We didn’t study fractions in my engineering level calc classes.
L:DL
Which magical country do you think people will find greater job opportunities in?
Maybe they should all train to be PickUp Artists? You seemed to like the idea in another thread. At least they will be getting laid so much they won’t care about being unemployed!
The economy is producing a glut of low-paying crap jobs and will be producing this by majority for years to come. Rising oil and food prices will wipe out people caught in those jobs while misguided economists claim that inflation is low and the cost of living isn’t going up. (Fat lot of good that does for the increasing throngs of people who will be working as Wal Mart greeters and can’t afford to drive to work or buy the food there.) (It’s called “the definition of inflation is sheer idiocy”, and people are in fact waking up to that fact.)
The job losses caused by NAFTA were offset by other massive job-creating emerging industries, an unrelated factor that would have been there with or without NAFTA. Now we are facing “emerging” industries that are not in any way big job creators.
Good luck with that. The GOP will obstruct them as much as possible just to make them fail. They’re trying to gut the entire working class and touch off a fire sale of America to the rich. If the Democrats fail we will quite literally become like Mexico.
Corporations added a million jobs overseas during this recession. I guess all that was magical, right? Find out where they’re hiring and send all our unemployed there. It beats living in homeless camps here.
Oh wait, India and China are smarter than us. They’re protectionist. They’ll close their borders if Americans start flooding there looking for work…
They’d be better off plying their skills in Asia or Africa than here. Or maybe Australia.
Train for waiting on and servicing the super rich. That will give you a chance to survive.
[QUOTE=Le Jacquelope]
Corporations added a million jobs overseas during this recession. I guess all that was magical, right? Find out where they’re hiring and send all our unemployed there. It beats living in homeless camps here.
[/QUOTE]
Assuming you didn’t just pull that number out of your ass, it begs the question…what kinds of jobs? Good, well paying jobs, or low wage high volume jobs? Of course, you don’t say, since it would hurt your argument to point out that a million jobs were added for folks making $.50/hour…
Dude, get serious. You REALLY think that American’s are going to leave the country in droves to take up jobs in China or India paying less than $5000/year??? You need to take a reality break from your rhetoric.
-XT
Economic inequality grew during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the 1920s, and again during the 1980s. Nevertheless, most Americans advanced somewhat economically, so most did not care that the rich advanced much more than they did.
Most Americans have lost ground economically since 2000 while the rich are richer than ever before. That has never happened in the United States before. I do not believe it is politically sustainable. Nevertheless, the Republicans might be able to hang on by pitting the white have littles against the black and brown have nots. This was a nightmare scenario envisioned by Michael Harrington in his 1968 book, Toward a Democratic Left.
I thought about being a truck driver. I don’t get people looking down on it. It looks like an awesome job. You get paid big bucks to go on a road trip. What could be more awesome?
The thing that convinced me to look at other things is a realistic appraisal of myself. Behind the wheel of a car I’m a safe driver. I keep track, I drive like masters play chess, several moves a head and looking for any possible thing that could something stupid.
However I also have ADD. Once the novelty of seeing the country wore off I just don’t have the attention span to be behind the wheel for 14 hours a day safely. Much worse is if I ended up taking the same routes over and over again.
That looks like an interesting read. How well has it aged over all in relevance?
No problem. I’ve been competing with 3 or 4 other people for positions my whole life. I’ve always won. Because I’m better than those I compete with; I’m smarter than them; I’m more productive than them.
Some fields that have high demand can never be “saturated with qualified applicants” because there simply aren’t enough people that are smart enough to become qualified.
It has been awhile since I have read Michael Harrington’s Toward a Democratic Left in its entirety. As you may know, Harrington’s The Other America inspired the war on poverty. In Toward a Democratic Left Harrington considers the possibility that the Republican Party and the upper class would succeed in pitting white blue collar workers against poor blacks, but he does not think it is likely. Of course, it did happen. The white working class became a Republican constituency that has been essential to the Republican domination of the United States, which really began with Richard Nixon’s presidential victory in 1968.
