Posted on 01/29/2007 11:47:35 AM PST by DredTennis
Laura Ingraham, the willowy, conservative radio talker, really nailed it. She was speaking last Friday night as part of a panel discussion at a "conservative summit" in Washington held by National Review magazine. Ingraham said she was impressed by Jim Webb's televised rebuttal to President Bush's State of the Union address, particularly the part that hit on economics. In his talk, the newbie U.S. senator from Virginia launched a populist attack on the Bush economic years, railing about growing income inequality, skyrocketing CEO pay, outsourcing, and the so-called middle-class squeeze. Although Webb's stern speaking manner and improbable hair are easy to mock, Ingraham urged her fellow conservatives to pay serious attention to his message. "The party that comes off as the party that represents the American worker best is the party that wins in 2008," she said, adding that the GOP will be relegated to the political wilderness if it goes back "to being the party of the elites."
(Excerpt) Read more at usnews.com ...
"Some people are stupid enough to vote for RATS because their union forced their job to a RTW state. I agree on that."
You can pontificate, posture, and proclaim your superior knowledge from now until the moment Hillary! takes her oath. But to ignore what voters experience, and how they will respond will lead to some serious Dem inroads.
And they'll take us all down together.
"As an anecdotal bit Gen X'rs that I know are not particularly concerned with who the President is or what the new en vogue policies are. They are concerned with their jobs being outsourced and their future. Now that is very shallow when things like Islamofascism are looming but it is what it is. Hey where's the remote"
Oh really????? You are speaking for all of us or worse your a boomer trying to cause trouble. I don't know which one it is, but I find your statements ridiculous.
In reality today the real average wage for meatpackers is $14-$15 an hour.
In northern PA it's $9-$12 as of 6 months ago.
That's what I got out of the election, too.
It wasn't about Iraq, It was about the perception that the government would save your JOB.
In the meanwhile, Siemens is closing two plants. Delphi is 'downsizing'. NCR is moving a production line and Navistar is rumored to be 'relocating'.
All going to Mexico. Where are the democrats now?
Take a look at Duncan Hunter, he is runnign for the rep nomination. He is anything but a free traitor, he is for fair trade and controlling the border.
If Lou Dobbs says it, its a lie.
Seems like a good man. I just wonder how much of a chance he really has. Moving up from the HR to the WH is a tough path. A local pol I know personally tried it a few years ago (John Kasich) and he didn't make much headway. I talked to John about it after he had left DC. Said it was the biggest mistake he ever made in politics.
He cited Labor Department statistics.
Another poster showed that meatpacking wages have dropped as well.
Simply calling something a lie to dismiss an inconvenient fact might work on the other side of the aisle, but not here.
Well, it's not. And even an illegal-immigrant-lover (:-)) like me can explain that illegal workers are NOT part of the free market, because they are held captive by their illegal status. They can't bargain in open, honest negotiations with their employees. And if they don't pay taxes, they are unfairly competing against americans.
However, nothing is simple. The alternative in a free market to having illegals packing for 9 bucks instead of americans packing for 17 bucks at a U.S. manufacturing plant could well be legal mexicans packing for a buck an hour at a factory in Mexico for export to our country.
Also realise there are legal citizens of this country who live in a culture where putting 10 people in a house is normal, and who therefore can exist on lower wages, and if there is a competition for jobs, they can beat out other americans because they need less money for their lifestyle.
You solve that problem by expanding the economy and limiting immigration. One way to do that is to implement a guest worker program. Immigration is like a company hiring an employee. The expectation is that the employee will have a job for "life", and the employer will make an investment in that employee, and will usually make some effort to retain them. That's immigration.
A guest worker program is like a company hiring independent contractors. They are there just to do a job, because the company has a temporary need, or a need for special skills. Those contractors can be cut on a moment's notice, and are expected to go away and not cost the company anything when they are gone. That's a guest worker program.
Note that most big companies hire out their janitorial staff, NOT because their employees couldn't do the work, but because their employees don't WANT to do that work, and would be too expensive to do the work. So the big company hires some contract company to provide the cheap, less skilled labor to clean the toilets and empty the trash. That's "doing the work americans won't do".
There is no doubt that world trade has hurt our manufacturing base. Whether that is a good or bad thing remains to be seen. It could have freed us up to do bigger and better things, making us even more competitive. Or it could have simply been the start of turning us into a 3rd-world economy.
