Business guru Tom Peters once observed, “You can’t shrink your way to greatness.” Clearly Tom left his tri-cornered hat at home, because that’s not how today’s Tea Party operates.

In the recent debt ceiling negotiations budget cuts were the sole strategy to address what ails our nation. Raising taxes? Are you crazy? Questioning entitlement programs? Downright unpatriotic. Nope, to the Tea Party there is only one mantra, cut today, cut tomorrow and then put together a commission to cut in the future.

Unfortunately these “patriots” chose the wrong party to affiliate themselves with. They’re much more like the Donner Party than the folks who threw tea into the Boston Harbor to protest a British tax on tea in 1773.

To refresh your memory, the Donner party was a group of 87 pioneers who set out for California in 1846. Choosing a new route to follow, the Hastings Cutoff, they got trapped by a huge early snowstorm near Donner Lake, Utah. Food supplies ran very low and some of the members chose to munch on other pioneers to survive, resulting in only about half of the group reaching California. Yep, the other “C” word, cannibalism.

Cannibalism? Isn’t that a bit strong to describe efforts to get the Federal debt under control? Which leads to another “C” word, Clinton.

According to FactCheck.org, Clinton’s combination of spending restraints and tax increases, which fell almost exclusively on upper-income taxpayers, produced a surplus of $1.9 billion in 1999 and $86.4 billion in fiscal 2000. Please note that I used the more conservative calculations that eliminated the Social Security surplus, which tended to hide the size of the actual Federal deficit. Contrary to popular belief, this short-lived bout of rational economics was not the motivation for Prince’s anthem “Party like it’s 1999.”

As a best-selling business author and award-winning internationally syndicated columnist, I’m a business guy, not a political pundit. But watching my beloved country suddenly saddled with a AA+ bond rating and trillions lost in stock markets worldwide, I couldn’t sit on the sidelines and watch pseudo-patriots drive my country into the ground any longer.

Before looking at any solutions, let’s reflect on the Tea Party’s roots and the fateful day of February 19, 2009. That afternoon, from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, CNBC’s Rich Santelli criticized the government plan to refinance mortgages. He called it “promoting bad behavior” by “subsidizing losers’ mortgages.” Santelli suggested holding a tea party for traders to gather and dump the derivatives in the Chicago River on July 1st.

Yes, when I think of populism and fighting for the little guy my mind immediately thinks of the , CNBC and how losers’ mortgages are what really drove our economy off the cliff during the late ‘aughts. Personally if anything should have been tossed into the Chicago River on that day I think it should have been executives from AIG, Washington Mutual, Bank of America, etc. who profited from those bad loans and who were the real source of any bad behavior.

Watching the world’s economy teetering on the edge, Treasury Secretary Paulson proved that my grandfather’s admonition “In America we have socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest of us,” was right on target. Instead of investing in keeping people in their homes, we tossed money willy-nilly at banks. At least Goldman Sachs, Paulson’s former employer, was able to get paid dollar for dollar by AIG on the money it was owed due to this bailout. And don’t even get me started on the “Let them eat cake” Bush tax cuts.

I’ve got my MBA and have served as an adjunct professor to MBA students. No, I’m not a credit-swap-smoke-and-mirrors-MBA. I’m a put-everything-on-the-table-MBA who believes that you have to look at all your options before you can solve a business problem as complicated as the Federal deficit.

Sure budget cuts must be a part of any solution moving forward. But revenue increases and entitlement programs must also be in the mix. Heck, forget Afghanistan and Iraq, we might want to consider closing the book on World War II and finally bring our troops home from Japan and Germany. Just sayin’.

Any attempt to address our budget shortfall by just cutting budgets is like trying to treat a case of the measles by cutting off the patient’s hand.

According to Wikipedia, some commentators claim that the “tea” in Tea Party stands for “taxed enough already.” Comedian Lewis Black sums up my feeling about taxes when he asked the question, “Why don’t we ever see paying our taxes as being patriotic?” If you really love America, shouldn’t you help to support it to keep it strong?

We can continue down the Donner Party, oops Tea Party, route and cannibalize our future. Or we can put everything on the table and actually return to the days of a balanced budget. Sure it will be painful, any effort to remove sloth requires some work to achieve.

And the next time you hear someone say that something is off the table in any budget negotiations, let’s join together to toss them off the table, because the Donner Party approach is nothing but a dead end.

