United States Is Appearently

[unicorn]

We are living in an interestening time. No doubt.

My vacation is nearly ended, five weeks of leisure and a lot of time to think about all sorts of things...

...and I have come to the conclusion that we are watching the upcoming fall of United States of America.

The Internet plays a role in this. For the first time people not knowing each other can find other of the same way of thinking, and organize. We can see quite some political action. Now this action is formed more by groups that act upon specific matters rather than joining a political party.

Starting somewhere with the Vietnam War (In Vietnam known as the American War) the different US administrations have effectively built a solid base for those that get irritated and upset by the american foreign affairs. To me it seems as not many, in percentage that is, americans understand what others think about the US and the political role the US has on Earth. This has made it easy for american companies to take advantage of cheap raw material and cheap labour in other countries.

What a horror to discover that some start to protest.

Now when the elections are getting closer you can see some activity here i this forum. Kerry sucks according to some. So does Bush (known to most already of course).
According to me they both suck. It really doesn't matter who wins the election. It's just different names but mainly the same politics. This is looking at the US from the outside. (Your internal affairs are up to you americans and there might be differences between Kerry and Bush, I don't know that much about it.)

The interestening thing is to see a great nation slowly die without caring to discuss it, not to mention the reasons for why this is happening, or act upon it. I might be very pessimistic but I see, not very far from now, a long period of chaos in all imaginable ways.

The great land of freedom and hope doesn't permit a truly free speech any more, masked as terror prevention anyone can get their mail and phones tapped. Privacy is a joke and encryption is suspected. From my distant point of view many americans find this good and have no problems with the Act of Patriotism. Economics are totally out of hand, democracy is not longer important, a big share of the population is in jail and the administration (whatever it is called) keep to help the big companies to earn more, wherever that will take us all.

Note 1: I'm not trying to debate anything here. The above is just my own reflections and thoughts. I'm not very happy with them and so just needed to put them into words.

Note 2: I'm not native englishspoken. Please bare with my language.

Take care out there!

[wase4711]

interesting observations guys...
without getting into a heated political discussion, I will just say that the US does seem to be moving towards being run in the "corporate boardrooms", and the "gap" between the "have's" and the "have nots" is growing wider..It sickens me that we spend billions and billions on helping countries all over the world, but kids go hungry here in America..
And, our health care industry is the biggest embarassment of all, one that forces older and sick people to choose between medicine and food..
I'm not sure what can reverse this trend, and I hope it doesn't take another "Civil War" for this trend to change, but one never knows..

No question this country is nothing like it was, even 20 years ago...

[BigHead50]

hello BetaONE

I TOTALLY agree with unicorn, rikytik, and wase4711....

I have been very depressed at what this country has become, and I am almost certain that there is going to be very bad trouble, probably in the next year or so, that will stun the world, and start a cascade of events that no one ever dreamed could happen to this "once" fine country...

It has become an empire of big business, and they have been useing the world to get as much money as they can at the expense of Everything else, they polute the air and water in other countrys, and use almost slave labor abroad to make items to be sold here, they have poluted our water and air so much that almost every lake and river in the united states has very high mercury counts in the fish, and raised the cost of fuel, health care, electricity, food, and Medicine so high that most older people have to decide wheather to eat or take thier meds....

there are less and less jobs here, but the empire, I mean gov. keeps fixing the numbers, and even then, if you do the math, we are losing about 30-50 thousand jobs a month, but the "man" comes on TV and brags about how his tax cuts to the rich are working, Hey Yea, for the rich.....

The world, let alone A LOT of us here in this country, have had just about enough of the pain and hunger of "big business" or "fortune 500" = screw all the working men and women, old persons, and children....Give me ALL your Money, you don't need it, your to busy woking 80 hours a week for minimum wage trying to eat.

If I sound angry, I am.....

I am NOT a traitor, I am a Very Proud God Fearing American that is very tired of being Screwed..........

