the global economy. Dependence on corporate jobs is 20th century thinking IMO. Before the Industrial Age, Americans were entrepreneurs by necessity. The Industrial Age changed all of that. Now that technology has leveled the competitive playing field globally, Americans must go back to being entrepreneurs again. The Internet makes it possible for Americans to market their talents to a global market. Greater levels of education is the only legitimate path forward in the 21st century. Mimicking a carnival barker who promises to bring back the 1960's economic advantages that America enjoyed is not a truthful solution. America must up it's game and greater levels of education is the only way to do that. Why is education frowned upon in this country ?

This reminds me of something I heard years ago. A Japanese exec said that the average American college graduate knew less than a Japanese high school graduate. This country has been running behind other first world nations for a while now thanks in part to this strange notion that being just this side of illiterate makes you authentic and real; all it makes you is stupid.

In 1970, someone working a minimum wage job would only have to work 4.3'ish hours a day, 5 days a week to pay for tuition at Yale. Today, they would have to work over 17 hours a day. So without mommy and daddy footing the bill, or the prospect of being in debt for the better part of several decades, a higher education is for the rich.

Look at annual tuition at any higher level beyond community college and you'll see that a higher education is out of reach for the vast majority of working class people. Im over 40, and still slowly working towards my higher education.

Its not the education itself that is elitist, its how one has to get there in today's day and age. Education has been systematically cut off in the past three decades for those in the working class.

This piece was first published in Jacobin under the headline ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out.’

'It is now becoming clear that Clinton’s ground game — the watchword for defenders of her alleged competence — was actually under-resourced and poorly executed. Like so much else in this election, her field strategy was hostage to the colossal arrogance and consequent incompetence of the liberal establishment.

At the heart of the failure was the notion of the “new emerging majority.” According to this argument — pushed by, among others, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira — women, Latinos, blacks, and skilled professionals who support the Democrats were becoming the demographic majority. Thus the traditional white working-class base of the Democratic Party could be sidelined.

Back in July Chuck Schumer summed it up: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

From this theory and strategy flowed a deeply flawed set of tactics, and a badly fumbled get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort.

A labor organizer in Ohio, who wished to remain anonymous, reports that Clinton’s early GOTV effort there focused on Republicans in the mistaken belief a significant number of them could be peeled away. This play largely failed. And it also involved serious opportunity costs: traditional Democratic constituencies like African Americans and the white working class were neglected, and Clinton ended up badly under-performing Obama among both groups, especially in the Rust Belt.

Only in the last two weeks, according to this labor source, did the Democratic Party outreach effort really switch back to traditional Democratic voters. By then, it was too late. Due to lack of preparation, the voter lists guiding the effort had not been updated. Because poorer voters tend to relocate more frequently than home-owning suburbanites, many addresses were wrong. And for lack of more frequent contact the campaign was often unsure about the voters’ current political attitudes.

And when the campaign finally showed up in the African-American, Latino, and white working-class areas they got lots of “so you only come by once every four years?”'>>>

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-hubris-of-the-clinton-ground-game_us_5831cebce4b099512f835e78

They elected Trump who gave them zero specifics on what he was going to do to bring these jobs back. I mean realistically what jobs could he bring back at anything resembling living wages? Factory work where they pay people considerably less than a dollar an hour? Coal Mining where safety standards are skirted and it would take 16 months to make what a U.S. miner would make in one month?

The only thing the Democrats could say to the people who voted for Trump to get their vote is to straight up lie to them, just like he did. The way for jobs to come back to these places was for the US to embrace the future and the future is researching, developing and selling renewable Green Energy Tech along with anything that will be required by environmentally beneficial based types of manufacturing. Rather than see the writing on the wall they have all decided to stick their heads in the sand and decry the onrushing future by voting for a collective that denies global warming and pushes "clean coal" which is still dirty as hell when compared to all the other energy options.

Welp, they now have nothing to look forward to other than more economic desolation as they continue to have no industry, a health care apocalypse when suddenly massive swaths of their populations no longer have access to affordable(FREE) health care. Falling behind educationally as economic subsidies dry up and financial aid falls right off the vine.

Obviously Hillary didn't connect with them. We would have had better luck with someone like Biden or an earthy male, with those folk, I think.

It's a complicated mess, this election, and yes, overall, Trump connected with people somewhat more than our moderate Dem did. And there was all kinds of fuckery going on, fake news, hacking, the FBI, the media killing Hillary on emails, the media not covering policies at all, and finally, this was not a year favorable to Dems historically, and the left always has more trouble coming together than the GOP. Etc. Not one factor.

So much depends on having the right candidate, and we just didn't, this time, as much as I admire Hillary.

when it came to jobs - no plan, just bullshit!

Coal jobs are not coming back, there are robots.


Bing, bong, bing, bong, bing, bong....is clear as mud.