"Obama is hardly making the progressive economic case (a la Edwards), but at least he is recognizing there is a problem, and some of its manifestations."
Well, I suppose that some of us who have lived through offshore outsourcing, nationality-based job discrimination and tried to influence politics are rather cynical and suspicious.
Paraphrasing Norm Matloff, empty expressions of empathy are of little significance.
People will not vote on economic issues if the candidates will not differentiate themselves on economic issues...
The fact that Obama will not even use the term "offshore outsourcing" is a blow to his credibility.
Is Obama, like Kerry before him, wanting to have it both ways: Keep the powerful pro-outsourcing interests happy while benefiting from the popular disaffection with free trade?
At the outset, I want to publicly acknowledge my skepticism and suspicion re. politicians generally.
That said, I'm unconvinced that Obama's comments represent any real indication that he would do anything different with respect to the offshore outsourcing of American jobs. He expresses seeming empathy for people affected by so-called "free trade".
Yet, what votes or resolutions in the Senate can he point to as evidence of his concern?
Even viewing his comments in the most favorable light, what should I think about Obama when he won't even utter the term "offshore outsourcing", voices support for expansion of guest worker programs (such as H-1b) and repeats the lies that pro-offshoring lobbyists use about insufficient numbers of skilled American workers?
and I will use only proper terminology from now on.
I support your efforts to keep this site about the facts, such as we know them, and not the political spin too often applied to our economic discourse.
Which certainly can use some more good writing about a topic vital to policy making and....
A field about to go through, I believe, a real upheaval.
From now on it will be Senator Obama or Senator Clinton. I urge you to keep your standards where you want them.
Well, let's keep Obama's name to his actual name. It's rare for me to go into this tit for tat stuff but I do really see an issue, esp. in the blogs of a disdain for working people.
But this site was started in order to get people to look at the real statistics, the details and now I guess I'm veering into this sort of political rhetoric.
....my point, not well expressed perhaps, is that this thing many bloggers in Obama's camp have named the 'creative class'; this thing which they claim is coming to save our nation from itself...
Does not exist.
It's a figment of Chris Bowers imagination which has caught on somewhat.
As near as I can make out it's made up of the Millenials who have, at the moment, decent jobs and subscribe to the Libertarian outlook that all government is bad and that unions are yucky...
Yes, I know it doesn't make much sense but then....
Also, on this creative class, I believe most bloggers are college educated and of a group that has enough free time to blog. Obviously a single mother working 3 jobs does not have time to learn how to blog and spend hours commenting, neither does that small business owner, trucker or landscaper, construction worker.
That said, there are many of us who know perfectly well that the working class is the American class.
I don't get these people because there is no doubt that Professional careers, which require a college education are under attack for labor arbitrage and globalization as well.
Maybe they are young, or are not aware of what's going on here, maybe they haven't been laid off yet from a job or be sitting there with multiple Masters degrees, homeless yet but I don't see any real difference in economic reality between those working blue collar jobs and white collar jobs as a general rule.
I do see a huge difference between the executive class as well as Washington elites who close ranks on their own circle and give each other and their friends more money. I think CEO is one of the few jobs in the United States where one can be completely incompetent yet get a raise, yet another job and a huge bonus. It's clearly class that is driving that inner circle of corporate executives, elites and Politicians doing their bidding.
.........the only folks that matter, to Obama and his wife, are the 'creative class'.
Despite my never having seen any numbers on how many of these Chris Bowers created folks vote.
Despite the total lack of evidence that there is such a thing.....
Barry the Ignorant is campaigning for their vote. Which, if you've read his books, is very consistent with his view of recent American history. A wonderful fantasy land where everyone has good intentions, none more than that defender and champion of the working man Ronald Reagan, and all ultimately ends well. Except for those nasty traffic controllers that is. Union members are not good Americans as St. Ronnie and his acolyte Barry the Ignorant have repeatedly asserted.
It was not 'til today that I read over at TalkLeft, a good site except for Big Tent Democrat who's got a case of W hat O bama R eally M eant, that Obama attended private school all his life.
No wonder he acts and talks like a Libertarian teenager.
Excellent analogy. So many programs, government public service have been cut and I believe one is finally starting to show, the deterioration of US roads and bridges.
Like the airlines, we now have unsafe planes and bankruptcy.
What I find amazing is how no reports on how the industry offshore outsourced plane maintenance about 4 years ago.
When unions tried to fight back they received scant attention.
