They No Longer Need Us. Now What?

I mean, that's the heart of the problem, right? Corporate America doesn't want or need working class Americans anymore. They can get their labor overseas now, cheaper and with fewer complications (like unions, or healthcare, or occupational safety rules, or minimum wages, or child labor laws...) Oh sure, they still need a few of us around for the menial tasks of running their little isolated continental kingdom here in North America, and they need a few peasant boys willing to play soldier for them so those pesky Chinese don't get any bright ideas about expanding their empire, but that's about the extent of it.

They still need the American middle class as a consumer base (at least for now...they're cultivating replacements in Asia as fast as they can.) But working people? Blue-collar people? What good are they anymore? What factories we have left after outsourcing are run by machines and computers now, and the number of actual humans required for those jobs gets smaller and smaller every year. Technology and uber-cheap foreign slave labor have diminished the need for working-class American jobs to a mere fraction of what we used to have. There's no recovering from that. Even if we wanted to, that cake has already been baked and there's no taking it back. We will never have the glory of unionized, labor-powerful America again. It's too complicated and expensive to change it now, and there's no real motivation for it--we LIKE technology, we LIKE super-low prices, we LIKE the conveniences and gadgets that make up most off our modern lives, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. I'm not anti-technology, but I *am* pro-truth, and the truth is this: the American working class is terminal, and will be dead within a generation.

What's left for us in a world like that? Low-income people who come from factory-worker stock can't just "retrain" and do something else. There's nothing for them. Even jobs that used to be solidly middle-class (like tech and IT jobs) are becoming scarcer and scarcer. We can't ALL be upper-level management. We can't ALL be doctors, lawyers, teachers, and career military officers. We cannot ALL go to college because we can't ALL afford it, and besides, the middle class has a vested socioeconomic interest in making sure that very few low-income people DO go to college. The more people who have those degrees, the more competition there will be for middle-class jobs, and the less those degrees are ultimately worth--for everyone. Many of you are already suffering under long, stressful job searches. Imagine how much worse it would be if your competition doubled...or tripled...or quadrupled.

What jobs are left for the millions of low-income young people in America to aspire to? What hope is there now for them? Flipping burgers at McDonald's? Checking groceries? Serving coffee at Starbucks? Even THOSE jobs seem to go to people with college degrees these days. There's a man with a Master's Degree in Psychology and a man with Master's in Social Work who both drive taxi cabs here in my city. My domestic partner lost out on a job as a housekeeper at our local hospital to someone with a degree in Political Science.

What's left for these people except for welfare and despair? And even the welfare is no longer guaranteed. The 1996 reforms removed welfare as an "entitlement" program, and replaced it with a cruel bureaucratic nightmare with insanely strict rules, a program that hardly ANYONE qualifies for anymore. Food Stamps is still safe...for now. Rest assured, they're coming for that too, eventually.

I am 30 years old, from a low-income working class family, and I'm in college. What future could I ever hope to have, especially considering that I'm an English and Creative Writing major? I'm a poet in a world that doesn't value art that can't be hoarded in someone's mansion and/or sold at auction at Sotheby's. Because I'm very smart and very, very good at what I do, I'll probably end up making $14,000 a year with no benefits as an adjunct professor, or perhaps slightly more as a high school English teacher, and that's if I'm lucky. My brother and sister, both impoverished and both lacking even a high school diploma, have no chance at all of a decent life. They'll struggle in hunger and fear until they die, and they'll look back at THESE days as the "good times" when they could still get a little help via Food Stamps and Medicaid.

Corporate America does not value working people anymore, period. To them, our lives are worthless...a drain on their resources, a source of annoyance due to the pittance of taxes they pay in order to support the few social programs we have left. Nobody values American workers anymore. There is no patriotism in the ranks of the wealthy, no sense of noble duty to the country that helped them become rich...there is nothing but greed and more greed. If we are not useful to them, then we have no value, period.

We should be in the streets screaming about this. T.S. Eliot once said, "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang, but a whimper" As much as I admire Eliot, I cannot accept that it must be that way. I know that my life has no value to the Powers That Be. I know that I am a peon, a prole, a peasant, a nothing to them. My voice is small and I have no power, save for whatever small amount of persuasion my words might possess. But I will NOT go down quietly. I will not accept my fate with silence and hopeless despair, and nobody else should either. The ONLY thing that the Powers fear is an empowered and angry citizenry, because if we rise up and scream NO MORE! together, we WILL be heard.

Let me leave you with another bit of poetry, that "useless" art that nobody can tuck away into a vault as an investment:

'And these words shall then become
Like Oppression's thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain,
Heard again - again - again -

'Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.'
--Percy Bysshe Shelley

As for the "now what? We are going to have to take to the streets, and blood will need to be spilled, before we can ever turn things around.

I'm thinking that next year will tell the tale of this part of American history.

I don't think blood needs to be spilled.
I just think we need to walk away.
They don't need us, but we don't need them either.
Just walk away from them.
Stop buying their products.
Stop using their services.
Stop helping them enrich themselves.
They can keep their ill-gotten booty, for all I care.
It won't do them any good.
It won't do them any good if there is nobody to serve them.
We don't need to "turn things around," we need to change things.
We need to make the criminal class understand that they are simply no longer welcome here.
We simply need to stop building their pyramids for them, where they live in die in their glory.
We need to take that energy and build communities for ourselves.
Forget about blood in the streets... that's what they want us to do, don't you understand that?
There are too many useless eaters on their planet, and they have all the guns.
The only blood in the streets is going to be ours.
They don't need us... and we don't need them.
It's time for us to prove that... to ourselves!

peace!

