In the pockets of the rich.

Editor,

In the NYT article yesterday blasting as a pipe dream Van Jones's vision of "Green Jobs" revitalizing the American economy, certain assumptions stood out like a sore thumb, and the NYT did not allow readers to comment there. But a comment here on this article as well as that is a propos.

If we are going to install solar panels on every rooftop in America, it is obvious that those solar panels should be manufactured in the USA, not China.

Furthermore, the objective in a massive WPA-like program, in order to provide real benefits for this nation's economy as well as putting millions of people to work, is not to maximize the profits of the companies to which the federal government contracts out the project.

In fact, this, in addition to campaign financing, is the fundamental structural problem in the way our government does business: government contracts are managed to maximize profits for corporations; they are not managed to maximize economic benefit to "the American people," to whom politicians are forever paying lip service as they stab us in the back.

A green jobs agenda that stipulates its ancillary manufacturing must be done in the USA, specifically to cycle tax money into the hands of American workers at the **American** wage scale, as opposed to that in Cambodia, would turn our economy around overnight.

But here is the issue: Our government, as everyone on these comment blogs knows, does not represent "the American people" It represents Wall Street, billionaires, and multinational corporations; and these actors are in the business specifically of funneling dollars up the financial pyramid, from workers' to their own pockets, by whatever means they can imagine.

So even massive government spending, which the current economy demands, would not wind up in worker's hands but in the pockets of the corporations and the rich.

Re: "U.S. Stocks Lower After Drops in Asia and Europe" (8/20/2011)