About the Author: Bob Rosner is the author of the Wall Street Journal and Amazon best-seller, the Boss’s Survival Guide, and an award-winning journalist who writes the internationally syndicated Workplace911 column. He received a B in his MBA Finance course, which he believes qualified him to write this article.

As the new year begins, it’s as good a time as any to look at a topic almost completely ignored by mainstream media: how Native American people are faring in the U.S. labor market. The economy and its paucity of jobs dominated U.S. headlines throughout 2010, but news media overlooked the particularly difficult experiences of native peoples.

In late November, the nonpartisan think tank Economic Policy Institute released a report looking at unemployment figures among American Indians. According to Algernon Austin of EPI, unemployment in Indian Country is bleak.

For instance, the national unemployment rate among Native people spiked from 7.7 percent in the first half of 2007 to 15.2 percent in the first half of 2010. Whites experienced a 4.1 percent and 9.1 percent unemployment rate respectively, in the same time period. In his brief “Different Race, Different Recession: American Indian Unemployment in 2010,” Austin writes that:

We find some of the largest disparities in employment between American Indians and whites in Alaska, the Northern Plains, and the Southwest.

These are also the regions of the country where the ratio of the Native to non-Native population is among the highest.

The unemployment numbers are different from those released by the Bureau of Indian Affairs Labor Force Report, whose sample and methodology is different than that used by EPI. The BIA bases its numbers on the American Indian and Alaska Native population that lives on or near the reservation and are eligible for BIA-funded services.

This population, however, according to Austin, is only about one-third of the total American Indian and Alaska Native population.

Austin’s report, based on statistics from Current Population Survey (CPS) data, uses the total American Indian and Alaska Native population, including biracial individuals. Here are his research’s key findings:

• By the first half of 2010, the unemployment rate for Alaska Natives jumped 6.3 percentage points to 21.3%—the highest regional unemployment rate for American Indians.
• Since the start of the recession, American Indians in the Midwest experienced the greatest increase in unemployment, growing by 10.3 percentage points to 19.3%.
• By the first half of this year, slightly more than half—51.5%—of American Indians nationally were working, down from 58.3% in the first half of 2007.
• In the first half of this year, only 44% of American Indians in the Northern Plains were working, the worst employment rate for Native Americans regionally.
• The employment situation is the worst for American Indians in some of the same regions where it is best for whites: Alaska and the Northern Plains.

This year, President Obama made efforts to work toward building a better relationship with native people, ordering his administration to seek the advice of native people on the best ways that federal programs and policies could serve them.

In 2010, the Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration’s Indian and Native American Program awarded $53 million to 178 grantees to provide employment and training services geared toward unemployed, under-employed and low-income Native American adults.

And it awarded an additional $13.8 million in grants to 78 tribes, tribal consortiums, and tribal nonprofit organizations to offer summer employment and training activities for native youth to offer basic and occupational skills training and job placement assistance.

As outlined in the 2010 White House Tribal Nations Conference Progress Report, Obama requested $55 million in his 2011 fiscal year budget for the Indian and Native American Program, which grants funding to tribes and Native American nonprofits to provide employment and training services to unemployed and low-income Native people.

That’s a 4-percent increase over fiscal year 2010. Whether it will be approved or not is another matter, of course.

This article was originally published on Working In These Times.

About The Author: Rose Arrieta was born and raised in Los Angeles. She has worked at three dailies and two television stations. She currently lives in San Francisco, where she is editor of the Bay Area’s independent community bilingual biweekly El Tecolote. She can be reached at rmarrieta@inthesetimes.com.

The new year started with better but not great news on the jobs front. The latest figures from the U.S. Department of Labor released this morning show that unemployment dropped from 9.8 percent in November to 9.4 percent in December.

Even with the expected holiday season hires, only 103,000 net new jobs were created last month. Economists had predicted 150,000 to 175,000 new jobs for December. The number of jobs created is a drop from November, when 151,000 jobs were added.

The jobless rate has been at 9 percent or more for the past 20 months—the longest it has been this high since World War II, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

Economic Policy Institute (EPI) economist Heidi Shierholz says the drop in the unemployment rate is somewhat misleading. 

Around half of the improvement was due to 260,000 people dropping out of the labor force, leaving the labor force participation rate at 64.3 percent, a stunning new low for the recession. Incredibly, the U.S. labor force is now smaller than it was before the recession started, though it should have grown by over 4 million workers to keep up with working-age population growth over this period.

According to the report, 14.5 million are officially jobless, down by 556,000 from last month. Long-term joblessness did not change from last month, with 6.5 million workers jobless for six months or more. That represents 44.3 percent of all unemployed workers.

