The American economy lost another 85,000 jobs in December according to the U.S. Department of Labor, a surprise uptick that tempered some of last month’s “irrational exuberance” on the employment front.
Forecasters had predicted that the economy would create jobs in December, which many believed would signal the beginning of a recovery from what many are now calling the “Great Recession.”
It didn’t happen.
The Labor Department did revise November’s employment data to show a net gain of 4,000 jobs, but it also added 16,000 new job losses to October’s total. That means the economy shed 127,000 additional jobs in October instead of the 111,000 originally reported.
Obviously, that’s better than the massive job losses of the first few months of 2009 (when the economy was shedding as many as 700,000 jobs a month) but little comfort to the millions of still-unemployed workers.
Speaking of which, the U.S. unemployment rate remained unchanged at 10% in December, which in human terms translates to 15.3 million people who are currently out-of-work. By contrast, when the U.S. recession began in December 2007, 7.7 million people were out of work and the unemployment rate was 5%.
Meanwhile the “underemployment rate” – which includes those who have given up the job hunt or who have been forced to work part-time – inched up to 17.3%.
By Stan January 8, 2010 at 10:33 am
Please end NAFTA now! If either party wants to get out of this mess, BRING BACK MANUFACTURING to the United States! Put these people back to work. In the name of God, country and family, bring back the jobs and nullify NAFTA, CAFTA and GATT. It won’t hurt big business to pay a living wage to the workers. Any objections?
By Great Caesar's Ghost January 8, 2010 at 10:41 am
I object. Sustained economic growth requires free markets, not corporate protectionism. The only thing that drives excellence is competition. That used to be so obvious to Americans as to require no expounding, but people like Stan are (sadly) growing in numbers.
By Liberty For Me January 8, 2010 at 11:02 am
This is going to be a long slow death of history’s greatest economy and republic….We either step up to Liberty and a real free economy in 2012 or we succumb to a fascist state or communist rule.
Wake up people!….
By Brutus January 8, 2010 at 11:12 am
I’m glad Caesar is just a ghost, so he won’t go hungry when he doesn’t eat. As for the rest of the mortals, they have to eat and this ivory tower bunk just doesn’t cut it. It must be nice to be aloof from these problems. I dare you to go tell the Cannon textile workers or the people down at the unemployment office this free market stuff. There’s nothing wrong and never was anything wrong with American manufacture. The workers are great, they do quality work and there is uncompromising quality control. Compare American products with the lead poisoned products coming from overseas. It’s wrong to enrich corporations at the expense of workers. Remove the profitability from off-shoring and watch the jobs come back. You cannot honestly tell anyone who has lived for any length of time that American products are not among the greatest in the world. German products are excellent, too; if you can afford them. Remember those defective toys that came from the far East? Thanks to big corporations, the factory bosses cut corners. If standards had been followed that should have been, everyone would have been happy, even if it gripes conservative insides to see labor get a fair shake on wages. The problem is a tempest in a teapot. Remove the giveaways to big business for selling out the workers and make it easier to sell the product within North America. Not rocket scientist, even for a long dead ruler.
By Liberty For Me January 8, 2010 at 11:35 am
Brutus…Thou hast been struck with a magnificent dumb stick.
I think we are almost all against corporatism.But closing our borders and promoting socialism will just put inflation in an even higher gear.When will you people ever understand a free market?……
Is Detroit the model of what you want the country to be??
Please get deprogrammed from socialism before we are a third world country
and we are living like peasents of old
By Free Trade Important January 8, 2010 at 12:24 pm
Across the board, free trade hasn’t harmed our economy. People spending more than they make, digging holes they can’t get out of caused the problems. The whole Me, Me, Me, generation.
I buy nothing other than my house and cars on credit. I use no credit cards. Ever. I have a mortgage payment and a car payment. Otherwise just month to month bills.
If people stopped over-spending and trusting a banker to guide them, our economy would be better off.
For everyone that hates free trade. Don’t spend money on anything unless it is proven to be 100 percent made in America. There won’t be much to buy and what there is will be too expensive for most to afford.