Like nearly everyone on the left at the time Harrington overestimated the political power and durability of the student movement. He did not realize that it was an unusual development caused by the War in Vietnam, and that it would collapse as soon as the draft ended. Harrington only barely mentions the popularity of George Wallace, although an understanding of that popularity is essential to understanding the direction the United States moved in during and after 1968. In its understanding of where the United States was going in and why, Toward a Democratic Left is about as empty as The Greening of America, by Charles Reich.
Two books written at about the same time that understand what was happening at the time and where the United States was going are The Emerging Republican Majority, by Kevin Phillips, and The Real Majority, by Ben Wattenberg and Richard M. Scammon. Phillips accurately predicted that the civil rights legislation and the war on poverty would cause white workers to leave the Democrat Party for the GOP. Wattenberg and Scammon dispel the liberal myth that if Bobby Kennedy had not been assassinated in 1968 he would have been elected president. Of the three Democrat candidates - Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and Hubert Humphrey - the only one who was ever ahead of Richard Nixon in the polls was Humphrey, and that was rare.
In 1968 the Democratic New Deal coalition was breaking up, and the Democrat Party was in serious trouble that Harrington and Reich preferred not to see.
The youth movement was alive and well during Obama’s run. They were not fired up in other elections. Perhaps they will get fired up by corporate destruction of America’s future.
We can only hope. Nevertheless, the best students at the best universities can still get get good jobs, even though most of their contemporaries cannot. During the War in Vietnam the best students at the best universities were threatened by the draft and the possibility of combat duty. That gave them a personal reason to become involved in left wing politics that does not exist now. A mass movement needs intelligent leaders. It should make its members feel altruistic and principled, but there needs to be a payoff.
If you’d only said this once, I probably would have ignored it (most other posters evidently did you the favor of ignoring your comment). Since you’ve now posted it twice and been so explicit, I will tell you officially: you are being a jerk. Stop it immediately.
This is not appropriate for the SDMB, msmith537. You’ve been here long enough to know that. Knock it off.
Things in this country could get better if a disaster did occur in the US, somewhere in the range of a zombie virus that our government hides from us until it’s too late, and most of the US population is brought to a small corner of the country to survive and rebuild. Jobs like welder, plumber, construction worker, electrician, HVAC, gain importance over jobs like Network Analyst, Collator, and CEO. and people with MBA’s and BBA’s would have to learn from certified electricians and plumbers and general laborers, so that they can help rebuild. What is left of our government would have to rethink the budget and acquire resources according to what the remains of the
American Public really needs. Recycling would become the most important activity, and people would become more and more thrifty.
Actually, American would be a LOT better off without Wall Street as it is now constituted. It’s basically a gambling den where they use the bank deposits of American citizens as chips. They are very good gamblers, but sooner or later, they always lose, and when they lose, they lose big. And so do we. See: great recession.
Yeah Obama has been a disappointment. I’m sorry to every Hillary supporter that I disagreed with. A lot of them said that this is EXACTLY what would happen.
You may be right when it comes to things like construction but you are entirely off base when it comes to agricultural workers. If we didn’t employ the cheap labor, people would simply start growing Oranges in Brazil and shit like that. Agriculture is one of those things that can be outsourced (at least with respect to stuff like fruits and vegetables that need to be hand picked (I don’t see America losing out to anyone on grains)).
Yeah, I don’t know how he biffed that so badly. To spend all his political capital on health care reform rather than getting us out of the recession and putting a leash back on wall street.
Obama clearly underestimated the severity of the economic situation. He seemed to think that because he was a Democrat unemployment was going to magically go down like it did when Bill Clinton was elected.
Obama was not elected president because the electorate moved to the left, but because most Americans did not benefit from the Bush economy, and because Bush started two expensive wars the could not win.
Obama could have moved the country to the left, but first he had to establish his credibility by cleaning up the mess George W. Bush left him. He needed to achieve successful conclusions to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he needed to restore the good economic numbers of Bill Clinton’s second term. If he could achieve that during his first term, he could have worked on health care during his second term.