The economy needs to add about 150,000 new jobs each month to keep up with the growth in the labor force. But to lower the nation’s unemployment rate to 6 percent by 2013 and make up for the more than 8 million jobs lost due to the Bush recession, the economy needs to add 350,000 jobs a month.

The nation is in dire need of a battle plan to create jobs and revive the economy. But instead of tackling job creation out of the gate, the new Republican majority in the House is playing cheap partisan politics by devoting its first week of action to repealing health care reform.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says that while the drop in December’s unemployment rate is welcome news, “net job growth is still not enough to accommodate our growing population, let alone close the 11-million job gap left by the Bush recession.”

The cuts being proposed by Republicans in Washington and around the country, including undermining Social Security and Medicare and cutting transportation spending, are the wrong remedies at the wrong time and threaten our economic future. We need dramatic action to invest in America and give states and cities breathing room to prevent further layoffs and create jobs.

Manufacturing gained 10,000 jobs in December, contributing to a gain of more than 100,000 jobs since December 2009. Construction jobs fell by 13,000, while retail jobs increased slightly by 12,000. But that follows November’s loss of 28,000 retail jobs. State and local public employee jobs fell by 20,000 last month.

The health care and leisure/hospitality sectors continue to be the strongest areas of job growth, with leisure/hospitality jobs increasing by 47,000 and health care employment expanding by 36,000 in December.

Earlier this week, Michael Snyder took a dispiriting look at how working families have been battered in recent years, especially with vanishing middle-class jobs and blue-collar jobs that pay decent wages. These jobs vanished in large part because of Bush-era trade and economic policies that encouraged U.S. firms to export jobs and gave Wall Street and Big Banks free rein to recklessly ride the economy off a cliff.  Snyder writes:

More than half of the U.S. labor force (55 percent) has “suffered a spell of unemployment, a cut in pay, a reduction in hours or have become involuntary part-time workers” since the recession began in December 2007.

Since the year 2000, we have lost 10 percent of our middle-class jobs. In the year 2000, there were about 72 million middle-class jobs in the United States but today there are only about 65 million middle-class jobs. Meanwhile, our population is getting larger.

One out of every six Americans is now enrolled in at least one anti-poverty program run by the federal government.

Income inequality continued to grow with the richest 20 percent of working families taking home 47 percent of all income and earning 10 times that of low-income working families.

This article was originally published on AFL-CIO Now Blog.

About The Author: Mike Hall is a former West Virginia newspaper reporter, staff writer for the United Mine Workers Journal and managing editor of the Seafarers Log. He came to the AFL- CIO in 1989 and have written for several federation publications, focusing on legislation and politics, especially grassroots mobilization and workplace safety.

About the Author Jonathan Tasini: is the executive director of Labor Research Association. Tasini ran for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in New York. For the past 25 years, Jonathan has been a union leader and organizer, a social activist, and a commentator and writer on work, labor and the economy. From 1990 to April 2003, he served as president of the National Writers Union (United Auto Workers Local 1981).He was the lead plaintiff in Tasini vs. The New York Times, the landmark electronic rights case that took on the corporate media’s assault on the rights of thousands of freelance authors.

Long ago, on New York City’s docks, Frankie drilled into me the American credo about climbing the ladder to a better life. “Kid, you gotta finish college,” he would say. “You gotta do better than this. All you need is to work harder and you can get there.”

Frankie, a massive fellow who had spent his life on the Manhattan docks, was my protector and career advisor. He would find a clean place to hide my college books in the mornings when I showed up. And when a fight broke out, he would warn me.

If you ever worked in a steel mill in Ohio, a lumber camp in Alabama, a diner in Maine, a cotton mill in North Carolina, or any blue-collar, back-breaking job anywhere and it was clear that you had a good chance to move on, you probably heard the same lecture about the American worker’s credo: “If you get knocked down, stand up and try again. Yeah, life’s is tough. So what. You have it in you. Set your goals high and you’ll wind up somewhere near where you want to be.”

One of the many things we seem to have lost in the Great Economic Bust is a widespread belief among those down and out that they will ever get back up on their feet. This finding comes from a recent survey on the unemployed called “The Shattered Dream: Unemployed Workers Lose Ground, Hope and Faith in their Futures” (PDF link).

It was produced by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

How deep is the disappointment of the unemployed?

Nearly 60 percent of the unemployed polled by the organization said that hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most persons.