However surely you were informed, we English majors have always banked on joblessness after school. It's something of a fait accompli. :hi:

comparable to thsoe in China or one of third world countires. Then, the just manufacture where ever they can get the cheapest labor.

And corporations arn't worried about China getting ideas. China as grafted a Capitalist economy onto a Comunist bureaucracy. The former will overwhelm the later.

:(

that the totalitarian framework is already in place. Here they have to trick us into entering Frank Zappa's proverbial theater before they can raise the curtain on that impenetrable brick wall. I suppose that costs them a little money and time, for which we should be grateful.

which is why the government is spending trillions of dollars trying to keep real estate, commodity and stock prices artificially high.

There is prophecy in your words.

We have gutted out labor class, wages are being greatly outpaced by cost of living, and healthcare is a debilitating, ruinous prospect. We are breeding a nation of paupers.

by shit foods that make us soft and kill us.

Last year I hoped for a crash where we would be jarred into seeing things as they really were, but we (ha!) were spared as everything was barely kept afloat.

Until we lose our jobs, toys, and poisonous food we will not change, rise up, or see what is really happening to us.

I hear some nasty things.
And in St. Louis I saw one.
On the 170 spur that connects highways 70 and 270 military vehicles, armed soldiers,
a FEMA vehicle and some dude with a laptop commanding that some be arrested at a roadblock.
This was called a " sobriety checkpoint" (170 is a four lane super slab they had necked to one lane.)
This road does go by the McDonell Douglas Boeing plant.
While it obviously wasn't a sobriety check it might be legit.
But its as ugly as day old Borsch.

On a public highway?

when?

the best and not pay for that level of skill. PO should know that all too well.

they are 'asking' us to take!

They don't need us. There's no sugar-coating it, no denying it. It's impossible to say what will happen next. :(

every family of four would have $2 million dollars. The Walton family owns more than 100 million Americans do. Is it time for the revolution yet? Let's oil up the guillotine now.

Not that I don't believe you, I just want confirmation for my dropped jaw.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_in_the_United_States

Still looking it over, but seems like a likely place to figure this out.

America is defined by it's values & it's people. As you've pointed out, the corporate oligarchy supports neither.

you can always whore yourself out in advertising. Pictures still need words to sell things and they pay for that. See? There is a place for you in this clapped-out world after all.

for good writers. Don't give up.

And if you think of it as "whoring yourself out," that's not really going to help. Think of it instead as taking what you know how to do and finding a way to make it pay.

People assume that if you can write, your only options for a regular paying job are in teaching. They're wrong.

Thanks for sticking up for me, whatever it said.

:hug:

Not just a callous reply but a staggeringly dumb one. Your post is a landmark. Those who would so casually dismiss it are whistling past the graveyard.

I'm sure you'll go running there to crow about your post...

:yourock:

RL

:thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:
Quite a talent you have there!
BHN

1. The international resource monopolies will continue to use your resources, because they believe they own them, and leave you starving in the street. It is likely that then we will be economic refugees, like so many people from Latin America that come here.

2. The international resource monopolies will allow us to keep our own resources, out of the goodness of their hearts, and we will be able to rebuild our own lives without them. I cannot think off the top of may head where this has ever happened, but anything is possible.

3. We will wind up offing half the population and ourselves in an effort to wrest control of those resources from the aforementioned monopolies. This happens, less likely than number one, but it has happened before. The international resource monopolies use these kinds of chaotic episodes to show people that they can't handle the resources and should look to them for management, i.e., bow down and serve and/or die.

We are on our way to third world status, as you can see, they no longer desire to use our labor and they no longer have a need for our market. We get confused into thinking that the folk at the top actually require money the way we do. They do not, they own the resources and have unlimited access to the labor that money is suppose to represent.

Money is a tool we use to facilitate trade, nothing more. The Resource Acquisition Mafia knows this, and has worked for centuries to gather all the world's resources to themselves. Their struggle continues, valiantly, and without rest, while we fight each other.

There is not enough meaningful work to go around. Automation and increased productivity have eliminated much of it.

Nixon had the answer. Negative income tax. (One of my friends dubbed it "automation socialism.") Everybody is provided a living stipend. If you find work or are exceptionally creative, you can exceed.

--imm

Now what? The options are better than you think.

"I will not accept my fate with silence and hopeless despair,". I agree and love the words but what exactly can we do? We have already become the slaves. It is just not apparent to everyone. They have been arming local police and have built concentration camps, ready for the day we might try to throw off the chains. Our government is controlled by the corporations. That by definition is fascism.

But the bottom line is we need to get organized and build a strategy as to how to fight the corporations.

What future could I ever hope to have, especially considering that I'm an English and Creative Writing major?

Liberal arts is not a path to a good career based on your degree.

I've always advocated people go after "hard" degrees with a strong science and mathematics background. There's still money there.

Presumably nobody forced you to be an English / creative writing major. The fact is, we learn to read and write in high school. What we do with it after that is up to us. You don't need a BS degree to learn creativity. You either are or are not.

I have a useless liberal arts degree in fine arts, with music minor. I was able to parlay that into a decent writing / marketing communications career during the high tech years. My career went kaplunk with high tech.

