The Return Of The Giant Sucking Sound

SFGATE.com (The SF Chronicle) ^ | 02/09/04 | Adam Sparks

[sfwarrior]

Since 2001, the United States has lost 2.8 million manufacturing jobs. Hello! Is anybody listening? This is a crisis. Our house is on fire, and few in Congress are paying attention. And, at the rate things are going, the only jobs even college graduates will be able to get will be in the service industry. That's political lingo for flipping hamburgers.

[LibertyAndJusticeForAll]

All the De-regulation in the world won't compete with 20 cents an hour labor.

[LibertyAndJusticeForAll]

"...the president is busily touting the increase in "service sector" jobs. Yes, these jobs did in fact increase. However, properly translated, that'll mean we will soon be able to all sit around in a circle and shine each other's shoes."

The problem is the shift from high-wage jobs to low-wage jobs. Lots of Americans with degrees in IT and Engineering are working way below their previous wage level; unable to find work anywhere but at Home Depot, etc.

[Beck_isright]

"The economy is the number #1 issue in the nation and W ignores this at his own peril."

This is very true, but I'm positive I have a different manner to cure this problem from that of the left wing San Fran writer.

[Euro-American Scum]

Bush is never going to live that saying down.

"Immigrants will only be used to fill the jobs Americans don't want to do." -- Consider it Dubya's version of "Read my lips. No new taxes."

[LibertyAndJusticeForAll]

"...the president is busily touting the increase in "service sector" jobs. Yes, these jobs did in fact increase. However, properly translated, that'll mean we will soon be able to all sit around in a circle and shine each other's shoes."

There has been a significant shift of high-wage jobs to low-wage jobs. Americans with degrees in IT and engineering are working at Home Depot because they trained Indians to replace them (some with the threat of losing severance pay if they did not train them).

[handk]

After reading several of your posts, I think you should change your screen name to "King of the Run-On Sentence".

"Once there was this time at band camp and we had to play a song and the funny thing is we didn't have the music for that song so we played the song but we didn't have the music for the song but we played it anyway?"

[Ciexyz]

This topic is definitely a cause for concern. I personally will vote for Bush because of homeland security concerns. But I know many others who won't.

[jpsb]

Damn the grammar police are here, I'd better turn on the spell checker. usually my tag line protects me, but this cop is persistent.

[Ciexyz]

Yikes - amazon.com outsources its email response center to India? Well slap me silly.

amazon is one of my favorite sites. I now renege on my pledge, formerly stated on FR, to boycott companies that outsource call centers. I like getting a 20% to 30% discount on mail order books.

[handk]

...Magma Carter in what 1260ish? Europe was still very much feudal 300 years later. And remeber the rights of the Magma Carter...

"Magma Carter"? What the hell is a "Magma Carter"? Has Jimmy liquified into lava?

You know, if you had only typed it once, I'd chalk it up to a simple typo. But you typed it twice. Twice!

[jpsb]

Yea, me too, the war comes first. But ... I am hoping for a real conservative party to rise from the ashes of the GOP real soon.

[jpsb]

I knew you'd find me, what can I say, as a writer I suck and I admit it. Now I am a damn fine programmer and a good scotch drinker and a not so shabby mathematician. But a writer I ain't. Ypu should have seen my posts on usenet or FR before preview. Bad. very bad, which was how I got my tagline.

[Veracious Poet]

"A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated [in the Federal Reserve System]. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men.... We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world-no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men."[Woodrow Wilson, the traitor who signed the Federal Reserve Act]

[jpsb]

Woodrow Wilson a worst president then even the horrid LBJ or the tricky Dick Nixon. When I was in high school we were taught what a great president WW was. It wasn't until much later, when I could think for myself that I realized just how much damage WW did to our Republic. Woodrow Wilson killed the Republic.

[reluctantwarrior]

The middle class as defined by land owners or merchants wasn't invented in the USA, but yes the codification of our pro individual property rights did lead to a massive broadening of the middle class and that is paramount to explain the scope of prosperity in the USA vice most other countries. But agian the phenomenom of middle class existed in other countries albeit not large middle class segments prior to our founding. I agree we took off post 1789 but so did other countries who grew away from fuedal systems and embraced individual property rights, which include Germany Italy France Netherlands and others.

[reluctantwarrior]

From King of the run on sentence to the person with nothing but self important grammar posts; get a life

[YankeeReb]

If a Democrat makes the immigration issue a major cause, he's going to get a lot of votes from people who have felt that they have been sold out to foreign interests.

Yes, all Kerry & the dims have to do is complain about the inaction by the repubs, they don't really need to promise anything. The implied message will be GWB doesn't care but we do. Once the dems are in power then the borders will be thrown wide open, but then it will be too late, the electorate will have been suckered again. Bush ignores this issue at his own peril.

[Lazamataz]

Lots of Americans with degrees in IT and Engineering are working way below their previous wage level; unable to find work anywhere but at Home Depot, etc.

I cannot speak to the engineering people, but I can about the IT folk. Lots of people simply should NOY have been in IT in the late 90's, but were lured into it because of outrageously high pay scales and remarkably little skills-checking. I worked with some of the very worst IT people I have ever seen in the late '90's. The bad ones have dropped out of the profession, and I've seen a marked increase in competancy since then.

[Walkin Man]

FORMULA: Outsource JOBS (+) MIGRANT LABOR INVASION (=) EXTINCTION OF AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS.

I'm glad to see somebody else has realized that both Rats and Repub's have declared war on the ever-shrinking American middle-class.

It started with Bubba, Algore and NAFTA and has accelerated greatly under President Bush and his super job killing / wage depressing illegal alien amnesty proposal.

[Agamemnon]

The numbers are employment-population ratio, different from unemployment numbers.

Funny. That's not what your post #79 said now is it?

Your post said "employment," not this new, unprecedented, if not contrived term, "employment-population ratio."

Care to make some sense of what is currently an irrelevant distinction even in response to that earlier post?