State Capitalism's Dirty Secret: Corporations Don't Create Good Jobs Anymore, They Destroy Them

While correct in directing its attention at the instability of the job market and unemployment, beyond that the article fails at a few points. 

Corporations are not working for the 99 percent. But this wasn't always the case. In a special five-part series, William Lazonick, professor at UMass, president of the Academic-Industry Research Network, and a leading expert on the business corporation, along with journalist Ken Jacobson and AlterNet's Lynn Parramore, will examine the foundations, history and purpose of the corporation to answer this vital question: How can the public take control of the business corporation and make it work for the real economy?

Free market capitalism works, but what we have is State-controlled capitalism. It's main tools for manipulating that market are regulation such as tariffs and taxes. Through these efforts, the State promotes industries and companies over others, even when the natural market would swing the other direction. 

Remember when sugar was in soda, real sugar? Tariffs imbalances trade between sugar producers and consumers across borders. When the US impose high tariffs in sugar imports, it forced foreign sugar producers into drug crops and American companies to use corn sugar as a poor substitute. The State priced real sugar out of reach of both growers an consumers. 

That is a failure of the State, not capitalism, which worked well before the State meddled in the business of private citizens and companies. 

For the last four decades, U.S. corporations have been sinking our economy through the off-shoring of jobs, the squeezing of wages, and a magician's hat full of bluffs and tricks designed to extort subsidies and sweetheart deals from local and state governments that often result in mass layoffs and empty treasuries. 

In reality, it is out legislators and representatives in government who have been stifling industries and our economy. This failure of control efforts is what is keeping us from returning to a sustainable trade market, one free of manipulation at a national level. Kill taxes and tariffs, end subsidies and regulations. Return to a free market where success is a reward that can not be bought from regulatory agencies and presidential administrations. 

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