I never thought I'd go back to school in my mid-50s. These were supposed to be my peak earning years. Instead, I'm exploring that other side of myself. I was always better at science and math than the arts, and my 1st semi-useless degree was to please my mother, not prepare me for the real world. In another year I'll have an AS in med lab tech, with a relatively small amount of student debt or, if I'm able to sell my house, no student debt. I'd rather be doing physics, but in recognition of my age and situation, I'm just happy to have a future again after sloshing around directionless for the last 8 years.

Reality is what it is. Moaning about how useless your degree is won't get you a different degree or a job. English and creative writing majors faced the same obstacles 30 years ago that you face today. Too little work; too many wannabees. Save the creative writing for your off hours. Get a degree with a decent income attached to it. Then you may be in a position to help your hapless siblings find a better path as well.

Hey, this guy is just getting stuff off his chest. His perspective is valid; he doesn't need to be upbraided by a boot-strapper with 35+ years head start on him in life, no matter how bitter he/she may be.

Some artists and writers are just not cut out for cubicle jobs, or reinventing themselves endlessly at every whim and vicissitude of the "the marketplace." He thinks; he's heart-felt.

In times like these, where it is painfully obvious that the entire country was sucker-punched, and continues to be sucker-punched daily, it's just OK to vent frustrations. It doesn't "bring the tone down," and it's not whining. It's real, actual thinking on a very pragmatic level.

Reality is NOT what it is. Reality is certain circumstances. Those circumstances are mutable. Many of them we have no control over, but that's because we have been stripped of power. Lack of control does not equate "reality." Certainly there has got to be a more human approach to people than "Bootstrap yourself, whiner!" This isn't Victorian Europe anymore. That morality is bankrupt.

Who is going to buy their shit in this 'shopping' economy?

Hard to sell shit, when you have no customers. I guess that nugget of wisdom slipped past their Corporate mindset.

Corporate America has shot itself in the leg, and they have been at Dr. U.S. Government getting blood transfusions, because they hit a major artery.
Dr. U.S. Government has hooked up the American People, and has been milking blood out of them, to keep Corporate America strong enough to siphon off even more blood from the American People.

They will be able to sell all this shit to the chinese and the indians.

We are on the way to becoming completely useless.

They don't pay well enough for the Chinese and Indians to buy all the shit they've been dumping on us, and they have only been successful, because they have been dumping their shit into the American Shopping Economy. Americans are tapped out, and no longer have the money to keep buying the cheap Chinese and Indian shit, because they exported and eliminated so many jobs here. When we become useless as importers too, then the Chinese and Indians do not make the money to buy anything at all either.

They can keep cannibalizing all they want, but they still need us to buy their shit, otherwise China would not keep buying American Dollars to be able to keep importing so much shit into this country. And that is the only reason they have been allowed to import so much here.

Somebody at the top hasn't thought this through too well, and has been building a house of cards with funny money.

Unless they envision some technocratic eternal dominance, it isn't gonna happen.

They will split the newcomers into groups as they always do. Tell group A "you are better than all the rest". Give them money and power. Tell group B "You are better than everyone except group A. Work hard and you can be in group A." Repeat down to group Z.

I think there is room for a purchasing class in china, AND a laboring class.




But in the end, at some point, they will have to hop in their private jets and fly somewhere nobody can ever find them. Because when that day comes, everybody on the planet will be hunting the people who ruined everything.

he paid all his workers such high wages at that time - almost double and triple what the rest were paying.

His retort: I make cars - I want MY worker to be able to afford to BUY the cars THEY MAKE - that is a win win situation for me because I sell more and more cars and make more and more money, and the side benefit is that my workers make a decent living...

(I have greatly paraphrased the quotes)

If we aren't consumer and we aren't workers, we break free of that system and start again.

The mortgage nightmare has put lots of property in their hands.

I don't know what I'd do now if I were 30 or younger. I am a few weeks away from 61 and I have a high school diploma that is yellow and falling apart and there used to be many jobs that you got on the job training like the Bell telephone in the 60's and so many others .

You could always find a job in any factory and drive through an industrial area and see help wanted signs for what positions.

It's all gone now.

I feel bad for the young people of this day and age. so many just out and the is no job market.

That world was a different place . All I needed was a SS card and to fill out an ap in 1993 to get my last job which I had 30 years experience at now it means nothing at all since there are no jobs open for me.

NOw they want on-line pre aps and credit records and to have access to your entire life .

I guess we should have been thinking about just what the long tern affects of out sourcing would be and avoided inported products and each title of workers looking out for all the other workers but we did not and perhaps we had no control over any of it other than to make these huge corporations fail by not buying their products.

Who knows . I certainly don't . My wife and I just try to make it through each day but it is not easy and the worry can kill you.

A life where nothing can be planned or counted on is a life of worry not of joy and a future.

That's what every person in politics and in the media tell, right? And that's what most of the people still believe, despite the harsh reality they might find themselves in. "Things will get better. This is just temporary. If I work just a bit harder, I'll make it." Nobody ever thinks of questioning *the system*.

Barack Obama, your beloved and adored president, is saying exactly the same. Of course, because he's the product of the same system and he's working hard to preserve it. He's not on the side of the common people.

He's not on the side of the common people.

No kidding!

You have to garner a ridiculous amount of money to run a two year campaign (enough money to feed an entire African nation). To gain that amount of money, you have to be open to taking money from lobbyists and giant multi-million dollar corporations. Or, as I call it, legalized bribery.

There has been several recessions in my lifetime alone.

I don't see what is the good of getting everyone down. Maybe those who are so far left they want a revolution? So if things get that bad? But that's like hoping things get that bad and people really suffer.

Our garden payed BIG dividends this summer!