Ironically, a similar poll conducted at the same time by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Harvard University and the Washington Post found that 60 percent of people say that most persons who want to get ahead can make it if they’re willing to work hard.

It seems to me these different points of view of the road ahead for American worker offer a good reflection of the baffling disconnect shown by many Americans toward an economy of crippling and unprecedented dead-ends for millions of workers.

How do the unemployed, according to the survey, view their future?

• Only one-third think they will recover financially.
• Two-thirds think the economy is undergoing fundamental and lasting changes.
• More than half think it will be harder for young people to afford college.
• Nearly half say they will never feel as secure at work as they once did and they will have to take jobs paying below their skill levels.

Some of what the jobless tell us is the bitter taste of feeling cut off from the a paycheck, a job interview and the chitchat about an economy on the mend. But some of it also is quite realistic. What made this economic collapse so different was the disappearance of so many jobs, and the downward pressure on wages and benefits that crossed over into jobs where there is no justifiable reason for such reductions.

Indeed, among the unemployed tracked in the Rutgers study, only one out of four has found work in the 15 months since they were first polled. And nearly all of the newly employed were taking home less pay or wages.

Remember the economic collapse of the 1980s, when auto and steel workers fled their rust belt Midwest towns for jobs? Many found new jobs and many wandered home eventually. Remember the dot.com bust about a decade ago? Many of those folks floundered, but many also wound up back on their feet.

What’s different today is that the past is a painful memory for many workers whose industries have collapsed, whose skilled are no longer needed or who are more defenseless on the job to protect their livelihood than ever before.

They are like the dockworkers I knew decades ago, before machines took their jobs and the docks themselves vanished.

This article was originally posted on Working In These Times.

About The Author: Stephen Franklin, former labor and workplace reporter for the Chicago Tribune, is ethnic news director for the Community Media Workshop in Chicago. He is the author of Three Strikes: Labor’s Heartland Losses and What They Mean for Working Americans (2002), and has reported throughout the United States and the Middle East. He can be reached via e-mail at freedomwrites@hotmail.com.

Just read a story on AOL about a CEO of a small construction company. (Actually two stories…the original and her update).  Link at the end of the post.

Even though she doesn’t acknowledge it….or maybe even recognize it, within her stories there is a message for how to survive and find the next job.

Simply stated:  write, write write.  As a result of getting her story published on AOL she has gotten ten opportunities to apply for positions.  She is in that process right now.  But she got those opportunities because she took the time to write.  Now there is no guarantee you will get on AOL, but I can guarantee there are many other places that will publish your writings on your expertise, vision and leadership

So begin writing.

1.  Start Blogging:    It is easy and you can do it for very few dollars….even free.  If you want help, there are services like ours that can make it even easier.  But start getting your message out there.  Write about your expertise in your industry.  Address emerging trends, industry challenges, industry opportunities, government and regulation issues, technology applications and on and on and on.  Apply SEO and SEM to your blog.  If you don’t know how….learn!!  Send a link to your blog to everyone you know.  Include a link with every job application.  Put a link on your Linkedin and Facebook page.  Join Linkedin industry groups and provide them with a link to your blog.  All of this is free and it can produce great results.

2.  Write on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and many others.   Communicate your message  through social networks.  Write about your situation, your leadership and vision, your expertise.   Show your expertise by answering questions regarding your industry or areas of skill….as posted by other members of Lindedin.  When answering several questions, the algorithms of Linkedin will recognize you as an expert.

3.  Write Articles.  These are not just blog articles or posts, but rather articles for publication in online trade journals.  There are also many online article publication websites that will publish every article you write….for free.  Their sites success is predicated on a huge volume of content on many topics.  They want your articles.  The articles will be picked up by search engines and you will gain extraordinary credibility across the Net.

Guaranteed, getting your message out to the marketplace through your writing can be the catalyst to drive success in your search.  And once you achieve a new position, don’t make the mistake of stopping your writing.  Our economy will be unstable for many years to come.  But consistently putting your message out across the Net, will pay dividends for years to come.  You will secure your future. You will be sought out, rather than having to seek a position.

Here is a link to Mollee’s article.  Be certain to read her update as well.

Be a dedicated and committed writer and you will succeed as well.

This article was originally posted on Corporate Warriors.

About The Author: Don Straits founded Corporate Warriors more than 18 years ago, and has dedicated his career to helping people develop strategies to support their careers. If you would like to contact Don for coaching or seminar work, please do so at don@corporatewarriors.com. You can also find his website here.

