You may play with words all you want, but the discussion is not about the number of people employed but about the validity of the Republican claim of 'trickle down economy' creating jobs. THAT has been shown time and again to be a sham, but it is still being defended vigorously. 2005-2007 was an economic boom yet ExxonMobil shedded jobs and pocketed the profit. The economic downturn of 2008 did not noticeably increase the job loss.Tudamorf wrote:Really? On the graph it says ExxonMobil employs 80,000 people, and that's just one company.erianaiel wrote:Except that the graph at the beginning of this thread, and many many other studies show that they don't.Tudamorf wrote: Because those 3% are smarter than the other 97%, yet they give the 97% a job.
How many poor people do you know who employ 80,000 people?
This pattern holds for pretty much all big corporations. Their profits keep rising, whether during times of ecomic growth or recession, and the number of people they emply keeps dropping. When they even do create new jobs they generally do it overseas (e.g. GM which was saved from bankruptcy at greate expense with public money and which turned around and thanked the tax payer by closing more factories so they could be moved to countries where there were no pesky labour laws to protect workers from literally being worked to death).
Bush first, and Obama after him borrowed about a trillion dollar to shore up the various banks. Strangely enough the richest 0.1 percent of the population collectively saw their wealth increase by over half a trillion dollar in the past few years. While the rest of the population saw their income and wealth decrease and while a record number of americans became unemployed with little to no hope of finding gainfull employment. What news jobs there are do not pay enough to rise above the poverty line (and in some cases are barely rising above the break even point of costs to maintain the job).
So it is time we stop dancing around the issue and accept that the current economic system of the USA (and to a lesser extent in the rest of the western world) is a vast machinery that grinds the population into poverty by draining out all money of the people and transfers it to the overseas bankaccounts of the richest percent of the population. A group that increasingly becomes a separate class (i.e. no longer marries outside its own class, has no relation as equals outside its own class and has its own social institutions separate from the rest of country. They are not quite at the point of having separate education and land grants, but it is rapidly working on that as well).
Eri