You're quite right. We are being ruthlessly fucked over by the less than 1 % of our population which owns 95% of all the wealth. Their wealth came from the labor stolen from the workers who created it. Time to take it back.

Your thinking and writing skills can be put to excellent use, as you have done here, addressing the core issues of why we are being so ruthlessly fucked and how to transform our society into one which serves the needs of human beings, not the profit statements of the anti-human corporations.

It is obvious to more and more people that corporate profits should have no place in the provision of health care. Why should they have priority in the provision of any needed human service? What if we started producing goods because they were useful rather than profitable and paid our producers a decent wage for doing so? What if our producers controlled the conditions of their labor and made the decisions about what to produce and how to do it? What if our communities could democratically control the events that most affect us?

So, let's talk about how we can create a human society. How do we get there from here? Let's analyze, in detail, what needs to be changed and how we can do that.

I don't see the problem as stemming from the personal, idiosyncratic greed of the top 1%, but from the capitalist economic system whose engine runs on the ever increasing need to maximize profits. Its an inherent feature of capitalism, and that motive force is destroying our lives and the life of our planet.

I've been living in Venezuela for the last two plus years because I wanted to see how Chavez's Bolivarian revolution was grappling with building a new, non-exploitative society. Living here, I can see what a huge job it is to turn a country of 30 millions people away from a capitalist system and into a human, socialist one. The Bolivarian revolution didn't come about through bloody battles, but through the ballot box. The ballot box has sustained it, in face of fierce opposition from the owning class. That opposition is a constant drag on effecting change, but so far it has been unable to stop it.

What keeps the majority of the Venezuelan people voting for change? The Chavez government, which has won 14 out of 15 elections since 1998, has instituted programs which meet the needs of every day people -- for free health care, free education, subsidized nutrition and housing. The new 1999 Constitution makes all of these things a constitutional right. The majority of the people keep voting for the Chavez government because it is extending democratic decision-making and control to the sectors of the population which never had that power before: community councils now control local decisions, decide how local problems will be solved, and carry out the job of implementing those decisions -- with funding from the national government. The new labor laws support the right of workers to unionize and, increasingly, to take over and run their plants. It encourages and subsidizes the creation of small businesses and cooperatives. But it is a hard job to demolish the old economic structures and create new ones. All the adults here have been raised in the capitalist ethos of every man/woman for him/herself, so there is the need to create a new, social consciousness. Successfully building a new society is a much, much harder job than simply tearing down the old one.

Venezuela is very lucky to have a visionary leader who is committed to building a truly human, democratic society. We need to encourage leadership like that in the U.S. and build a truly American movement which can support and develop such leadership. Most of all we need to raise and discuss the issues of what kind economic and social relations are required in a truly human society. And we must all participate in those discussions -- the unemployed assembly-line workers, the McDonald's servers, the homeless and the youth, as well as the formally schooled writers. poets and intellectuals. In the very discussion of ideas about what kind of a society we want, the forms and organizations and the methods for achieving it can emerge.

The United States was born in a revolution against imperialist tyranny. We Americans can do it again, if we have the powerful ideas which can capture the souls and energy of our people. It's time to work for the second great American revolution.

That is the basic truth that we must come to.
If anyone has land they will never go hungry and cannot be enslaved by the need to earn money for food and shelter.
Is there a single homeless person that would rather live under a bridge than on his own piece of land?
And frankly I think that this is the reason for the financial crisis of today, to capture more of the real estate and make us even more dependent on the feudalist that own it.
Feudalism is making a come back.

Thanks for the thread, Lyric.:thumbsup:

In another thread it was reported that many German ultra rich are demanding that their taxes be raised. They know two things.

First. The prosper when the country prospers. If the economy is in the dumps, their fortunes suffer.

Second. If you screw people over enough, they will kill you. The disparity of wealth that exists will inevitably lead to revolution.

We cannot manage to get everyone covered by health care...because it means that some might pay for others....
OMIGAWD!! That's Socialism!!! We can't have any of that here..even if it would mean better health care, longer lives, lower infant mortality, fewer medical cost bankruptcies, a better life in general..because it might cut into the profits of the corporations.....
banks, drugs, insurance.....oh nooo..Their bottom line is more important than the well-being of the citizens of this country..

We are being led around by the selfish and the short-sighted...and we will pay for it... I guess we are already paying for it in some ways..

We exalt individualism over community to the point where our communities are failing horribly. An individual can only excel within the structure of a healthy & robust community.

It's the YOYOs vs the WITTs. You're On Your Own vs We're In This Together. The ruling class are largely YOYOs. They don't want to contribute to a shared social safety net for the betterment of the community, but rather think we should all provide our own safety net. In other words, "Fuck the community. I can take care of myself & others should as well." They tell us that if you work hard enough, you can become anything you want. What they leave out of that equation is that the playing field is skewed. We don't all start at the same place. Some have better education, better health, better opportunities & networking. The field is getting more skewed every day.

I with a high school diploma and 5 yrs of trade school, questioned this very concept at 22. With a baby on my hip, I watched how the system tried to keep you in your place. Work hard, review time comes and you are just slightly underperforming. When i started in the trade I watched union brothers turn their backs on each other as long as they were getting theirs. 20 yrs ago we all worked with a partner no matter what task we carried out. Now, you work alone, foreman who are supposed to perform supervisory duties, work with the tools, unheard of when I started.
At 22 I questioned what was happening, 20 yrs ago I could see it. I questioned what would happen when there were no well paying jobs, or any jobs at all. Who would buy all this shit? Where would the customers come from? I was met by blank stares, being young I figured maybe my thinking was off.
To my horror I see I was right on. My thinking was skewed then by assuming because I wasn't college educated my ideas seemed silly, idealistic.