Denver Sparks Parental Involvement En Espanol
The experts agree: parental involvement has strong positive effects on students’ achievement in school. When parents are engaged with their child’s education, attendance improves, grades and test scores go up, and graduation rates rise. But how can school districts involve parents who don’t speak English? In Denver, where three in five students are Latino and many have parents with poor English skills, the school system has taken to the radio waves. Through an hour-long weekly program called “Educa” (educate) the Denver Public Schools connect with Spanish-speaking parents about school policies, events, and issues in public education. Parents can also call in with questions about their children’s school and the education system. The first-of-its-kind program broadcasts on three popular Spanish-language radio stations and has more than doubled its audience — to 54,200 unique listeners — over just a few months. For engaging immigrant parents in a format that speaks to them, the Denver schools’ multicultural outreach efforts come in loud in clear on our list of the best policies of 2010.

Good Jobs Prevail in Pittsburgh
Eager for new development and jobs, cities commonly give developers multi-million dollar tax breaks to sweeten the pot and to get shovels in the ground. But when subsidies are given to projects that create low-wage jobs that keep families in poverty, taxpayers get the short end of the stick. Workers making poverty-level wages at publicly subsidized developments must still rely on public assistance like food stamps, Medicaid, or rental assistance. The result is economic dependence more than economic development. To make sure that taxpayer investments would pay off for city residents, Pittsburgh passed a common-sense piece of legislation: if a developer wanted tax breaks for a new development, workers in the new taxpayer-subsidized hotels, supermarkets, or office buildings must be paid the industry-standard prevailing wage. In an affirmation of the law’s successful implementation in Pittsburgh, the surrounding Allegheny County quickly adopted a similar law. For ensuring that public tax dollars create good jobs with decent wages, Pittsburgh’s prevailing wage law earns a spot on our list of 2010’s best public policies.

Less Lock-up in New York
Treating young offenders like hardened criminals makes no sense — sending a kid in trouble to a juvenile prison greatly increases that young person’s chance of becoming an adult offender. Detaining kids also costs more money than community-based programs, which have a much better track record of preventing future criminality. Luckily, New York City is moving to eliminate unnecessary detention for youthful offenders, many of whom would otherwise be locked up while simply awaiting trial. The city is putting more kids into effective community-based alternatives to detention and reserving secure detention for only the most violent youthful offenders. New assessment tools have been developed to determine which youth should be sent to secure detention and which would be better served in the community. The bottom line is that secure detention for youth is now seen as the option of last resort, rather than the default option. For doing what’s best for youth, the community, and the taxpayer, New York City’s juvenile justice reforms are among this year’s best public policies.

My Way or the Highway in Austin
n Austin, TX, whose frustrating traffic congestion provided the backdrop for the movie “Office Space,” drivers waste an average of one and a half days stuck in traffic every year. Some business leaders pushed for a conventional response to congestion: wider roads and more highways. But the city opted to go down a different path. Recognizing that they could never build enough highways to eliminate traffic congestion, lawmakers instead put a $90 million bond issue on the ballot to improve Austin’s existing streets and make them more hospitable to pedestrians and bicycles. According to blogger Austin Contrarian, “Most of Austin’s roads outside of the central core were laid when the city was more rural than urban. no sidewalks, no bicycle lanes, no sewers, no street trees. But once rural roads now cut through major population centers.” Austin voters approved the bonds on November 2nd. For affirming that transportation investments must include more than just new highway miles, Austin’s bond walks straight onto our list of the best policies of 2010.

Cleveland Sues the Banks
It’s the story of the decade: Ameriquest, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and other banks raked in record profits speculating on mortgages, pushing more and riskier home loans onto borrowers who clearly never had the means to pay them back. Then the house of cards collapsed. Foreclosure rates soared and cities were left to pick up the pieces. Arson, property deterioration, and crime in neighborhoods devastated by foreclosure imposed steep costs on municipalities just as the recession decimated their tax base. So some cities decided to fight back. The 2010 documentary “Cleveland vs. Wall Street” tells the story of one such fight, as the city of Cleveland sued more than twenty major banks for setting off a chain of events with negative consequences “entirely foreseeable by Wall Street.” When a federal appeals court rejected the case earlier this year, Cleveland announced it would continue its fight to the Supreme Court. For striving to hold Wall Street accountable for the devastation it wreaked in its neighborhoods, Cleveland’s suit wins a place on our best policy of 2010 list.

John Petro contributed to this article.

