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How can Obama bring the troops home when there are NO JOBS?

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KoKo Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-17-09 10:09 PM
Original message
How can Obama bring the troops home when there are NO JOBS?
How can he end two wars, downsize the military and even give reduce our prison population for those with minor drug offenses when there are NO JOBS?

How does he do that? :shrug:

It would be the correct thing to do...but instead the Military Industrial Complex is a major source of employment (due to decades of build up and three wars) and the DynCorps, Wackenhut and the rest employ thousands in communities where the large prison complexes need ever more criminals to provide employment.

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Skittles Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-17-09 10:10 PM
Response to Original message
1. believe it or not
soldiers actually do have stateside duties
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MADem Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-17-09 10:27 PM
Response to Reply #1
3. But there aren't enough billets to accomodate them all. And that's from someone who's schooled in
force management.

It's the reason we use so many reservists in combat zones. See, they can be spun up, and then, spun back down, without too much RIFing (reduction in force) or other force-shaping (read: firing) measures. There are no "stateside" billets for those reservists, most of them--they've been activated, and they'll be deactivated, and go back to serving two weekends a month, two weeks a year.

The overwhelming majority of servicemembers who are over there will go back to no job, though some can get their "old" job back--assuming it exists in this employment environment and hasn't been eliminated.

The exception are medical personnel--we always keep too many of them on active duty, "just in case." It makes military health care a wonderful thing in peacetime, because there are so many health care professionals available when there's no fighting going on, but they're an exeception. Most excess personnel get thanked for their service and sent home.
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Skittles Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-17-09 11:26 PM
Response to Reply #3
5. I was enlisted in the 70's
I remember it well
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KakistocracyHater Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-17-09 10:21 PM
Response to Original message
2. Colbert is 1 hot piece, but I don't get it?
You already know how he could end those money pits called "wars" & ALL those Chinese containers need to be inspected at the shores, plus those new underground electrical lines that are sealed watertight & keep the power on during hurricanes & tornados require the Army Corps Engineers' help. All those power plants that burn human waste require alot of new steel pipes & trenches must be dug; that's not even getting to where he orders virgin oil tankers to both poles to collect some ice to put into our new water towers-that alone will require the help of NASA & various other departments. But you knew this already, so why ask?
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stillcool Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-17-09 10:54 PM
Response to Reply #2
4. There is no reason for any...
global corporation to stay in this country. They can take all of their jobs and move on. How many more millions of people will be out of work before the wars end, and if there are no jobs now, what makes you think there will be then? How many Chinese containers will be needing inspecting then?
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KakistocracyHater Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon May-18-09 11:36 PM
Response to Reply #4
11. you missed my point, I think
doing alot of what I first mentioned would CREATE ALL THOSE NEEDED JOBS-see? Whatever is in those Chinese containers would then be ratched back, as WE would begin producing more & buying less on mere credit.

I am talking of creating jobs where there are none, creating entire new sectors & industries, much like the internet created Amazon & changed how people can listen to music itself. Global Corps. can hardly pick up shop as they have continuously threatened, reality is more difficult than mere words. Ask Bush...
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stillcool Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue May-19-09 10:32 AM
Response to Reply #11
13. I agree..but I think there will be a time..
of massive job loss. Whatever we manufacture is in the control of corporations. Either the jobs that are left stay or they go. If the government doesn't want to play nice with corporations, people continue to lose their jobs. People continue to lose their jobs, they blame their government. They blame their government and the government plays nice with the corporations. And round and round it goes. Whatever is the 'right' thing to do, is only 'right' by some. If you can't feed your family it isn't so right.
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area51 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon May-18-09 05:25 AM
Response to Original message
6. Why not ...
... address two problems? We have troops we need to bring home, and we need more medical personnel.

Why not start a transition to single-payer?

Why not offer returning troops training in various medical positions?

We would get a transition to a sane, civilized, 1st world medical care,

Soldiers would get training when they get back and then transition to jobs.

Win-win.


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FrenchieCat Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon May-18-09 05:30 AM
Response to Original message
7. They can go to school then.
Something like what the GIs did when the came home from WWII!
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KoKo Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon May-18-09 07:28 PM
Response to Original message
8. kick...I still don't see how he can bring "all troops home" and help "prisoners" without jobs
for them to go into...
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ZombieHorde Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon May-18-09 08:06 PM
Response to Original message
9. They will have the same job they have now, being a member of the Armed Forces. nt
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quiller4 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon May-18-09 08:16 PM
Response to Original message
10. Just because they return to the states doesn't mean they
leave the armed forces. There are still plenty of jobs for them to do in the army.
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ShortnFiery Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon May-18-09 11:50 PM
Response to Original message
12. Obama is NOT bringing our troops home. It's more perpetual war ... now surging in Afghanistan.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090518_the_disease_of_permanent_war

Our permanent war economy has not been challenged by Obama and the Democratic Party. They support its destructive fury because it funds them. They validate its evil assumptions because to take them on is political suicide. They repeat the narrative of fear because it keeps us dormant. They do this because they have become weaker than the corporate forces that profit from permanent war.

The hollowness of our liberal classes, such as the Democrats, empowers the moral nihilists. A state of permanent war means the inevitable death of liberalism. Dick Cheney may be palpably evil while Obama is merely weak, but to those who seek to keep us in a state of permanent war, it does not matter. They get what they want. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote “Notes From the Underground” to illustrate what happens to cultures when a liberal class, like ours, becomes sterile, defeated dreamers. The main character in “Notes From the Underground” carries the bankrupt ideas of liberalism to their logical extreme. He becomes the enlightenment ideal. He eschews passion and moral purpose. He is rational. He prizes realism over sanity, even in the face of self-destruction. These acts of accommodation doom the Underground Man, as it doomed imperial Russia and as it will doom us.

“I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect,” the Underground Man wrote. “And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something.”

We have been drawn into the world of permanent war by these fools. We allow fools to destroy the continuity of life, to tear apart all systems—economic, social, environmental and political—that sustain us. Dostoevsky was not dismayed by evil. He was dismayed by a society that no longer had the moral fortitude to confront the fools. These fools are leading us over the precipice. What will rise up from the ruins will not be something new, but the face of the monster that has, until then, remained hidden behind the facade.



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ensho Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue May-19-09 10:43 AM
Response to Original message
14. there are HAZMAT jobs in and out of the military


and the shovel ready jobs, transportation jobs, green jobs, and jobs they could create and bring to bare.

they could work on military housing. a lot of it is falling apart.


no-jobs is not an excuse to not bring them home.
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