By Great Caesar's Ghost January 8, 2010 at 12:26 pm
“Remove the giveaways to big business for selling out the workers and make it easier to sell the product within North America.” Not bad. But how is that sentiment consonants with doing away with free trade treaties (which is what I was responding to)?
By Billy Bob January 8, 2010 at 12:55 pm
Anybody that thinks we have free markets also believes in the tooth fairy. FREE TRADE only benefits the cheaters – the Japanese, the Koreans, the Chinese, the Mexicans, most of the European Union and the Rich fat cats that control our economy and give a chit what happens to the rest of us. Some form of protectionism is an absolute necessity to long-term economic health.
By Clay Barham January 8, 2010 at 1:16 pm
America’s plight is not irreversible! It will be tough for most people to begin all over again, but it can be done unless Americans, in their hearts, have given up on their own freedom and are ready to accept tyranny. A new book describes how, called SAVE PEBBLE DROPPERS & PROSPERITY, soon to be on Amazon.com, and mentioned in claysamerica.com. It tells how America became what it did and how we need to repeat and begin again if individual freedom is what we want to retain. Clayamerica.com
By countryboy January 8, 2010 at 1:45 pm
The F’ing unions are what drove manufacturing out of this country. Even in right to work states many companies had to pay comparable wages to avoid unionization. It finally became too much for most manufacturing companies. It certainly has put our auto industry in a tailspin.. As long as the union threat is here manufacturing is never coming back. And further, as foreign manufacturers have proven to be able to produce products with quality comparable to US made, consumers are going to buy the least expensive product. Really, be honest. Does anyone think a person in a low skilled job on an automobile assembly line should make $75 an hour with benefits? You have college grad people in, for example, nursing and other skilled jobs not making that kind of money. Look, I think executive pay is way, way the hell out of line too, so don’t think I am speaking from a pro-management standpoint. Only two things I can see that would bring about more manufacturing in the USA: 1) Groundbreaking patented inventions. 2) World wide collapse of all economies, whereby everyone had to “start over” and people everywhere would be glad to earn anything to survive. Of course this scenario would likely result in a collapse of civilization in the short term. A world of survivalists in other words.
By Liberty For Me January 8, 2010 at 3:53 pm
countryboy ..wow I agree.The biggest thing that would turn the economy around would be to purge the government of corruption…Then we would not have farm subsidies and corporatism….The best way to do that is to take their power away.GEE that sounds like just abiding by the constitution.Now if you could only get the military brainwashing out of your head you would be all set.
By votar January 8, 2010 at 4:46 pm
Obama’s radical, statist policies have resulted in more job losses.
Why would anyone trust this quack with their health care?
By BC January 8, 2010 at 7:05 pm
The posting on this forum range from on the money to apparently this person forgot what this post was about. I support and defend businesses that seek to be profitable but CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY must be held. Corporations must realize they have a stake in the communities and nation that they exist and serve in. Manufacturing jobs (to include many IT and Customer Service operations) have moved off-shore with the hope of netting higher profits through reduce labor costs. This make shareholders and other financial stakeholders in that corporation very happy. Yet they do not realize the impact or damage that is being caused throughout every American community.
Do I think NAFTA and other such federal program be removed? At this point in time no. Here’s the reason why, our economy is being setup to produce a new kind of worker. Initially, there were only unskilled labor, semi-skilled labor, skilled labor, trades-techs, and knowledge (college educated) workers. The workforce is about to experience a shift and now is the time for public-private partnerships to be developed to facilitate this process. More and more jobs have a technical aspect and with green jobs on the horizon this will become more evident. The age of the technician is fast approaching and what will come with it is a new form of middle class.
The chances of removing many of the laws that are currently in play are minimum at best. The ideal of a global market is hardwired into the society and corporations are using this advantage to hock their goods everywhere. This includes reducing the cost of producing, transporting, and distributing such goods and services. But I’ll do you one better, if you don’t want to continue the plight of disappearing jobs. Stop purchasing certain goods and services from these corporations. Just stage a giant boycott on a regional scale at minimum and watch what will happen. I’ll tell you the operational side just for fun; they’ll merely ship their inventory elsewhere.
