Investors Business Daily reports on President Barack Obama's lame jobs council:
In February, Obama chartered the Jobs and Competitiveness Council with a mission of leaving "no stone unturned" in the search of ways to boost the country's anemic job growth. But you could tell from the start that this council would have trouble even finding those stones, let alone turning them over.
After all, Obama stuffed the group full of Fortune 500 CEOs — General Electric, American Express, DuPont, Time Warner, Eastman Kodak and Xerox, among them. While these may be good companies, they've hardly been roaring engines of job growth. In most cases, in fact, the opposite is true. Some examples:
• GE's domestic workforce shrank by 25,000 — almost 16% — between 2001 and 2010, according to the company's annual reports. (The number of overseas GE jobs climbed over those years.)
• AmEx employed 28% fewer workers in 2010 than it did a decade ago.
• Kodak's workforce cratered to just 18,800 last year from 75,000 in 2001.
• Xerox's employee base shrank by nearly a third between 2001 and 2009, before it acquired Affiliated Computer Services and its 74,000 workers in 2010.
Whole thing, including specific suggestions that might actually swell the ranks of the employed, here.
