled about $3 trillion, which has left scant corporate resources for investment in innovation and high-value-added job creation.