This article was originally posted on DMI Blog,

About the Author: Amy Traub is the Director of Research at the Drum Major Institute. A native of the Cleveland area, Amy is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Chicago. Before coming to the Drum Major Institute, Amy headed the research department of a major New York City labor union, where her efforts contributed to the resolution of strikes and successful union organizing campaigns by hundreds of working New Yorkers.

In my last blog I wrote about the huge profits that corporations made during the third quarter of 2010. $1.695 trillion, give or take a few bucks. Okay, I whined a bit about corporations hoarding this money and not giving our economy a chance to build back its consumer marketplace by hiring new employees.

Here is an interesting survey outlining the curious place where we’ve all ended up as the recession drags on and on (I know that economists are convinced that the recession is over, but with an official 9.8% unemployment rate, and an unofficial one approaching 20%, I beg to disagree with them).

HR Solutions, recently surveyed 30,000 employees, and their results put an interesting spin on where workers are at today in trying to respond to tough times. The number one employee request, according to their survey, a higher salary. Okay, that was to be expected.

But some of the other comments that were at the top of the list might surprise you.

Employees are pleased with their coworkers.
Employees like the atmosphere of their organization.
Employees are pleased with flexible work hours.

Compare this to 2006, the last time the company surveyed workers. Back then some of the top comments were, “workloads are too heavy” and “departments are understaffed.” Apparently we have accepted a new reality of the workplace. That’s its going to be leaner, meaner and we should all be grateful to even have a job.

Okay, asking for a raise did make the cut. But it’s stunning how much workers have just decided that any job is better than no job and are putting up with huge sacrifices.

I know what you’re thinking. Duh. So what is new here?

In a remarkably short period of time we’ve gone from a workplace where talent had clout to one where talent is scared to speak up.

Enjoy your profits corporate America. Because at the same time I’ve seen studies that talk about huge numbers of workers who are going to start looking for a job as soon as the economy picks up. In other words, when it comes to surveys like this one, what people say is often less interesting in what they don’t say.

About The Author: Bob Rosner is a best-selling author and award-winning journalist. For free job and work advice, check out the award-winning workplace911.com. Check the revised edition of his Wall Street Journal best seller, “The Boss’s Survival Guide.” If you have a question for Bob, contact him via bob@workplace911.com.

If you feel like the recent recession screwed most of us over and left the fat cats even fatter, the next bit of information is going to really set you off. So I’d suggest that you go into the room with the most padding, remove all sharp objects and concentrate to keep your last meal down. Really, concentrate.

Last week American corporations announced their best quarter ever. $1.659 trillion in profits during the third quarter of 2010. Trillion, with a “T”.

For the last 60 years, since such things were tracked, that’s the biggest profit ever. Even bigger than 2006 when it was a paltry $1.655 trillion.

2006, when the unemployment rate was 4.6%.

Do you see a problem here?

Okay, I understand that today’s economy is full of uncertainty. And that it’s important for corporations to stash away some cash for a rainy day. But with $1.659 trillion in profits in just three months, isn’t it a good time to start hiring again to take the unemployment rate down from it’s current 9.6%?

I had feared that corporations would take advantage of the recession to drive down salaries and hiring. And that appears to be happening, although the business press tends to lump those two phenomenon into the phrase “increasing productivity.”

There is one major problem here, corporations need people with money to keep the 70% of the economy that is based on consumer spending running. The more corporations only see their profits, at the expense of actual markets where people can buy their products, well that’s the rub.

Employment and markets matter. I just fear that a trillion and a half in profits with an unemployment rate of 9.6% or 4.6% might not matter that much to the corporate corner-office crowd. But it makes a huge impact on society as a whole.

I know what you’re thinking. That I’m some kind of socialist. That couldn’t be further from the truth. I’ve got an MBA, I’ve taught at the MBA level and I’m current an executive for a company. It’s just that I take a longer view and think about who is really the foundation for our economy, the people with the paychecks that buy stuff. Whereas many corporate executives that I’ve talked to practice magical thinking where the people who buy stuff are separated from how the economy really functions.

It could be argued that the corporate sphincter muscle needed to be tight. But I can give you 1.659 trillion reasons why the time has come to relax it a bit and start spending some of the cash.

About The Author: Bob Rosner is a best-selling author and award-winning journalist. For free job and work advice, check out the award-winning workplace911.com. Check the revised edition of his Wall Street Journal best seller, “The Boss’s Survival Guide.” If you have a question for Bob, contact him via bob@workplace911.com.