Big business heal thyself (before it's too late)

It’s time for business to start creating jobs says Joe Nocera in his opinion editorial in the New York Times today.  He’s not talking about small business.  We’d love to start hiring again to meet incremental consumer demand but there is no access to capital for us.

Nocera is talking about BIG BUSINESS.  The companies he says “are hoarding cash while reporting record profits.”

With all their cash, companies shouldn’t be waiting for Congress to give them tax incentives to hire people. They should be trying to jump-start the economy — and fend off another recession — by making investments, and hiring workers, that will lead to renewed prosperity.

The problem, according to Nocera, is that these giant businesses are wed to “short-term profits instead of long-term good of the country.” 

It’s not a new love of socialism that Nocera proposes for corporations.  It’s the reality that their long-term financial health is directly tied to the long-term health of our economy.  And because our government has been made impotent to do much of anything thanks the success of the crazed minority’s rule of the majority, only big business can save itself by creating jobs, according to Nocera.

But what if they don't?  What if big business continues its myopic fixation on today's profits?  What if Congress and the President cannot deliver any effective job creation program?

Then that's what next year's elections will be all about.  Every member of Congress that continues to say NO to an immediate approach to creating jobs and only says yes to cutting spending needs to have opposition in the primary or general election.