The "TRAITORS" of this country are indeed the big business that have taken over because of GREED......

my 2 for now

BigHead50

[Firefox]

Quote:

Originally posted by BigHead50@Sep 7 2004, 10:54 PM
there are less and less jobs here, but the empire, I mean gov. keeps fixing the numbers, and even then, if you do the math, we are losing about 30-50 thousand jobs a month, but the "man" comes on TV and brags about how his tax cuts to the rich are working, Hey Yea, for the rich.....

The world, let alone A LOT of us here in this country, have had just about enough of the pain and hunger of "big business" or "fortune 500" = screw all the working men and women, old persons, and children....Give me ALL your Money, you don't need it, your to busy woking 80 hours a week for minimum wage trying to eat.

Yes it truly is Amazing, We bought our house in 1998 and where we live, our house if we were to sell it we could sell it for 41% more than we paid for it in 98' The cost of housing in general has skyrocketed (except property rent/lease monthly rent has stayed kind of close to what it was in 98.

With taking the Cost of housing in to the Picture : How is it that Home ownership is at an ALL TIME HIGH ( during a time when this president has "lost more jobs than any president in 75 years)

This president inheirted the Job loss and the Recession of the DOT.COM Bust and the
All the JOBS lost to 9/11. I rember looking for another tech Job before 9/11 they we not out there. I was supposed to be on a plane for a Job Orientaion/Training in Chicago on 9/11/2001.

It is intesting that NAFTDA was signed into Being not by Bush but by Ex-President Clintion.

I agree that the Fourtune 500 are screwing the Little guy, I got screwed by a Large multi-national company.

Presently America is larger than it was and has a Larger work force than it had when
Clintion was relected, the differnce in unemployemt numbers now and then 1/10thj of a percentage point. Is it becasue we are using precentage rather than real numbers ?

The number of undocumented workers in the country has increased by about 5 million (est) since 1996. I BLAME EVERYONE FOR THIS, but Neither KERRY or BUSH will do anything about this, 8 years ago you could make $15-20 an hour ( a honset living wage to support a Family) These jobs we'nt picking corn or cotton or berries, it was Framing, drywalling, and other construction Jobs now the top end is around $11-12 an hour. Can you guess why?

Who needs health care the Undocumented workers get it for FREE.

My kid sister ended up in a bad situation when her husband left her flappin in the wind with 2 kids and no child support, well she could'nt pay all the bills on her own when she went to get some social services she found out that she made $2 to much to qualify for any social services, but the funny thing is that people with the only form of ID was a Consular Matricular card, was given food stamps, section 8 housing and some cash with her 7 anchor babies in tow. They refered her (my sister) to the food bank, guess who she ran into at the food bank, That is right the mother with the seven kids, but alas perhaps this woman and her family was under perscution in there home country. I could get bitter but I chose to be better. My sister is in a better situation now, still no child support, but she found a Job with better benfits and wages. The whole family ended up kickin to help her (kind of the way it should be any how)

But when people with "social services " are eating like kings: Steak and Seafood
Have you ever seen people with a grocery cart full of food, then whip out the Food Stamps to pay for $3-400 worth of food, and you are struggling to live within your means?

America is chaniging.
Are the Children of these Hard working "..cough cough Immigrants" going to have the same work ethic?? are they going to only be filling the " low end jobs that no one wants so we have to import the labor" or are they going to get a tax funded higher ed degree, then under affirmative action are they going to get prefential treatment and the Job at the expense of a 5th-6th Generation American immigrant, (BTW my blood daughters fall into the Affimatvie action catagory because of the heriatge of my wife, their mom)
They say that 1 in 30 living in America are doing so illegally, this is not going to change for the better itstead I think that it is only going to increase, when we hear that K-12 education is broke ($), that health care has gone through the roof, that wages are going down, etc, etc, etc. It is'nt ALL the fault of big business,
It will not change so get over it. Until they come for your Job, your house, etc, we will not do anything to change it.

I hate statics too, they pick and choose, to skew.

By the way my wife is a Legal Immigrant and a Naturalized US Citizen.

I feel like we are being slowly invaded.

My .02 cents, I will live with it, one great thing about America is that we are resourceful and inventive. We will adapt,

All said Americas poor live better than 95% of the rest of the Planet.