It's still too easy to just watch balloon boy, Desperate Housewives, and endless upbeat ads aimed straight at our salivary glands and brain stems that lull us into a false sense of complacency. It's still too easy to turn our backs on the truth. Truth is something that happens to others. Yeah, sure, we know the banks aren't lending, and we're using the credit cards to eat but everything is going to be all right. Our consumerist way of life will be back in full swing any time now.

Truth is, most Americans won't face it yet. But they will when it's all they have left. Just like any other human being faced with truth in third world countries.

But some jobs markets will thrive. Young people can join the military or they can become cops. With the impending poverty there will be crime sprees and riots in our future. The country will need police. With the rise in crime there will be many more demands for prisons. Prison guards will be needed. And all these new working people will need food which can't be imported because countries can't afford to feed us on our low wages. People can go to work for the giant agribusinesses as cheap labor.

They hate us, but there are places where they will still need us.

:sarcasm:

hi-tech robots as soon as possible, or even at the time of this reply of mine (on a far-away robot, albeit a good one).

Sure there's a recession, but things perk up again eventually. And they never get as bad as during the Depression.

Sometimes hanging around DU gets you down and then you go out in the real world and look around and realize it's not all that doom and gloomy.

From down here on the bottom, things are looking dire indeed.

I just think things can turn around. The eternal optimist.

Don't you GET it?

The states are paying are paying unemployment benies in the RED, and yet,when you go out in the "real world" there are are no fucking jobs.

But it is not all "gloom and doom" until a child is dying in your arms. And THAT will start happening.

No child is going to die, we do have welfare.

Where's your proof about the unemployment benefits? And that is what they are for.

No fucking jobs? You can do that job any time you want.

But there are jobs. Unemployment is not 100%. And with the recovery there will be more.

who have in the last 9 months lost their jobs of 10+ years or more. Two of which were Union jobs.

I am in Mass, not Delaware, so i can't say how things are near you, but i can tell you i don't really know anyone that isn't strugalling financially.

It's doom and gloom here on DU because it's doom and gloom out there in the real world...

:shrug:

I'm exhausted trying to help friends in need

Depressing.

And that there will be no recovery?

Or that there will be if we sit around claiming there never will be?

Part of the economy runs on optimism. I'm not spending as much as I did when I had that confidence. So when you beat down people's confidence, you're just making it worse.

I don't think you understand the dire straits i'm talking about. This is about being jobless for 2 years, savings gone, family sickness, getting foreclosed on, being homeless. This isn't about optimism anymore. You need to GET REAL and understand what's happening. My uncle, my FIL, my neighbor, myself (to some extent), my friend (a Police Officer in the neighboring town, who is in Bankruptcy procedings), etc.

It's already too late for these people. One is living with a brother (talked down from committing suicide... i won't tell him to try optimism), one working as a dishwasher at $9 an hour (formerly made over $35/hour), one fighting like heck to keep his house (3 of the 6 lost theirs, this one is going to try the "produce the note" gambit),...........


I could go on, but i won't. It's fairly obvious to me that this Depression has not 'hit home' for you. I hope to god it doesn't, because you'll be in for a shock.

:(

We have got nothing. And things are getting worse. Sorry to rain on the parade.

Who says it doesn't? Just people who love to run around claiming doom and gloom?

There are two projects in the area with signs even saying they are doing the work (construction) based on the funds of the American Recovery Act.

Look at what your state is doing with their recovery money. There are going to be some jobs there.

There are also government jobs, according to the job search sites.

Unless and until we citizens start demanding better, this is how it will be.

And worse.

We homeless people tried to tell ya.

We were the canaries....

But you didn't want to hear that.

Sleeping in a friend's living room, but homeless nonetheless.

Rhythm lived on the streets of Charlotte, NC as a homeless person for 2 years a while back. I spent time as a young adult breaking into abandoned mobile homes so that I'd have somewhere safe and dry to sleep.

Believe me, we know what you mean.

Exactly. Or else demand that their tax breaks be stripped and that they pay higher taxes.

Oh there are none..well live well with "hope" as your master!!

I think your students will be lucky to have you. Good luck, Lyric.

(And you're asking all the right questions.)

eom

They have NEW consumers now.

They don't have the consumer classes in China, India, and other cheap-labor nations built up to QUITE the level they'd need to replace the entire American middle class...but they're working on it. No doubt about that.

The working class isn't the ONLY class in danger right now.

If we dumbass Americans would get off our collective asses and boycott every service and all goods that these pricks produce and elect officials that promote protectionism and would charge sky high taxes for any companies that employs these methods, we'd stand a chance. But, face it. 67% of Americans are overweight couch potatoes who would rather watch Jon and Kate's containing melodrama, Dancing With the Stars, and all the other reality shows and gossip entertainment about celebrities. They are each a circuit in the Matrix and don't even realize it. They, and maybe "us" too, will continue to elect guys that promise to make a difference and never do. Just like the original Earthlings on "Wall-E", we've gotten so fat and comfortable with the status quo that we don't even want to move to make our lives better. Crap. I've been watching too many movies.

Until more people are cold & hungry there will be no change. But by then, it may be too late. TPTB have been preparing for this eventuality with their high tech weapons, militarized police force & "national emergency centers" that are supposedly to provide "temporary housing, medical, and humanitarian assistance to individuals and families dislocated due to an emergency or major disaster."