By Brutus January 8, 2010 at 8:35 pm
You free trade defenders need to get out in the real world where there is real suffering. This capitalist horseshit you have been taught by some candy-assed teacher who never had to sweat for a living is intolerable. As if it needs to be explained: the giveaways to big business need to be withdrawn. That alone would bring jobs back to the country. Libertarian philosophy is not something the average worker can afford to pretend to believe. Libertarian philosophy also wants to abolish the national park system and let people come out and lease the land and develop it for their own use. Just what we need, let big business raze the forests and turn all of what’s left of wild America into a plaza full of kiosks and businesses. I just love hearing people who never had to sweat or bleed for their incomes to talk about how great the modern-day third-world sweatshops are and how terrible the New Deal was for people. Yeah, that old FDR was such a communist. He was only trying to save the nation from starving, that’s all. Shame on him, huh? These programs, along with the GI Bill which was started after World War 2, afforded a whole new wave of people to be able to attend college for the first time in US history. The implementation of a minimum wage was made under FDR as well. I suppose people like Caesar object to that, too. Post-war veterans started families and millions of people popularly referred to as ‘baby boomers’ were born. They were those born into a better world than their parents had known; at least a more economically sound one. Due to their new and improved economic status, the generation which spawned the baby boomers was able to give a better life to their children, who became the second generation of a newly empowered population and were able to attend college and avoid a life of drudgery or manual labor if they didn’t want to work in that sort of job. There’s nothing wrong with farming, ditch digging or working in the mill. Unfortunately, you can’t do that when there are no jobs because the jobs are gone. Now the third and fourth generation descended from the ‘greatest generation’ which spawned this DNA disaster wants to take away any rights the people have and restore economic servitude and subservience. There is nothing wrong with having a powerful and influential middle class. Without it you will be faced with 2 classes: an upper uber class and a lower peasant impoverished class. I, for one, would like to see a huge middle class. At least let the people aspire to a greater economic stratum. Bring back the jobs and they can have a realistic hope to climb up. It’s a lot easier to climb from lower-middle class to middle or even upper-middle class than it is to go from homeless caste to the haves and have mores. The reason big business left was because the hurdles were taken down and free trade was all the rage. There should be all types of jobs to aspire to. If you want to work in a factory, you should be able to do that. If you want to work in an office or in the office at the factory, you should be able to do that. If you want to cook in the diner that serves a bunch of people of all collar stripes from the the factory, you should be able to do that, too. Making it cheap and easy for big businesses to pull up stakes and relocate in some third world hellhole should not be allowed. If people really looked at the issue and could choose between paying a nickel or so more for an item and getting good quality or buying some cheap poisoned dog food with melamine or whichever latest chemical showed up in the paint or snack, they’d probably choose to pay a little more. But, in order to do that, they need to have their job which they should have been able to depend on for life if they hadn’t been betrayed by big business and those who let big business get away with the betrayal. Stop blaming unions for all the economic woes. If you don’t want to be in a union, fine: don’t be in a union. There aren’t many unions in the South, where most of you are writing from. Your stupid neighbor who chooses to waste money on what is too expensive did not bring down the economy, either. Anybody with any sense knows not to spend money on what they don’t need and can’t afford. Why don’t you free trade defenders place the blame where it belongs: on those who don’t want to give people a fair wage. No one defended $75 an hour wages for being on a car line. Who ever got that much for that? I’ve heard of them making $25 an hour, which is a lot; but far less than 75. Stop blaming unions and idiot neighbors who would have lost the mcmansion and SUV if they lost their job. The unions are what drove the jobs down to South Carolina as a last stop before NAFTA was passed. After NAFTA, that giant sucking sound was the sound of jobs leaving the lower income South to Mexico. Those items your stupid neighbors bought and couldn’t afford would have been repossessed if they couldn’t pay for them before free trade. If the working class isn’t going to stand up for it’s own interests, who is going to stand up for it? Maybe they’d rather just stand there and defend those who put them out into the cold. It isn’t your fault that Wall Street went on an unsustainable spending spree.
