I think we agree on at least one point which is that we do not agree on many points. Anyway, it was fun and see you around. Bye for now.

I’m speaking of my own idealist belief. Everyone I know that has a good work ethic has a good job, or at least one that is paying the bills. I know a lot of poeple who complain about their job, but do nothing to change it.

I won’t dispute the fact that things are harder now, and it’s because of massive corruption and greed. I also won’t dispute that things look dire if we continue down this same road. I will argue that anyone capable and willing can make a living and that we have become somewhat soft and dumber, making this transition in to harder times very tought to adapt to.

American workers now have to compete on a global scale, and as it stands now, with the taxes and lax labor laws, we are fighting an uphill battle. I think we don’t see eye to eye on the temporary fixes and long term solutions, along with their impact on american/foreign lives.

It’s still a fun debate.

Glisamerica,

On what reality do you base your “idealist ” belief?? We are not talking
about idealist fantasies here but we are talking about real life for
real millions of people. Where those poeple will find living wage jobs
if the current trend continues?? And what effect that will have on America as we know and knew it. You did not answer these questions but responded with sophistry.

I couldn’t agree more. The middle class is being wiped out. Working in the middle class used to mean one parent brought home the dough for 4 people, and they lived well, and got to retire before they were completely useless… that class is all but extinct.

I’m with you on tax write-offs, the super rich… basically anyone that is making money they really don’t deserve. If you work an honest 40hrs a week you should have enough money to live well above the poverty line, but not necessarily provide for a family if you are doing entry level labor. By entry level labor I mean a job that anyone can walk in the door and do. Basically ’starter’ jobs that you are meant to have temorarily and be promoted out of. Even a single mom working as a clerk knows that she has to eventually move up in order to provide for her kid. I agree with you that the system used to work to take care of honest workers, but now it doesn’t. It seems if you are a good employee you have a target on your back, or if the company has to shell out extra cash for medical/childcare you are really in danger. Either way, if you are working a McJob you should not expect to raise a family comfortably.

This may sound negative, but it stems from an idealist belief that any good american worker can find steady well paying work, but it takes some grit, and in these times it takes a little more grit than a few decades ago. This is not the america we grew up in, but that doesn’t give us an excuse to stop being the americans we once were.

You wrote:
“I’m not saying that everyone has to be educated to have a job. I’m saying as a country we need to be educated.”
But we are educated and as matter of fact overeducated. You have
no ideas how many people with advanced degrees in engineering and
and sciences are unemployed or under employed.
As I mentioned the outsourcing is not restricted to manufacturing jobs but extend to many professional and semi-professional jobs from
engineering and programming to drafting and detail design to accounting and writing medical reports and even interpreting X-ray
and ultrasound pictures and more.
The US is very rich and evryone who works and toils should get a living
wage that enable a reasonable decent life.
What was wrong with the forties, fities, sixties and early seventies
when workers were paid fairly. People were still getting education and striving to improve themselves and did not get lazy and
the USA was the center of innovation and sciences and emerged as a super power second to none
Fortunes were still being made and there was optimism in the land.
With the current obscenely high salaries and bonuses of upper corporate management regardless of performance coupled with massive tax cuts for the wealthy and the continuing cuts of wages and salaries of the working people and outsourcing their jobs and flooding the job markets with illegal immigrants, this country in the near future will be composed of a upper very thin layer of filthy rich group with the rest of the populations poor and struggling and it will be new America, land of the poor and oppressed. At that time
you can kiss the constitution and democracy good bye. It will be a
new era.

It is all about the value of your work. If you’re getting paid $15/hr to do a job that someone with no skill and hardly speaks the language can be trained to do in a few weeks, then you were getting paid way to much from the start.

I’m not saying that everyone has to be educated to have a job. I’m saying as a country we need to be educated. Our best minds need to be the world’s best minds. Innovation at home leads to good jobs for everyone. We’ve gotten lazy because people get paid too much for mindless entry level jobs. Why learn a trade when you can anwer a phone and make a decent living? Now that the TeleTechs are going overseas that dream is gone. Some of what could have been our next big innovators wasted their mid 20s answering phones and trying to move up in a company that didn’t care about them.

History has proven that jobs that require little skill or endurance, generally don’t pay well. If an illegal immigrant ’stole’ your job you’ve clearly made some mistakes in life.

I will agree that the tax structure for companies that outsource are completely corrupt. If you’re a company that does business in the US and has factories/service centers overseas you should have to treat those employees as if they were working on US soil, otherwise it’s just a fancy name for slavery.

Glisamerica,

Your “whining” comment reminds me with Phil Gramm’s stupid comment!!
So, you want every American to have a master or doctorate degree or
have the ability to work in finance or Wall Street!! Is that practical
or realistic expectation or demand??!!
Where people find living wage jobs if most manufacturing jobs and
now engineering , professional and semi professional jobs are being
out-sourced to abroad. Even summer jobs are hard to find these days,
they are taken by illegal immigrants. Just ask any high school or college kid who was looking for a summer job.