Sorry, my tinfoil hat is a little tight today. :tinfoilhat:

here at DU, so there is nothing new or different about those you deride.

It's up to us to find a productive way of getting through to others.

Once we tap into their anger effectively, there will be no stopping the uprising.

Frankly, I don't see a lot of anger. Instead, I see a grudging acceptance of a declining standard of living, but not so much pain that it's worth turning off Survivor to read depressing accounts of how badly Wall St. is sticking it to Main St. & how little our elected representatives care.

I would think that you, especially, would see that people who still have something to lose don't rock the boat.

I hope you are well.

I've been listening to a lot of people, and I hear a LOT of anger.

Often unfocused, but definitely anger. Misdirected sometimes, but definitely anger.

Maybe what *you* are seeing is people who don't know how to break through our damnable Rugged Individualism and come together to create an uprising.

Believe me, the anger is there.

We must vote, must campaign for true Democrats, not the Blue Dogs, we need to lobby Congress to revoke tax breaks, basically if they are going to be bad corporate citizens, they have to pay for the privilege to be bad corporate citizens.

They can always offshore entirely to China, but of course, :D , they wouldn't be able to get away with half the shit they do here in America. Ditto many places in the world.

We crash. The world's economies are being bifurcated into producer and consumer nations, and that imbalance is not sustainable. You cannot have entire nations producing goods--at wages so low that they cannot afford the goods-- to consuming nations who also cannot afford the goods unless it's on credit. That's a recipe for a collapse, a major collapse.

So, the answer to your question is that we crash unless we can develop new technologies which can then give birth to new industries. Unless that happens, we will have a global collapse.

factory worker stock ? What the hell kind of bull shit is that ?Factory worker stock !Nobody that ever worked in a factory raises children to think to believe that they should do the same ! Hell yes owe my soul to the company store !

What the hell kind of bull shit is that, factory stock !

Are there people so ignorant in this country for real ?

The idea that working in a factory is a terrible job is a relatively NEW idea. I assure you, for working-class people, landing a job down at the factory was considered a fantastic way to make a living--especially at the auto plants. Not everyone aspires to college. Not everyone has what it takes to succeed in college. But there was a time when you could make as much (if not more) than someone with a college degree if you got a good job at a factory. There are (or at least, WERE) lots of multi-generational factory workers, all of whom made a decent living and retired with pensions.

Those days are gone. The young people today whose parents and grandparents worked for Ford, Tyson, GE, and other manufacturers...they can't do what their parents and grandparents did, because those jobs are gone, and not all of them can go to college. They are trapped in a horrible situation, insofar as no matter what they choose to do, they're going to end up struggling to survive.

Surely you understand that.

Pardon me, I came up thorugh the two recessions of the sixties. It was a well know fact that industry was on it's way out back than. The shift had already begun. Now here I am talking from knowledge and experience in the highly industrialized areas of the eastern sea board. Even in the sixties it was all about education. And no, nobody back in Buffalo in the sixties wanted their children to grow up and go to work foe Ford or General motars or the big four at that time.Or the chemical plants or the steel plants or any of those god damed corperations of such.

now that the century has turned you see they are all over seas as was known would happen back in the sixties. That is of course if yer factory family were aware. I must addmitt, for some people ,knowing all that was more than they were able to except. Although on some level ,it was a well known fact.I do recall once when working at general motars discussing automation and with fellow employees at the plant . I had been involved in the Navy's nuclear program befor I worked at GM. My co workers cautioned me about keeping the discussion rather quite.,as there are those around us that are deeply afraid of being replaced by robots !

I understand the difficulties of retraining and raising a family at the same time. What I do not understand is those that knew what going to happen and refused to except it or prepare for it, or even bother to teach their own children or tell them the truth. Because the fact is the cirriculum did a piss por job of that as well.

Bull shit I say.

In all the years I spent in what was so termed industrial society (Eric Froome) (Frome ) frummy what ever, "The Heart of Man" The Art of love"
, I do not know of any family or family member ,be it provider or sibling ,ever being refered to as coming of industrial stock.

And that to me is insulting in the worst way what a family is in all that it means.

Forgive me if I misunderstood yer meaning, but understand this, industrial stock, that is BULL SHIT.

talking about a high-end factory, a unionized factory. For every great-paying auto factory there are probably five or six low paying factories where the work is pretty brutal too. What you call 'factory work stock' probably does not go back more than three generations and they were farmers.

It's nice of you to look down on masses of working people "oh no, those people are doomed, because the factories are gone and they are too genetically stupid to goto college".

Many in America may struggle to make ends meet, but only a small percentage are 'struggling to survive' even if that's how they describe it. They are stuggling more to have a life that meets their expectations.

And this is somehow relevant...how? Please, by all means...go talk to ACTUAL working-class people instead of the fantasy-workers that live in your brain. Ask them if they're ashamed that their parents and grandparents worked in factories, and if they'd feel offended at being grouped together with them. MY mother worked in a factory after my Dad died. My grandparents were factory workers for a while--German and Jewish immigrants working in processing plants and textile mills, and Slovakians working in the coal mines and preparation plants. If I want to see "factory stock" I only have to look in the mirror. I grew up in a West Virginia trailer park. Don't presume to lecture ME on what I am and am not allowed to say about my own people. I lived it. Unlike some people around here, I'm not talking out of my ass.