Airlines were also deregulated in 1978. So Americans want their cheap fares and here we are with a world economy built on airline transport and seemingly the safety of it hitting the skids.
What I am focusing in on is his claim that working people are "anti-immigrant" or "anti-trade".
I have seen that rhetoric repeatedly from him and during a debate he even claimed that it's not causing wage repression.
I linked to his constituent letter who was talking about being displaced (and have to train) a H-1B guest worker and he claims that it's immigrant bashing and the most odious corporate lobbyist talking points of all (see link).
Well of course most of the rage about illegal immigration is about wages. If candidates got into those areas of the country and neighborhoods, their daily lives, they would know it. The nation didn't magically turn into one gigantic KKK membership overnight, no, many jobs which used to be high paying jobs now use illegal labor and pay minimum wage, no benefits or close to it. If you add 8-20M workers into a system that has about ~35M workers in it, occupational area low skilled to blue collar skilled (100M workers in the US approx, low skilled occupational categories I'm guessing about 35M), that of course will flood the labor supply, depress wages and displace US workers.
It's not the keywords frustrated or bitter, it's the keywords "anti-immigrant" "anti-trade". He just called the working people basically racist xenophobe which is just ridiculous and not what most people are concerned about when dealing with immigration. Dems don't want to acknowledge these economic realities (most Republicans won't either) because of the US Chamber of Commerce, SEIU, La Raza, and so on who want unlimited migration and have formed a coalition to get it in so many words.
So, Obama, once again just called people racist xenophobes.
Then, in terms of trade, it is so well documented that is the reason for the loss of US manufacturing base but it's not just NAFTA, it's China where most of the manufacturing has gone. The China PNTR has to be the most biased trade treaty ever written. I call it the would you like to buy the Brooklyn Bridge too? treaty.
So, in essence, his attitude is that working people are just gun toting fundamentalists who are also protectionist, isolationist, racist xenophobes.
Which also implies...he has no clue or more, corporations don't want anyone to acknowledge the real clues.
I've seen many other statements, plus the constituent letter that really imply this view of most of America by Obama.
My post is saying these people are none of that, although the truth of Government ignoring all of these concerns for 30 years is dead on.
What Obama said is exactly what I have observed in my own personal experience.
How else do you get 81% of Americans saying the country is on the wrong track, and yet McCain (who will continue all of those losing policies) winning some presidential polls?
Workers may know exactly what caused their loss of jobs (and I agree with you on that) and yet they always seem to be ready to vote for more of the same. Maybe a good bracing reality-concentrating slap in the face is necessary.
I also agree with you that Obama is hardly making the progressive economic case (a la Edwards), but at least he is recognizing there is a problem, and some of its manifestations.
What did Obama say that is insulting? He just seems to be trying to explain the experience of Penssylvanians to his audience. He never says their sentiments are wrong. It seems more likely he is trying envoke empathy in those, who may have benefited from trade deals, and immigrant labor.
There was a test, I think the 1960's, where a Doctor went in to a Psychiatric Hospital as a patient. He was routinely diagnosed as a schizophrenic by all of the Doctors and staff, yet he was perfectly healthy and while in the Hospital just behaved as he normally would.
I just saw the recommended on dailykos (the Obama mania is dying down to get a word in edgewise?).
Can I suggest this to bring awareness there is an overall economics community site for those who are gravely concerned on just what is going on in the US from an economics, trade labor view?
Can I suggest posting the below in other posts in order to get more people aware of EP? You can just cut and paste this or put in your own definition of this site. ;)
<sup><em>Cross posted on <a href="http://www.economicpopulist.org"> The Economic Populist</a> - A Community Site for Economics Freaks and Geeks</em></sup>
That will look like this:
Cross posted on The Economic Populist - A Community Site for Economics Freaks and Geeks
G, good to see you've gotten a lot of attention for this elsewhere, and thanks for crossposting here.
At bottom, the culprit here is the complete abandonment of Congressional oversight. Why bother obeying the law when its clear that the lawmaker could care less?
And the Fed has of course IMMEDIATELY generated the worst kind of moral hazard, as investment banks know that gains are theirs, losses are for the Fed/public. Courtesy of Bloomberg:
Wall Street firms may be bundling high-yield, high-risk corporate loans into securities to use as collateral to borrow from the U.S. government, according to a report by Morgan Stanley analysts.
Securities firms can borrow against collateralized loan obligations at the Federal Reserve's Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the analysts said. The Fed set up the facility last month, its first extension of credit to non-banks since the Great Depression.