By Brutus January 8, 2010 at 8:59 pm
PS – All this talk about a world of survivalists is unrealistic. You’d better hope that there is no such collapse if you want to keep on living. A lot of people suffer delusions about how their credit card using neighbor brought down the economy all by himself or herself. They don’t recognize who put them where they are today. They also don’t recognize that if the economy collapsed, they would be in a world of hurt. A lot of these tough survivalists are going to have a very tough time before they die, likely with an empty stomach. Watch what happens when power is lost for 1 or 2 days. Imagine this on a national or world scale and it’s an unfathomable recipe for disaster. You’d best hope and pray that such a thing never happens. A lot of these Daniel Boone types are in for a rude awakening if they think they can live and even thrive outside of this system into which they are entirely dependent. Y2K and all that, remember? 50 Daniel Boones would likely turn into 1 within a year. You’d better hope that doesn’t happen. Between the looting, stealing and predators, the store shelves would be empty within a week. The life of most predators would be short, but they could cause a lot of problems before they were finally stopped. After that, no delivery trucks as no paying customers, no gasoline or diesel fuel, no manufacturing or packaging of food and no power to operate the pumps. Please get out of dream world and face the reality of today. Survivalism is not the answer. You can’t make it outside the system because you’re too involved in it. You would be hard pressed to make it outside the system even if the system continues. It’s because of electricity and antibiotics there are so many people today. Removal of those things and there would be a massive die-off, including the frontiersmen wannabes.
By James the Foot Soldier January 8, 2010 at 10:08 pm
Y’all are a bunch of fukin morons. Government has grown exponentially above the population even in last year’s “draconian” state budget.
By definition government spending is wasteful at its best and fraudulent at its worst.
You want robust economic growth? Two simple United States (and every state across the fruited plain) constitutional amendments:
1) government spending shall increase NO MORE than population growth.
2) eliminate the income tax and replace it with the fair tax.
kapisch?
By Brutus January 8, 2010 at 11:03 pm
Your life is your own life and what you do with it is your business. If you want to live with your eyes shut and be grateful for getting screwed, I wish you a happy time with all that.
One side wants to declare fair wages for labor (not $75 an hour for an unskilled worker to work on an auto line, so shut up about that) a horrible solution that screams ‘socialism!’ and ‘protectionism!’ while calling the systematic screwing of labor ‘free trade’ and a good thing. It’s not good to screw the workers and you can say corporatism is bad, but so many here seem to favor it in spite of protests to the contrary. Nobody is asking that some overpaid lazy auto worker be paid $75 an hour. The very idea that anyone defended such a proposal is ludicrous. Besides, no one can show me anyone getting paid that much for just doing that. That sounds like some kind of lie put out by some cheap-labor conservative pundit.
In order to not become like Detroit, it would be good for the people to have work to go to. In Detroit, there are a bunch of people out of work. Stop putting up strawmen to forward arguments in favor of cheap labor conservatism. The crime rate is high and that goes hand in hand with high unemployment. Remember that. It’s not because people don’t go to church or because there are dreaded unions in the vicinity. People who are out of work tend to commit more crimes. Ever wonder why?
All this empty talk about how a new day is coming to the American worker is just a bunch of hot air in summer. There is no new ‘form’ of middle class on the horizon. What kind of form is that? The new middle class will be of less financial means than the middle class of the 70s, 80s or even 90s? Does this new form mean that those who were considered poor in the 1990s will be considered upwardly mobile and even well-to-do in the 2010s?
Read carefully and closely, if you dare: There is nothing coming down the pike for the average worker. There is little better coming down for the above average worker. What Libertarians call ‘liberty’ means fewer opportunities for the man or woman who is trying hard to make an honest living. Once ‘liberty’ according to libertarian and cheap labor conservative standards is implemented, then the average worker is going to know what real servitude and fascism is about. Fascism is the wet dream fantasy of libertarians and cheap labor conservatives. Government is to serve business and business interests. Hint: Business interests do not include fair wages or any kind of healthy working conditions or benefits for the lowly worker.