I see what you did there. I didn't say ANYTHING about people being "genetically stupid"--don't project your own bigotries on me. And I am hardly "looking down" on the working class that I am a PART OF as I spend my time and energy advocating for the best interests of said working class...including my own friends and family. I can only surmise that you have some problem with the idea of a smart, articulate poor person, or else some creepy beef with ME in particular, if you read my OP and saw it as "looking down" on the working class. I mean, REALLY? The mind boggles.



You know, you're right. MOST of the working class people aren't living in huts and eating insects to survive...YET...so OBVIOUSLY we're just spoiled little brats who have nothing of substance to complain about.

And you claim that *I* was ignorant and offensive. Jesus. Get out of your ivory tower and visit a tenement, a trailer park, a housing project some time. Go see how the poor ARE struggling to "survive." Unless you're too terrified of dirtying your shoes.

:eyes:

Me, who has worked for the last seven years as a janitor is somehow looking down at working class people because I defend them from your attacks.

You said this

"Low-income people who come from factory-worker stock can't just "retrain" and do something else."


"Stock" is a comment on their genes, and just look how incapable they are - too stupid to retrain for something else.

Sure, you are talking about your own family, but not about yourself, because you said this about yourself.

"Because I'm very smart and very, very good at what I do,"


So other people who come from "factory stock" are incapable of retraining to do non-factory work, even though their ancestors switched from farming to factory work, and you feel like you are just like them. Right.

I happen to have lived the last twenty years in the middle of the bottom quintile. And yet I look to my left and see about $4,000 worth of DvDs. I look ahead and I see two desktop computers and a high speed internet connection and a brand-new netbook. Yes, it sure is a fight for 'survival' down here at the bottom of the income ladder.

And then there is the YET of your post. Yes, a certain segment of DU has always loved to proclaim doom. Soon there will be mass starvation and the world will be just like "Road Warrior" or "A dog and his boy". Those jeremiads might be more convincing if I had not been reading them for the last six years, and also if they did not always hyperbolically overstate the hardships of the now.

we have the power and just aren't organized enough, or smart enough, or just maybe brainwashed too much... "apathy is deadly"

Disussing these issues with friends, and then noticed Prez's points about potential for what I'll call 'new' economy, related to environmental matters, requires science/engineering/construction/distribution, etc. Might this work for all of us?

We don't invest enough in public education. We hand our teachers pennies and expect them to turn out results of solid gold. When that doesn't happen, we declare the schools have "failed" and strip away even MORE money. It's nice to dream that this might change, but I don't think it will. It will take something radical, something that 99% of politicians just are not willing to do.

I am also concerned that, if we focus too much on math and science and not enough on music, art, and literature, we risk losing what little bit of culture we have left. We can't base a culture on money and the most expedient ways of procuring money. I firmly believe that the only reason that we don't value the arts as a society is because the Powers That Be have taught us that anything not done for profit is a waste of time and energy. How many students are ill-suited for math and science jobs, but brilliantly-suited to create literature or compose music? And yet, for the sake of the Almighty Dollar, we would rather force people into ill-fitting roles than trying to visualize a culturally-rich and diverse nation that has a place for everyone.

All of these issues could be addressed if we had the funds and the willpower to do so, but we can't even agree on what the problems are, much less how to solve them. Upthread, someone suggested that I need to switch majors because I'll never make a living as a writer. They meant well, but I still find it profoundly hurtful that poets and philosophers are truly so valueless in our world. It's as if everyone believes that we have reach the pinnacle of our culture and can't possibly need to grow any more, so we don't need the visionaries and artists anymore.

If that's what the world is destined to become, then I'm glad that I'll be leaving it sooner rather than later. I couldn't breathe if I didn't write. If I had to study computers and math all day instead of poetry and literature, my life would have very little meaning for me. Miserable people are not productive people. Have we really lost our national need for beauty and mystery? :(

Our universities and research centers will develop more powerful solar and wind technologies - and then those technologies will be manufactured in China and India.

That's the "new" economy - we'll provide the brains, other countries will provide the labor. It's already happening. I posted a link a couple of weeks ago that shows how many companies are exporting solar-based products. The United States had around 950 - China had more than 55,000. Yes, we'll need our labor to install this technology if anyone here is still able to afford it. Doubtful.

There's only one route left, and that's to examine every single thing you buy. If it's made outside of the United States, go without. That's the only way to starve this beast and stop contributing to our own destruction.

Boycotts, however successful, don't endure, imo.

There must be government policy to ENCOURAGE manufacturing here, and Prez O has stated that's his goal.

Since Corporate America no longer needs us....
Then we should not need them.
Kick their asses OUT.
Put a big fat tariff on any item coming in from overseas..
And put America back to work making things for America.
Fuck them and the traitors in government they rode in on.

Film, TV, radio, magazines, Internet: probably more media than ever before even without newspapers. Plus technical writing. I don't know how well any of those pay these days and you might need to relocate to immerse yourself in a suitable media market and start circulating.

At some point in the future those overseas workers may wise up and figure out that their foreign corporate bosses are little more than middle men that provided the startup resources. They can make and sell their products directly to the rest of the world and keep all the profits for themselves. That's what the corporatists would surely do to them if something more profitable came along.

In the past year or so I have bought some items on eBay directly from overseas sellers in Hong Kong and Singapore and even mainland China. No middle men. Couldn't Wal-Mart send its buyers to Chinese plants owned and operated by the Chinese and simply bypass the U.S. and other corporatists who have been getting rich off the cheap Chinese labor? It could turn out that the corporatists wake up one day to find that their short-term profit-seeking and unquenchable greed have done them in, that the Chinese no longer need them. Then what? It would be poetic justice.