I have lived 2 years in a Third world country, taken cold showers, boiled my drinking
water, had electricty on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturdays. Running water on thoose days (electric pump) So I am not speaking in blind ignorance.


When you think Empire the new Empire on the Rise is China.!


Peace Out.

[rikytik]

My son in law moved from Toronto to Dallas nearly 6 years ago to take a pretty good job as a network maintenance guy. After 3 years , the company was bought out and his division closed down. He's been without work for nearly 3 years.

My daughter went back to work, as a trainee for Walmart, the plague of NorthAmerica. For more than a year she has worked 60 hour weeks as an assistant manager, meaning she gets no overtime and gets paid for 48 hours work. The turnover in her store is 150% and she does all the hiring and training. This store basically lives off the fact that it caused all small businesses in the local area to close down, and may be the only "game in town" for work. Walmart is destroying much of middle Amerian life and nobody in Washington seems to care. They take pot shots at guys like Billy Gates, but the rest is simply corporate payola and the changing of life as we used to know it in North America.

What's next?

Looks like a club here: Maybe what's next is we all go out, have a beer and shake up the town. <grin>

[JacKDynne]

Jobs and snow jobs
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomass...s20040909.shtml


Jobs have become a big issue in this election year -- which means that it is optimistic to expect a rational discussion.

Nothing is discussed more irrationally than "outsourcing." It is obviously completely misleading to discuss how many jobs American companies are sending to other countries without even mentioning how many jobs foreign countries are outsourcing to Americans.

Yet those who are making the most noise about outsourcing seldom say a word about the in-sourcing of jobs from other countries. But it is the net balance that matters.

Maybe those statistics are hard to get. But you certainly won't get them if you are not even looking for them and avoid even mentioning them.

Official statistics published last March in the Survey of Current Business showed an increase of 2.8 million jobs outsourced by American-owned multinational corporations during a quarter of a century ending in 2001. Over that same span of time, there was an increase of 4.7 million jobs outsourced to Americans by foreign-owned multinational corporations.

These numbers go back and forth over time. But they don't even exist in the rhetoric of those denouncing outsourcing.

Any laws passed to stop the outsourcing of American jobs to other countries are almost certain to bring laws in other countries to stop the outsourcing of jobs to Americans.

We had something like that during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when international trade restrictions were imposed in order to save jobs during a period of record unemployment. Countries around the world did the same thing, with the net result of a sharp reduction of international trade and a needless prolonging of the depression.

Many policies designed to "save jobs" have effects that are the opposite of their intentions. Germany has some of the strongest job protection laws in the world -- and double-digit unemployment rates are common in Germany.

Job protection laws add to the cost of labor. These laws may save the jobs of those who already have jobs but the passage of time brings new young job applicants into the labor market and the high cost of labor means that employers have incentives to get their work done by substituting machines for workers or by shifting to producing products that require less labor.

Countries in the European Union as a whole have stronger job protection laws than the United States -- and higher unemployment rates because their rate of job creation is much slower.

On the other end of the spectrum, there has probably never been any place with a more unrestricted labor market than Hong Kong when it was a British colony. Unemployment rates of one or two percent were common in Hong Kong then. After China took over Hong Kong, it created various new benefits for workers -- and unemployment rates hit 7 percent, not high by European standards, but a multiple of what it had been for years.

What all this says, in various ways, is that there is no free lunch -- not even during election years.

Senator John Kerry says that he would create 10 million jobs if he were President. But Presidents don't create jobs.

The most a President can do is have policies that allow private employers to create jobs. Foolish policies can destroy jobs and prolong a recession or depression but Presidents cannot "grow the economy," no matter what political rhetoric says.

Of course the government can hire more people or favor a particular industry in one way or another, and thereby cause employment to be greater in that particular industry. But the government has no money of its own, and the money that it takes from the private economy to increase its own hiring or to promote hiring in some favored industry reduces the money available to hire people elsewhere in the economy.

President Bush's tariffs on imported steel may have saved some jobs in the steel industry but estimates are that the higher price of steel that resulted cost several times as many jobs in industries that use steel.

With jobs, as with anything else, it is the net result that counts -- and there is no free lunch, not even in election years.

