A rant re jobs, corporations and the economic situation
A friend suggested that I post part of a email response I made, in a blog. So the following is that response I made. The prior discussion can be inferred from the context, I think.
Jim
The loss of the American middle class, as you pointed out, in my opinion is partly due to manipulations of some of the powers-that-be who are crazed to want to control lots of things, a horde of mini-dictator-wannabes that form the radical right wing of the country. The job loss due to outsourcing of middle class jobs points out two things, one is the high wages needed to cover expenses primarily of housing costs, costs which have been vastly inflated by the real estate easy money folks who have long been increasing the cost of buying a home far greater than the value added to the home. Thus the cost of living had to increase far beyond the value added to the economy, by untold trillions of dollars. The bubble had to break sometime; I don't know if it was deliberate or just lots of people who could not see the big picture effects of the "free money" from the increasing housing costs without corresponding value added; probably a mix of the two.
The other major factor (in my opinion, again) is that we Americans have lost the do-it-yourself mode and thus have lost versatility and fall-back self-reliance. Thus utterly dependent on somebody giving us a job so we have income to pay for things. And those "somebodys" tend to be professional employers who again want to gain maximum profit for least value added, and one way to do that is to lower wages and pocket the difference, smart business people they think. And the educational system has unfortunately not adapted to fill in to make graduates adequately resilient - plus the emphasis is to "get a degree" instead of learn the knowledge and skills; the degree guarantees them superiority in the job market is said. It does, but those getting those jobs are puppets of the employers, who in turn do not have adequate responsibility for the American economy re where they fit into it - they are just responsible for maximum profit to give to their salaries and to investors, instead. As things fall apart, people look to point the finger of blame somewhere and avoid whatever part they themselves play in it.
Furthermore, the right-wingers have taken a military-type organizational mode of utter obedience top down and have taken a stance intending to bring down the Obama administration; as it is said, "a house divided cannot stand." So that makes the situation worse; they intend to bring down the country until they can take it over again, and then those unified employers will have all the working class at their mercy as little more than slaves from then on.
They had already worked in that direction for decades; I saw it from the inside. Innovation was systematically strangled at the grass-roots level by blocking it in the employees, by the misuse of the "employment agreement" which workers need to sign in the technical fields, which give all rights to any ideas the employee has, given freely to the employer who has no use for the ideas but sits on them not developing them, thus all ideas are dead, and the working class learns it is not useful to be innovative, and the urge to practice innovation dies out. Thus the expected American innovative ability that Obama expects to pitch in to save the country in his administration, has been systematically stomped out by the corporate system.
The "employment agreement" implies that the employee is out to steal the employer's ideas, but the real thing it does is let the employers steal the employees ideas, clever. Even back in the 1980s it was made unlawful for employers to demand ownership of employees ideas other than those related to job duties; but I was told that I would have to fight in court to make it effective, and of course the employee does not have the legal resources to fight the big corporation legal machine and surely would lose their job etc and to gamble on an idea to bail them out if jobless just is not a viable option in the vast majority of cases. Thus we have basically lost that "Yankee Ingenuity" that gave the country its huge boost in the earlier part of the last century.
And now we are mired in the results: we don't have the practiced ability to innovatively solve problems on our own, and we wait for the corporations to give us jobs to survive; but the corporations want total control before they will cooperate, and that means they have to take back the White House before they will cooperate. Meanwhile things are falling apart. As you noted.
Jim
The loss of the American middle class, as you pointed out, in my opinion is partly due to manipulations of some of the powers-that-be who are crazed to want to control lots of things, a horde of mini-dictator-wannabes that form the radical right wing of the country. The job loss due to outsourcing of middle class jobs points out two things, one is the high wages needed to cover expenses primarily of housing costs, costs which have been vastly inflated by the real estate easy money folks who have long been increasing the cost of buying a home far greater than the value added to the home. Thus the cost of living had to increase far beyond the value added to the economy, by untold trillions of dollars. The bubble had to break sometime; I don't know if it was deliberate or just lots of people who could not see the big picture effects of the "free money" from the increasing housing costs without corresponding value added; probably a mix of the two.
The other major factor (in my opinion, again) is that we Americans have lost the do-it-yourself mode and thus have lost versatility and fall-back self-reliance. Thus utterly dependent on somebody giving us a job so we have income to pay for things. And those "somebodys" tend to be professional employers who again want to gain maximum profit for least value added, and one way to do that is to lower wages and pocket the difference, smart business people they think. And the educational system has unfortunately not adapted to fill in to make graduates adequately resilient - plus the emphasis is to "get a degree" instead of learn the knowledge and skills; the degree guarantees them superiority in the job market is said. It does, but those getting those jobs are puppets of the employers, who in turn do not have adequate responsibility for the American economy re where they fit into it - they are just responsible for maximum profit to give to their salaries and to investors, instead. As things fall apart, people look to point the finger of blame somewhere and avoid whatever part they themselves play in it.
Furthermore, the right-wingers have taken a military-type organizational mode of utter obedience top down and have taken a stance intending to bring down the Obama administration; as it is said, "a house divided cannot stand." So that makes the situation worse; they intend to bring down the country until they can take it over again, and then those unified employers will have all the working class at their mercy as little more than slaves from then on.
They had already worked in that direction for decades; I saw it from the inside. Innovation was systematically strangled at the grass-roots level by blocking it in the employees, by the misuse of the "employment agreement" which workers need to sign in the technical fields, which give all rights to any ideas the employee has, given freely to the employer who has no use for the ideas but sits on them not developing them, thus all ideas are dead, and the working class learns it is not useful to be innovative, and the urge to practice innovation dies out. Thus the expected American innovative ability that Obama expects to pitch in to save the country in his administration, has been systematically stomped out by the corporate system.
The "employment agreement" implies that the employee is out to steal the employer's ideas, but the real thing it does is let the employers steal the employees ideas, clever. Even back in the 1980s it was made unlawful for employers to demand ownership of employees ideas other than those related to job duties; but I was told that I would have to fight in court to make it effective, and of course the employee does not have the legal resources to fight the big corporation legal machine and surely would lose their job etc and to gamble on an idea to bail them out if jobless just is not a viable option in the vast majority of cases. Thus we have basically lost that "Yankee Ingenuity" that gave the country its huge boost in the earlier part of the last century.
And now we are mired in the results: we don't have the practiced ability to innovatively solve problems on our own, and we wait for the corporations to give us jobs to survive; but the corporations want total control before they will cooperate, and that means they have to take back the White House before they will cooperate. Meanwhile things are falling apart. As you noted.
posted by Unknown at
13:17
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