Follow how the united states kept it superiority through the decades.

We started with food then raw materials, once other countries got in the game we moved to refining. Then we moved to finished products. Then we moved to service. Now we’re into banking and value added.

This way we keep our raw materials, finished material production and everything else for ourselves when things go bad. Think about it. We have the best infrastructure in the world and have managed to get rich quick without really tapping into our natural resources.

If a bunch of people who never even saw a computer until they were 20 years old can do your job as a computer tech support after 4 years of training, then you don’t even deserve your job.

What happened to americans being the best by far? We’re getting lazy and it’s starting to show. When labor was the trade we worked harder and longer than everyone else. When college education was the trade we were smarter than everyone else. Now we need to be the best at post graduate education to keep our edge, and we’ve gotten lazy and are falling behind.

If you don’t want a third world student who was raised in a house without a phone stealing your tech job, train harder or find a new job. I refuse to live in a country full of whiners.

In case anyone hasn’t noticed, crime is the new industry. The bigger the better and safer. I recommend going to college for embesslement an fraud, because we are still the best at that.

In my history lessons, the New Deal has always been a highlight of how a governement can react when absolute capitalism and fiduciary responsibility put a choke hold on the people.

I agree that we as a people need to embrace the industry of solar power. Not only in use to generate electricty, but to manufacture as well. There are some great advances recently in new solar designs to increase efficiencies. Read about it on my tumblr.

http://energydepository.tumblr.com/

Of all my history lessons, the only time period that I was fond of governement intervention was the post-depression era. The New Deal has always been that spark of hope, that despite the great adversity of capilistic absolutism and fiduciary responsibility, the people, and our leaders can make just decisions on reforming a failing system.

The time is now to reinvent our industries. As Ernest warns, if we do not move to the solar industry without a complete backing and support from the government, then we will lose the true power struggle of the world, the control of energy.

There are great advances going on as we speak. Read my Tumblr about solutions to energy independence.
http://energydepository.tumblr.com/

In the least the outcome of acting responsible to the environment and the stakeholders would get someone fired…I’d think that’s all the lesson the rest of them would need for even considering it.

If anything, shareholders and workers would have a common interest in some form of self-management and residual claimaincy by workers, based on what their human capital contributes to the total equity of the firm; it would benefit shareholders as well as workers because it would increase the total size of the pie.

The problem is, management prefers having a larger slice of a small pie. The typical management approach is to gut human capital, strip long-term productive capabilities, and hollow out firms, in order to promote illusory short-term profit and game their own bonuses and stock options. Management salaries have risen from around a quarter to around 40% of total labor compensation over the past thirty years. Total labor compensation, including management salaries, is a greater share of the GDP than it was then. So in fact management is feathering its own nest at the expense of shareholders. If shareholders can’t sue for that, on the grounds that management salaries and perks contribute to overhead at the expense of profit, how could they sue for any other deviation from profit-maximization.

None of this is to suggest that the shareholders are the good guys, or to deny that the rentier classes are a parasitic drain on labor. My only point is that the managerial classes are at least as parasitic, and regurgitating the myth of shareholder responsibility is just playing into their hands.

Some Iraqi officials blame waste and regional politics, as well as the continuing war in some of Iraq’s bread baskets – such as in Diyala, just northeast of Baghdad, where a joint U.S.-Iraqi operation is under way to oust al-Qaida in Iraq from safe havens.
The view from an Army helicopter confirms why farmers in Diyala are in a panic. Instead of crops, shriveled, dusty fields stretch as far as the eye can see.
Standing on the tarmac at the American base outside the provincial capital, Majid al Khalid, Diyala’s top agriculture official, says he has never seen it this bad. He says the drought has damaged more than 120,000 acres of farmland and killed any summer vegetable crop. One-third of the fruit orchards are also in bad shape.

This of course is just Iraq. China and India same and this is happening Worldwide. Outsourcing jobs to China from the US is in many way’s speeding up the destruction of there country. The pollution in China now the pollution that you can see is incredible and what you can’t see is on the rise. India because of coal burring is not to far behind. The United States well we have cleaned what you can see but not what you can’t see American is funny like that. There does need to be some outsourcing of clean energy as it is my opinion without that the rest is just academic but first you need research into clean energy and in the States funding has just been cut for research, don’t figure or maybe the figuring was done but using twisted logic the kind of logic that this article put so well:

In addition to injured customers, there are unconsenting third parties, “stakeholders,” who are affected by corporate activities. These include persons residing downwind and downstream from industrial polluters, teen-agers “hooked” on cigarettes leading to a shortened life of addiction, taxpayers who pay for the public health costs of smoking, ecosystems damaged by pesticides, citizens whose government is corrupted by corporate lobbying and campaign contributions, and humanity at large the future of which is imperiled by global climate change.

This is the battle going on and so far nobody will win this one. James Hansen just wrote one of the best I have ever read. Just go to his web site Google James Hansen there it is and his last post you will see it “trip report” At the end page 18 read those e-mails odd style of writting.