[redkitty]

Quote:

But the government has no money of its own, and the money that it takes from the private economy to increase its own hiring or to promote hiring in some favored industry reduces the money available to hire people elsewhere in the economy.

I'm so tired of hearing this line of gussied-up crap. Like most market fundamentalist/libertarian notions, it sounds good but falls apart unless you restrict the argument to an artificial set of assumptions which don't match up very well to reality. And the fact that a lot of credentialed people push it doesn't make it any more true.

(Nothing personal here, by the way. To be fair, I fell for this stuff too in my younger days. For instance, at one time I entertained the idea that government employees don't really pay any taxes, since "the government has no money of its own.")

The map is not the territory. Money is not wealth.

Money is only a marker, a stand-in for real wealth in goods and services. It is essentially created out of thin air, either directly by the government or under governmental authority (Federal Reserve). In a well run economy, the money supply will have at least a loose relation to changes in actual wealth due to changes in productivity and population, but you shouldn't get in the habit of thinking the two things are equivalent.

Like private industry, government has overhead, but services and goods provided through the labor of government employees are wealth that is just as real as anything produced by the other parts of an economy. Roads. Medical research. Public health services. Satellite data. Weather forecasts. Geological and oceanographic surveys. National Parks. Public education. I could go on all night, but you get the idea, yes?

Overhead and wastage aside, the money that goes to government employees represents real wealth that is produced by those employees. And contrary to free-market mythology, the so-called private economy is not necessarily more efficent or less wasteful than government, even without considering the social costs of cheap labor. For instance, compare the 2-3% cost of running a single-payer system like Medicare with the average 15% (as high as 50%!) of private health insurance.

Forgive my little outburst, but I'm just sick of the same tired, smug right-wing rhetoric. Like smarmy jokes about Post Office efficiency. In my opinion the Post Office still does a pretty damn good job, but before the Nixon gang tried to privatize it in the 70's, the U.S. Postal Service was considered one of the crown jewels of the nation. Ever see the 1947 movie "Miracle on 34th Street"? The whole climax of the plot rested on the Post Office's reputation for reliability. The plot device worked because it was based on real public opinion.

- end of rant -

[kamikazee]

I'm still trying to figure out when the presidents responsibility was to create jobs, the president cannot create jobs, the policies set forth and the corporations themselves are responsible for creating jobs. And lets tax the self made billionaires lets punish them for being successful and making money, just because they saw an oppertunity and took advantage of it and built it, lets screw them first, we'll slap so many new taxes on them that they will have to close stores, and fire employees to pay the taxes somewhere else. Now it's Wal-Marts fault they are squeezing out all the small guys, no what scares everyone about wal-mart is they are non-union and thats whats scares the others, they have to contend with unions. There are alot of things that could be better no doubt, but someone to suggest that they take more of my money is ridiculous. YEa lets have global healthcare, why not fix the system first, get the illegals off of it, get them out of the schools, lets enforce the laws we now have and then see where we stand. I spent 13 years in the Army and there was a little known secret when the wall came down I was there and even have a little piece, no one really understood what it meant, well what it meant was a bunch of un-happy West Germans who didn't want to see the wall come down, because when it did every single person in the east was entitled to 1500-2500 marks, it bankrupted alot of system to include their retirement. We need to fix the system we have in place first.

[tubebuoy]

"Like private industry, government has overhead, but services and goods provided through the labor of government employees are wealth that is just as real as anything produced by the other parts of an economy."

Nice try Kittybuoy!

But a capitalist business model depends on PROFIT! Government does NOT! The private sector invests money in order to make MORE MONEY. The government does NOT! Making more money is GOOD! Losing money is NOT!

To be sure there is a ballance to be maintained. There is no profit in maintaining interstate infrastructures but these infrastuctures expedite commerce which allows the private sector to function more efficiently and therefore maintain or increase profit margins.

Before I close I'd like to paraphrase Abrham Lincoln (yes, class warfare has been going on since the dawn of humanity) "Destroying the rich will not benefit the poor"

Right now, today, US unemployment is at near historic lows! PLEASE compare the employment rate in the US to ANY euro economy you wish and get back to me


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