... ``At least one'' recent CLO was probably done to take advantage of the Fed's new facility, it said.
``It's not cheap to finance loans today in the market,'' Vishwanath Tirupattur, a Morgan Stanley analyst in New York, said in a telephone interview.
I feel like some super elites are just hell bent on destroying the United States. Seriously. Now it looks like they are plain creating yet another crisis to rob the national treasury.
Am I just bitter, paranoid, oh it's not that bad?
Why is it we see this stuff and think about the lines of a complete economic collapse yet on Wall street, they are all trading like tomorrow is just another Sunday day? It seems like everything is rewarded as long as some company announces some more offshore outsourcing, VC investment in China and axes a few thousand fellow Americans out of their jobs.
If you think being over 40 is bad, try over 55. I promise you, when the company advertised the position, they weren't thinking of hiring someone who looks like their dad (or maybe even their grandpa). You can practically see the shutters going down behind their eyes when they get their first look at you.
Funny thing is, I used to hire programmers myself. Our company had a fairly elaborate interview process involving 5 or 6 people, who would confer together after the interviews. I can tell you there was a lot of barely-concealed bias against even slightly-older guys. Some of the rationalizations:
* Since we were a game developer, it was assumed that an older candidate wouldn't "get" games.
* Older candidates wouldn't work as hard (we did work very long hours).
* Older candidates would be argumentative and set in their ways.
* Older candidates would expect to be paid more.
Merely answering to the contrary during the interview, with respect to any of these assumptions, was not considered to be a convincing rebuttal. The potential advantages of an older candidate, such as greater professionalism due to longer experience, were ignored, discounted, seen as a threat, or never even imagined by the young interviewers. Top management was was an older guy himself, but was insecure and quite the flim-flammer, so he was worried that older candidates would be more difficult for him to push around and/or hornswoggle.
I can't say I saw any bias against Americans at this company though. We were looking for talent, not nationality.
I thought Russia had hyperinflation in the 80's, early 90's.
S. Korea, Thailand I'm not so clear on but what is even less clear with all of this "borderless" capital (globalization) just how bad are the interdependences.
I did see a series of nation-states talking about decoupling from the US economy to lessen it's impact in a collapse.
none of them, to my knowledge, involved hyperinflation. The currencies, like the dollar recently, swooned, but then recovered. The difference being, of course, that their currencies weren't the world's "reserve" currency.
"Obama is hardly making the progressive economic case (a la Edwards), but at least he is recognizing there is a problem, and some of its manifestations."
Well, I suppose that some of us who have lived through offshore outsourcing, nationality-based job discrimination and tried to influence politics are rather cynical and suspicious.
Paraphrasing Norm Matloff, empty expressions of empathy are of little significance.
People will not vote on economic issues if the candidates will not differentiate themselves on economic issues...
The fact that Obama will not even use the term "offshore outsourcing" is a blow to his credibility.
Is Obama, like Kerry before him, wanting to have it both ways: Keep the powerful pro-outsourcing interests happy while benefiting from the popular disaffection with free trade?
>> Bill Gates asks for more H-1Bs, so DHS CIS responds.
More evidence of who is really running this country - big business interests.
>> this contentious rule as an "emergency situation" to avoid "serious damage to important interests."
This is what the Nazis did. Declare national emergencies in order to legislate by edict.
At the outset, I want to publicly acknowledge my skepticism and suspicion re. politicians generally.
That said, I'm unconvinced that Obama's comments represent any real indication that he would do anything different with respect to the offshore outsourcing of American jobs. He expresses seeming empathy for people affected by so-called "free trade".
Yet, what votes or resolutions in the Senate can he point to as evidence of his concern?
Even viewing his comments in the most favorable light, what should I think about Obama when he won't even utter the term "offshore outsourcing", voices support for expansion of guest worker programs (such as H-1b) and repeats the lies that pro-offshoring lobbyists use about insufficient numbers of skilled American workers?
and I will use only proper terminology from now on.
I support your efforts to keep this site about the facts, such as we know them, and not the political spin too often applied to our economic discourse.
Which certainly can use some more good writing about a topic vital to policy making and....
A field about to go through, I believe, a real upheaval.
From now on it will be Senator Obama or Senator Clinton. I urge you to keep your standards where you want them.
I do at my blog.
Well, let's keep Obama's name to his actual name. It's rare for me to go into this tit for tat stuff but I do really see an issue, esp. in the blogs of a disdain for working people.