This empty talk about green jobs will lead nowhere. Before NAFTA was passed, a lot of people were talking about how great it would be because it would benefit the people all over and we could buy those Mexican goods like their rugs, sombreros and whatever garbage most of us never buy. The Mexicans, of course, would flock to buy those American high-dollar products, infusing jillions of dollars into the American economy to buy our high-dollar stuff since there would no longer be a tariff. How’s that working out for you? This NAFTA has put so many Mexican farmers out of work for several reasons. One is that the Mexican corn farmers can’t compete with already subsidized US corn. Then the Mexican farmers and farmworkers risk their lives trying to get into the US to find work and NAFTA has been an all-around failure. NAFTA has always been a failure for the average worker in all 3 major North American countries.
About the same time, the economists were forecasting how the young people of that day were in for such a great future and it was going to be even better than the economic times of the 1960s and how it was time for them to stop complaining and just wait for the new economic oasis to spring forth.
The green jobs are a fantasy created by speechwriters or some other liar types to take heat off politicians who are doing nothing to bring jobs back to the nation and who will be out of office if there is any collective day of reckoning ‘But, you said…’ Green jobs are meant to fool people into thinking that 1) the leaders care about the environment and 2) the leaders are doing something about it by actually giving lip service to it and so 3) the tree-huggers are encouraged to believe it and not be skeptical and then 4) the mindless masquerading as intellectuals are so proud to parrot what they heard on NPR or read in the Business section of the newspaper and how to make excuses for the continued dissolution of the working class.
There will be no green jobs revolution. The only people who are going to benefit are a few who have marketing skills and even fewer self-taught technicians who are able to grasp the technical aspects of a technical trade. Believe it or not, everyone is not adept at mechanics and wiring schematics.
The new kind of middle class (whatever that means) is fine and good if they have work. But, let’s talk about now. What about the people here and now who have no place to live and nowhere to turn to? All they really need is gainful employment, which has been allowed to abandon them. Nobody is talking about $75 an hour assembly line workers or people who refuse to work. In spite of the blame the poor salve that people use as a first line of defense against the unemployed: a lot of good workers have been put out of work. If good work will be here in a few more years (yeah, right), people still need to be able to support themselves today. Corporations expect people to buy their products. The people can’t afford to buy those products when the corporations have moved out of the communities where they used to have production facilities. A co-dependency was established and is sustainable, in spite of cheap labor arguments against paying workers a decent wage. The Guatemalans and Chinese will not buy that crap because they can and have always done without. Besides, they’re being paid a lot less for the same work in worse conditions. The workers in the US who were put out of work would buy it, but they can’t afford to pay for it.
If I’m wrong about these so-called green jobs, I will be glad to eat my share of humble pie, even if we never meet on this forum again. I would LOVE to see those who are seeking work to have a job so they could put food on the table and be able to pay for other luxuries like a roof overhead and clothes, shoes and transport so they could keep going back and forth to work. I’m sure there are people on this board who will disagree with that and call me dumb and a socialist for those evil dreams of mine.
It isn’t patriotic or in your best interests to have to scrounge food from trash cans or in the back alleys because you lost your job and can’t find anything to eat. To these libertarians and cheap labor conservatives, it’s all about making the money for the business. Labor be damned.
By Liberty For Me January 9, 2010 at 12:10 am
Scary how many Americans are pro-communist and of those that are,most are in self denial.
Brutus go petal your crazy somewhere else.We don’t need more people that are for the good of the collective and Stalinist diatribes.We have a president pushing it already..at least till 2012.
By Brutus January 9, 2010 at 9:47 am
The last question in this matter is whether or not profitability is a higher priority than producing a decent and durable product. It used to be that people took pride in what they produced. Your name and reputation depended on the goods you produced. Today’s businesses don’t seem to have that ethic. They’re all about profits and shares. Anyone who would spit on the community they sell in and expect people to buy their products must be dreaming, unless everyone is marching to the beat of business is good and whatever is best for business is best for America. If a company wants to enjoy a good reputation and have a good customer base, at one time in history they would have considered trying to make themselves palatable to the community. One way is not to run off for the sake of a quick and easy profit.