I do know that when you start a company, you do all the work yourself, and when you finally "make it", you start hiring cheap labor to take out the trash, type the memos, etc. And we don't think of that as a bad thing, because it frees up our skilled labor to focus on what they are best at.
If an island can support 10 fishermen, and then one of them figures out how to catch 10 times as many fish, it's bad for the other 9. They can either KILL the guy who can catch 10 times as much fish, or they can find some other work. Or the government can control the market and keep the productive worker from catching so much, so the others can compete with him.
Well, conservative policies and the free-market system are NOT largely at work in this country, so the meatpacker example hardly disproved my "claim", which by the way was not so much a claim but rather a statement of what we had to do to overcome the class warfare argument.
In any case, the angst felt by some at the fortunes of others is real, but meaningless. Making others suffer will not in any way improve the circumstance of the poor, although I guess they will "feel better". But as conservatives we better make d*mn sure we explain to them that they are essentially revelling in other people's misfortunes.
I don't doubt that the person who loses his house in a fire feels better if his neighbors houses also burn down, but if he ever SAID he did he'd be roundly criticized.
I think maybe too many of us hang out on FR for too much, and think that rational people run the real world.
They are more at work now than they were in 1980. During that time, the wages of meatpackers have dropped significantly.
Funny, most of the ones I know don't care about politics at all, they are happy with their lives and don't see government as helping or hurting them. Many aren't registered, and if they DID vote they'd vote for some 6th-tier issue like maybe they want bike paths or something.
"Connect with worried workers?" I don't know if we will, but we'd better.
Considering the profitability of the indudtry, this could be another industry that is better suited for offshore.
Any meat cutter making $19.00 an hour is a Union Meat Cutter. NO UNION has ever replaced $19.00 an hour members with $7.00 an hour meat cutters. YOUR Meat Cutters are an obvious Internet Myth. They do not exist.
Doubtless there are people who CLAIM this but it is pure utter rumor. If you take the time to actually DIG into these claims you find that THEY were not actually the meat cutter but their brother Billy Bob heard it from a guy at the VFW that his sister dated a guy who knew a fellow who was laid off from his $19.00 and replaced by a dirty illegal for only $7.00 an hour. Of course investigation of the fact turns out the guy laid off was a no good drunk bum caught sleeping on the job and fired for cause but HE is never going to tell you THAT. No it always some scapegoat's fault his fat lazy ass got fired.
NOW, the FACTUAL data on the economy shows a completely different reality then these made up media myths.
Highest per capita family home ownership ever.
Longest period of positive GDP growth ever.
2nd lowest unemployment rate ever.
Best average unemployment rate EVER.
Net growth in average wage across ALL job classes.
Best stockmarket gains ever. Which means highest returns on average 401K and Pension Funds EVER. More then 3/5s of America have one or the other which means the wealth is being shared across social/economic/ and racial classes.
Those are the economic FACTS.
So turn off Lou Dobb and the other con men who scream economic nonsense at you so you stay in hysteric panic mode and keep buying their books and watching their TV shows. They have a fiduciary or political interest in keeping you all in panic mode about the Economy. You should be a LOT more cynical about the crap they are selling you. It is NOT about the "news" with these clowns, it about keeping their ratings up. They do NOT get your attention by reporting the news. The REALITY is actually boring. There is good news all over here and here and here, some worries here, a problem here or there. Who is going to sit and watch that? They get your attention by screaming "the sky is falling, the sky is falling" and keep you all in hysterics over make believe problems. What you watch on TV "News" is nothing but marketing same as any commericals you watch.
Take 15 minutes do some BASIC economic research and find out the facts. Instead of mindlessly accepting what ever chicken little nonsense is currently screamed at you by demagogues and con men on your TV or raido as gospel truth, try actually THINKING for yourself for a change.
Do you think that someone who has gone from $19/hour to $11/hour, and then sees the guy from Home Depot get fired and still get $50 million - do you think he's gonna start to question free market economics?
The corporatists have to realize that if working stiffs aren't getting at least a sliver of increased productivity, they sooner or later might well say screw the whole lot. And support some deranged socialist like Chavez.
That's Department of Labor statistics.
Are you allergic to facts or something? You sure act like it, the way you react to them.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.