But this site was started in order to get people to look at the real statistics, the details and now I guess I'm veering into this sort of political rhetoric.
....my point, not well expressed perhaps, is that this thing many bloggers in Obama's camp have named the 'creative class'; this thing which they claim is coming to save our nation from itself...
Does not exist.
It's a figment of Chris Bowers imagination which has caught on somewhat.
As near as I can make out it's made up of the Millenials who have, at the moment, decent jobs and subscribe to the Libertarian outlook that all government is bad and that unions are yucky...
Yes, I know it doesn't make much sense but then....
Much of what Barry says doesn't either.
Who is Barry?
Also, on this creative class, I believe most bloggers are college educated and of a group that has enough free time to blog. Obviously a single mother working 3 jobs does not have time to learn how to blog and spend hours commenting, neither does that small business owner, trucker or landscaper, construction worker.
That said, there are many of us who know perfectly well that the working class is the American class.
I don't get these people because there is no doubt that Professional careers, which require a college education are under attack for labor arbitrage and globalization as well.
Maybe they are young, or are not aware of what's going on here, maybe they haven't been laid off yet from a job or be sitting there with multiple Masters degrees, homeless yet but I don't see any real difference in economic reality between those working blue collar jobs and white collar jobs as a general rule.
I do see a huge difference between the executive class as well as Washington elites who close ranks on their own circle and give each other and their friends more money. I think CEO is one of the few jobs in the United States where one can be completely incompetent yet get a raise, yet another job and a huge bonus. It's clearly class that is driving that inner circle of corporate executives, elites and Politicians doing their bidding.
.........the only folks that matter, to Obama and his wife, are the 'creative class'.
Despite my never having seen any numbers on how many of these Chris Bowers created folks vote.
Despite the total lack of evidence that there is such a thing.....
Barry the Ignorant is campaigning for their vote. Which, if you've read his books, is very consistent with his view of recent American history. A wonderful fantasy land where everyone has good intentions, none more than that defender and champion of the working man Ronald Reagan, and all ultimately ends well. Except for those nasty traffic controllers that is. Union members are not good Americans as St. Ronnie and his acolyte Barry the Ignorant have repeatedly asserted.
It was not 'til today that I read over at TalkLeft, a good site except for Big Tent Democrat who's got a case of W hat O bama R eally M eant, that Obama attended private school all his life.
No wonder he acts and talks like a Libertarian teenager.
Excellent analogy. So many programs, government public service have been cut and I believe one is finally starting to show, the deterioration of US roads and bridges.
Like the airlines, we now have unsafe planes and bankruptcy.
What I find amazing is how no reports on how the industry offshore outsourced plane maintenance about 4 years ago.
When unions tried to fight back they received scant attention.
Airlines were also deregulated in 1978. So Americans want their cheap fares and here we are with a world economy built on airline transport and seemingly the safety of it hitting the skids.
What I am focusing in on is his claim that working people are "anti-immigrant" or "anti-trade".
I have seen that rhetoric repeatedly from him and during a debate he even claimed that it's not causing wage repression.
I linked to his constituent letter who was talking about being displaced (and have to train) a H-1B guest worker and he claims that it's immigrant bashing and the most odious corporate lobbyist talking points of all (see link).
Well of course most of the rage about illegal immigration is about wages. If candidates got into those areas of the country and neighborhoods, their daily lives, they would know it. The nation didn't magically turn into one gigantic KKK membership overnight, no, many jobs which used to be high paying jobs now use illegal labor and pay minimum wage, no benefits or close to it. If you add 8-20M workers into a system that has about ~35M workers in it, occupational area low skilled to blue collar skilled (100M workers in the US approx, low skilled occupational categories I'm guessing about 35M), that of course will flood the labor supply, depress wages and displace US workers.
It's not the keywords frustrated or bitter, it's the keywords "anti-immigrant" "anti-trade". He just called the working people basically racist xenophobe which is just ridiculous and not what most people are concerned about when dealing with immigration. Dems don't want to acknowledge these economic realities (most Republicans won't either) because of the US Chamber of Commerce, SEIU, La Raza, and so on who want unlimited migration and have formed a coalition to get it in so many words.
So, Obama, once again just called people racist xenophobes.
Then, in terms of trade, it is so well documented that is the reason for the loss of US manufacturing base but it's not just NAFTA, it's China where most of the manufacturing has gone. The China PNTR has to be the most biased trade treaty ever written. I call it the would you like to buy the Brooklyn Bridge too? treaty.