Fine, liberty for yourself and no one else. Let’s let Liberty for itself work without benefits or a minimum wage. Remove all the protections and let him work in a sweat shop for whatever the boss deems appropriate. Let’s do away with another libertarian boogeyman: OSHA. We don’t need no stinkin’ oversight on working conditions. Breathing all the white dust in the mill is good for you. I guess liberty for itself has enough money in a trust somewhere or is in the right monied family to be able to afford to hold onto these silly ideals of libertarianism, which is little better than a pot smoking republican. The real insanity is people who embrace ideology against their own interests. Nobody alive in the Western hemisphere is a Stalinist. If your shady leader were a Stalinist, he might have reversed NAFTA. That ain’t going to happen. At least use the right names if you’re going to call people names.
By Liberty For Me January 9, 2010 at 11:25 am
Yes that’s right,abolish the minimum wage.What is the teenage unemployment right now?? So lets start with that.You think especially in this economy that no job is better than $6.00 an hour?What if your homeless??A job does not mean it is the only source of income…what if its a joint effort in the household,teenagers cant help or make money for themselves because we are loosing jobs because of minimum wage?How many jobs are not made because they are not a feasible at the minimum wage?
All socialist feel good agendas sound good.Because they offer something for supposedly free.It is human nature to accept something that would improve their life.The thing is ,it does not.There is no free lunch.Every socialist idea has a consequence of stealing from someone else and in the end making life much harder for the ones it is supposed to help.
You think you are some kind of deep thinker….socialism is a very shallow idea.It does not take a whole lot of gray matter to see through it.Unfortunately you have not acquired enough of it yet.How old are you Brutus?? just curious…
You are either a college student,someone who has never had a private sector job or maybe just shallow.I am betting on one of the first options
By Jonnie January 9, 2010 at 4:32 pm
Just weighing in here. There is such a thing as a free lunch. The recent Goldman Sachs and friends give aways as well as corporate expense accounts. Socialists steal and all others are always honest? What about the homeless wages? In every case, the homeless have partners to help them out so if they make 2 dollars an hour, they will do well because of their team effort with those who cooperate with them. That sounds like socialism. I guess they don’t deserve a minimum wage, either. Just curious: how many jobs are there that are not made due to the minimum wage? Fitsnews readers want to know. Paying a living wage is a bad thing? If you are the one who has to pay it. We’d better all volunteer to quit taking money from work in our pay or they might do away with us. Maybe if we ask them to reduce our pay 20 or 30%, they might not lay us all off. We’re guilty for taking money for doing work. It’s all stealing and now I know I’m a burden on my employer. Fair pay is socialism. Socialism is shallow. Greed is deep and good.
By Liberty For Me January 9, 2010 at 5:25 pm
Jonnie..to answer you.
Goldman sachs is hardly a free lunch.The money that was paid to banks will be taken from us in the way of inflation or theft of our money value.Money always has to come from somehwere and in this case we are robbed of our money to give to rich investors.
Socialism is to take by force from one person to give to another.You think you are not rich or middle glass maybe so you think it is proper to steal from them.What if the state thinks you dont need two cars in your family and takes one of two you have to give to a neighor that has none .Is that right?? Is that not stealing??How is your money any less peoperty than your car?..makes sense?
As far as wages..If it is between not having a job or your job paying 20% less.You would rather go hungry than work for less??That makes sense to you?
Every one wants the most they can get for any job.But,if it is a free country ,then you see if someone will pay you more.If you dont want the job you find another.
People should get paid by their talent and what they are worth to the person offering the job.If there is not enough money for the job at a mandated rate the job does not exist.Who benefits from that??
I am not sure even how you can get paid unfairly…As far as I know we still have the right to refuse jobs.
Please tell me how I am wrong….
