By Joseph J. Honick
There is a fascinating rumor making the rounds suggesting the very people condemning the president for low job production are helping to keep hiring low until the election.
It is no secret the major contributors to the Romney campaign are from big corporations or their massively financed stand-ins like the National Association of Manufacturers, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Koch Brothers, et al. are the loudest accusers of the President.
Oddly enough, these accusers are the same people who just as loudly claim the government cannot produce jobs; only the private sector does that.
What’s being whispered about election circles, however, is the idea that these same major actual and potential employers are inhibiting their own hiring to keep the President on the ropes. And why not? There is no hurry as they see it. Delays keep all sorts of financial commitments in check even as major government contracts keep refueling these big operations with taxpayer money. Certainly, the daily hundreds of millions in defense contracts that rollout of the Department of Defense alone have produced hundreds of thousands of taxpayer produced jobs for more than a decade.
A political strategy that keeps the damper on new or limited job production benefits all these industries because they know their heavy contributions could indeed produce a Republican victory in November and have made no secret of their support for candidate Mitt Romney.
Just as important, the Supreme Court decision that converted corporations into personhood changed forever how American citizens have to contend on an uneven field in almost all political conflicts.
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 50 (2010), is a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court, which held that the First Amendment prohibited the government from restricting independent political expenditures by corporations and unions.
The decision overruled Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990) and partially overruled McConnell v. Federal Election Commission (2003).[4] The Court, however, upheld requirements for public disclosure by sponsors of advertisements (BCRA §201 and §311). The case did not involve the federal ban on direct contributions from corporations or unions to candidate campaigns or political parties, which remain illegal in races for federal office.
In short, corporations could pump literally billions into politics as persons themselves without seeking any vote or other permission of stockholders. To be sure, labor unions possess much the same power, but there is little evidence memberships are in opposition to overall union politics. However those memberships may see things, there is no comparison to the economic impact of the major corporations that have profited hugely from government business for years and especially in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that seem to have no real end.
In Iraq alone, the international oil combines have reaped hundreds of billions of benefits from the efforts of NATO (mainly American) forces to rehabilitate the country’s oil fields.
So back to the current and unseemly campaign to control the most powerful piece of real estate in the entire world: the White House, a campaign in which the economy and mostly jobs have been the main focal points.
Republican strategists are said to have persuaded the beneficiaries of the Supreme Court decision to hold the line on hiring to maintain their effort to embarrass President Obama despite the impact on the unemployed and millions facing potential foreclosure on their homes.
What is just as confusing and discouraging has been the inability of the Democratic candidate and sitting world leader to deploy his own minions to strike back very publicly.
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Joseph J. Honick is
president of GMA International in Bainbridge Island, Wash. |