So, in essence, his attitude is that working people are just gun toting fundamentalists who are also protectionist, isolationist, racist xenophobes.
Which also implies...he has no clue or more, corporations don't want anyone to acknowledge the real clues.
I've seen many other statements, plus the constituent letter that really imply this view of most of America by Obama.
My post is saying these people are none of that, although the truth of Government ignoring all of these concerns for 30 years is dead on.
What Obama said is exactly what I have observed in my own personal experience.
How else do you get 81% of Americans saying the country is on the wrong track, and yet McCain (who will continue all of those losing policies) winning some presidential polls?
Workers may know exactly what caused their loss of jobs (and I agree with you on that) and yet they always seem to be ready to vote for more of the same. Maybe a good bracing reality-concentrating slap in the face is necessary.
I also agree with you that Obama is hardly making the progressive economic case (a la Edwards), but at least he is recognizing there is a problem, and some of its manifestations.
What did Obama say that is insulting? He just seems to be trying to explain the experience of Penssylvanians to his audience. He never says their sentiments are wrong. It seems more likely he is trying envoke empathy in those, who may have benefited from trade deals, and immigrant labor.
There was a test, I think the 1960's, where a Doctor went in to a Psychiatric Hospital as a patient. He was routinely diagnosed as a schizophrenic by all of the Doctors and staff, yet he was perfectly healthy and while in the Hospital just behaved as he normally would.
That's what your story reminds me of.
They ignore workers and Obama just proved it. So have McCain and Clinton.
I just saw the recommended on dailykos (the Obama mania is dying down to get a word in edgewise?).
Can I suggest this to bring awareness there is an overall economics community site for those who are gravely concerned on just what is going on in the US from an economics, trade labor view?
Can I suggest posting the below in other posts in order to get more people aware of EP? You can just cut and paste this or put in your own definition of this site. ;)
That will look like this:
Cross posted on The Economic Populist - A Community Site for Economics Freaks and Geeks
G, good to see you've gotten a lot of attention for this elsewhere, and thanks for crossposting here.
At bottom, the culprit here is the complete abandonment of Congressional oversight. Why bother obeying the law when its clear that the lawmaker could care less?
And the Fed has of course IMMEDIATELY generated the worst kind of moral hazard, as investment banks know that gains are theirs, losses are for the Fed/public. Courtesy of Bloomberg:
Cheers.
doesn't mean they are not out to get you.
I feel like some super elites are just hell bent on destroying the United States. Seriously. Now it looks like they are plain creating yet another crisis to rob the national treasury.
Am I just bitter, paranoid, oh it's not that bad?
Why is it we see this stuff and think about the lines of a complete economic collapse yet on Wall street, they are all trading like tomorrow is just another Sunday day? It seems like everything is rewarded as long as some company announces some more offshore outsourcing, VC investment in China and axes a few thousand fellow Americans out of their jobs.
If you think being over 40 is bad, try over 55. I promise you, when the company advertised the position, they weren't thinking of hiring someone who looks like their dad (or maybe even their grandpa). You can practically see the shutters going down behind their eyes when they get their first look at you.
Funny thing is, I used to hire programmers myself. Our company had a fairly elaborate interview process involving 5 or 6 people, who would confer together after the interviews. I can tell you there was a lot of barely-concealed bias against even slightly-older guys. Some of the rationalizations:
* Since we were a game developer, it was assumed that an older candidate wouldn't "get" games.
* Older candidates wouldn't work as hard (we did work very long hours).
* Older candidates would be argumentative and set in their ways.
* Older candidates would expect to be paid more.
Merely answering to the contrary during the interview, with respect to any of these assumptions, was not considered to be a convincing rebuttal. The potential advantages of an older candidate, such as greater professionalism due to longer experience, were ignored, discounted, seen as a threat, or never even imagined by the young interviewers. Top management was was an older guy himself, but was insecure and quite the flim-flammer, so he was worried that older candidates would be more difficult for him to push around and/or hornswoggle.
I can't say I saw any bias against Americans at this company though. We were looking for talent, not nationality.
I thought Russia had hyperinflation in the 80's, early 90's.
S. Korea, Thailand I'm not so clear on but what is even less clear with all of this "borderless" capital (globalization) just how bad are the interdependences.
I did see a series of nation-states talking about decoupling from the US economy to lessen it's impact in a collapse.
none of them, to my knowledge, involved hyperinflation. The currencies, like the dollar recently, swooned, but then recovered. The difference being, of course, that their currencies weren't the world's "reserve" currency.
Pages