By jonnie January 9, 2010 at 7:15 pm
There was a free lunch for Goldman Sachs. They got the lunch and the taxpayer was left holding the bag. In other corporate news, office workers are told to bring their own toilet paper to save the company money while doing the accounts for a big company party that featured alcoholic beverages as part of the menu. Business execs get free lunches charged to their account and that’s perfectly fair as far as most conservatives feel about it. Conservatives never care if the poor get sheared, so long as the conservatives themselves don’t have to pay for anything. Huge incentives given to businesses and businesspeople for a stadium or for moving a business into a jurisdiction who then abandon the stadium or industrial park while the taxpayers have to make up the balance. Even Focus on the Family has taken great advantage of property tax loopholes while slamming the idea that anyone should get any kind of welfare or food stamps. Dobson publicly claimed how using a loophole had saved his Focus on the Family cult millions of dollars. Given a choice, I’m sure that every company would settle on the magic number of 20% reduction. Very soon, you’ll find yourself making 50%, 60 then 70% less and maybe 90% less after a little collusion on the part of industrialists. After all, what are you going to do? If you have to work, you take what you can get and learn to be thankful for getting it. It’s difficult to feel sorry for this sort of corporate defense. If one boss is working people for $4 an hour, with or without collusion, the price will go down soon enough. The $4 an hour jobs will be filled and the other jobs will soon be filled by those willing to work for $2.50, $2.25, $1.75, $1.50 and finally people will be fighting for the .75 an hour jobs because that’s all there can be. You can’t refuse a job when you need a job to make it.
By brutus January 9, 2010 at 7:51 pm
Boo-hoo-hoo! Boo-hoo-hoo! Slurp! Snort! Waaaaaaaaahhh!! Liberty said I think I’m smart. Boo-hoo-hoo! Poor widdle Liberty for itself only feels put upon because that bad bwutus calls him out on his horseshit Economic Darwinism. Anyone who has worked in the pwivate sector wouldn’t be defending it so much. They would be holding their bweath wowwying they would have work in the future as cuts to the bone were continuawwy made to keep the bottom wine sowid. And now widdle wiberddy has to lash out against people who don’t agwee with him and make all kinds of far out accusations. Stawinist? Sociawist? You must be joking. Don’t wowwy, wiberddy baby. You won’t have to wowwy that any of that bad sociawist weasel’s powicies are ever impwemented. Awwwwwwwww.
I never called anyone ‘sociopath’, but if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck and smells like a duck… I guess my cwime has been to disagwee with wiberddy and it’s lashing out at those who spend their time thinking about what’s good for people and not only businesses. In widdle wiberddy’s world, humane = socialist and sociopath = bootstrap Libertarian.
I never said I thought I was a deep thinker or smart. The only thing I’m going to tell you is that I tell you the truth. The truth is that we’re all in a lot of trouble and there is no new middle class emerging as technicians and to believe so is to fool oneself. The education system is not changing to accommodate the new technology and change everything. The education system has been and continues to be all about milking as much money out of students as possible. It’s more of a business than a way to educate people. My only concern is that people have what they need and if others label that as socialism, so be it. I’m as socialist as those who run food banks so that people who have nothing to eat might have a chance to not go around hungry all day and night. I’d hate to think what would be said about those who work in the food bank or who work in the soup kitchen by these bootstrap Libertarians. The rest of you may now return to your promotion of how great it would be if only the minimum wage were to be abolished and let government get out of the way so that the common worker can make less money.
By Liberty For Me January 9, 2010 at 7:53 pm
So……”all conservatives don’t care”. Which I assume by your language means all business owners are evil….
So…who would you like to work for?? Who in your perfect world runs business?
I again assume that would be a government controlled company. Right ? To make sure that all is good for the collective of the worker…
Is there anybody out there reading this??? If so, please explain to me how this is not communism…How is this wording of a free republic.?. Wake up people .This is the propaganda that has been indoctrinated to our children
By BC January 9, 2010 at 11:59 pm
Interesting how this entire forum has shifted gears in relation to minimum wage, survivalist mentality or the realities of such, and unions. This is about job loss….job loss. The minimum wage increase over the last few years did not cause job loss. The minimum wage is established by the Fair Labor Standards Act and enforced by the Department of Labor. Many states (mostly northern states) feel the federal minimum wage is inadequate for any person to sustain themselves or a family. In which, many have higher rates to attempt to compensate but in most cases it does not. It is easy to throw stones until you are the target. In Charlotte, NC the homeless population is roughly 90% employed but cannot afford housing. What is wrong with this picture? Do these people not work each and everyday? Do they not have responsibilities and needs that any basic human has? Forget about what you’ve seen on the streets of Columbia or whatever metropolitan city you’ve visited. I’m talking about the working poor. How do you solve this problem?
How about another one for the ages, who do you blame for the economic crisis that started December 2007? To hard? Ok, I’ll give you a hint….its not government! NOW GO!
Lastly, unions have a history that many of you in the South do not understand. In fact, do any of you know about the Uprising of ’34? I’m gonna challenge many of you to do something very unique. Do some research on this one. You’ll be surprised what you find out! Unions do not have a strong footing in the South due to this incident. Lets shed some light on something real fast, while were at this, SC has the lowest average wage in the southeast. Why is that?
Ok…back on topic. Job loss is being spurred by what? NOW GO!
By Liberty For Me January 10, 2010 at 12:55 pm
OK BC….So why not make it $15.00 an hour??
Tell me about how the unions made Detroit prosper???…How do think the people in Michigan feel now ?…
So South Carolina would be in good shape if most had union jobs here??
How is it companies would thrive if they had unions here,if they are not booming with no forced labor ageements now.Paying workers more increases availble jobs??
Is there anyone in their right mind that could make these statments work?? of course not.
Communism is not the answer.If you think it is ,show me where it has proven itself to better an economy or a standard of living.OK now say how you are not promoting communism because you are calling it something else.What a worker state?? The Peoples government??
One thing it isnt is freedom and Liberty!!
By BC January 10, 2010 at 10:52 pm
Hi Liberty for Me,
The issue that Detroit faced is not the unions singular but that the entire system had problems from all angles. Many cities in the northeast are operating fine with and without unions. For all intense purposes, unions can spur management to work more closely with workers to discourage unionization. This is in indirect benefit of a union at another facility or plant. To reduce or eliminate a union being formed, management will raise wages and provide other fringe benefits that can head off such action.
Now on the issue of communism….which I said nothing about. Take along look around you. I mean a real look around from every end of the globe. How many countries do you see operating under a communistic regime? There aren’t that many because most of the people have given up on this textbook crap fostered by Karl Marx. In real world application, communism does not work due to certain ingrained tendencies in the human mind. Personally, I do not feel communism is an issue worth discussing because the proof thoroughly exist that it does not work. But what I do believe is that South Carolina needs to wake up and stop being the dumping ground of low wages for the nation. Do I think unions can help? Well, with the proper leadership it could. Because apparently, what SC is doing right now is not working.
By Liberty For Me January 11, 2010 at 1:42 pm
BC….How would unions bring jobs???Such a statement is ludicrous. To build a work force, all we have to do is make it work friendly…Like majorly reducing taxes.
Communism is symantics.Communism and facism are all forms of socialism.
To counter what you said.How many countries are free??..none..How many are socialist? all of them,including the U.S…The only thing that people hold on to that gives them hope is elections.If you think that the elections are not controled then we can fix our country.If you think the elections are rigged by really just having one party and it is promoted through media..Then we are screwed.The jury for me is out.I hope we can change it.
http://www.thefoxnation.com/judge-andrew-napolitano/2010/01/11/judge-andrew-napolitanos-constitution-and-freedom-part-1
By robert barrows January 16, 2010 at 2:24 am
Dear FITSNews:
I saw your blog about “that giant sucking sound” and I thought you might want to take a look at a
poem I wrote called “It used to be made in America.” The poem is about the loss of jobs and the consequences of job losses due to outsourcing.
You can see it online at http://www.itusedtobemadeinamerica.com.
Sincerely,
Robert Barrows
http://www.barrows.com
http://www.itusedtobemadeinamerica.com
By Hilary January 20, 2010 at 1:44 am
Yeah, free-trade extremism is what got us into this mess. Free-trade is why American factory workers are literally competing against five-year-old orphans in Pakistan. Free-trade is a scourge. Businesses like it, not because it enables them to export, but because it breaks unions and results in cheaper labor and bigger profits. Free-trade is a menace to civilized living conditions and should be replaced by fair-trade immediately.