Good luck. Stay flexible.

Great post!

get on what the hell this factory stock bull shit is !I am sending this post along !

I would expect that kind of a statement out of a god damned bureaucrate!Or some kind of a republican right wing nut in a bull shit prosperity pitch wearing a grin!

Factory stock, what kind of a bull shit is that !

Understand this, I know of English stock, Irish stock ,French stock all kinds of european stock, and I do know the world is large ! very large!
Indeed it is.

But factory stock, no, some kind of god damned bureaucrate thought that one up.

Fantastic post:thumbsup:

1) Ultimately, the workers overseas are going to get tired of their low wages, too. I'd give it one more generation.

2) As they impoverish workers, they are going to run out of markets in which to sell things.

3) People will get tired of their fascination with computers and media when they are homeless, don't have electricity don't have electricity or heat, or don't have food. That will focus people back on reality pretty quick.

4) With this economic crisis, the wealthy have shown how badly they could mess up. Related: there is a point with greed beyond which it just becomes stupidity.

5) Nationalizing is always an option if people are pissed enough.

6) This could still be fought and reversed now. For the most part, the wealthy have only done this because the rest of us have allowed them to.


I have to mention also, I never thought of a lower class person with a degree to be competition with me, but I guess it does break down like that in the form of race.

"If there is something you do and do well because you love to do whatever it is so much that you would pay someone to let you do it,Then Do it!

If you went out and got better at whatever that is than anyone else that you know or know of because of the enjoyment of doing whatever it is Then DO IT!

Don't worry about the money,it always follows the Best"

And You sir write better than anyone I have read in a long time. A Very Long Time.

I think they will be able to sell things to Socialist countries (since their wealth is shared more evenly).

Socialist-leaning countries like Sweden, Norway, Brazil, Venezuela, France, Canada, etc. (India will join the pack sooner or later).

How about Medicare for all (to begin with, and the rest will follow...)?

Conservatives call them that. I would call them liberal.

Now, to the point, yes, I think the best we could do is go "liberal." Medicaid for all? I certainly agree.

I see things as you see them. I use to be called Pollyanna because I always tried to see the positive in every situation. The glass half full in lieu of half empty type thinking.

Yet ... there is a lot brewing out there that doesn't smell good for any of us. I now have a pit in my stomach.

I have a 20 year old son, and I worry about his future. His hopes and dreams will need to be re-examined; and if he's lucky maybe he'll be okay - but ... I worry about him and all of us.

I wish I didn't, but I see America as another chapter for the Economic Hitman.

NAFTA will kick in any day now, and Americans will have more good jobs than they know what to do with....any day now.
Its only been 15 years.

Do you remember when the "Centrist" Democratic Party sold us THAT shit.

where Gore helped STICK us with NAFTA.

:) I agree, I agree! Thank you for stating it so well!

If we aren't serving them, doing the day to day work they are priveleged to abstain from, then what good are we? If we aren't serving them by generating income for them with our stolen labor, then what good are we? And if we don't spend every moment we get free from that grind thinking about their world and consuming or planning to consume on the basis of their values...then what good are we? As another Du'er pointed out a few nights ago, they steal our time on this planet for their profit. With half a fucking life and no time to actually live it, well, what good are we?

We have gone from merely being disposable to having no real intrinsic value whatsoever except for what can be coerced out of us at a decided disadvantage for us.

got South/Central American and Chinese tobacco production to a sufficient level, they started shutting down operations here. Asia and South/Central America is where there is market growth. lax or no regulation, and an exploding population.

UofK ag department helped develop strains of tobacco that would grow in China and other locations. The distinctive aroma/taste of Burley can be simulated. Kentucky soil isn't that important anymore.

I hate that weed, but it put dinner on the table on many occasions.

Love that quote from Shelley.

John Vanderslice borrows from the last paragraph in the chorus to "Pale Horse."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbEtOIqXG5k

It used to be prosperous, now it is one of the poorer counties.
The house we live in we bought a few years after it was abandoned by the original owner. It is a modular about 15 years old planted in the middle of what was a tobacco field, part of a plantation that was established around 1725-30 of about 1,000 acres, we have 9 of those acres.

I have had to struggle my whole life to keep food on the table after being outed and tossed from the Navy, I worked as an electrician with side jobs in restaurants, and refinished furniture as a side line.
I could not go to college, I graduated from HS in 1980 there were no jobs in my home state of WV since the mines went to the mountain destruction method, Kelly Springfield tires, Celanese,and foundries all closed, the paper mill my dad worked at was cutting jobs as they automated. I had to join the service or go hungry. I have gone hungry there was no money for college and scholar ships were drying up even then except if I wanted to go t Alabama Kreestian college( I hate bible thumpers and 2 classed each day were related to theology as a requirement).

I have read a lot of the comments. I have lived the struggle to make even as much as dad did. I lived in right to work states, been cheated out of pay, vacations and ins after being promised them.

I have been saying for years we are going to land in a depression and was told I'm a doom n gloom negative asshole. All the while each successive job I got I ended up with less pay. I did good work, showed up on time and sober ready to work.
As little as two years ago right on here when I said lay in some rice and beans I was shot at. Our house hold gets by on 40% what we did in 98. The only reason we can is because we are not 'consumers' we buy just what we need. We bought the house because it was cheaper than rent was(1/2) because it was abandoned and needs work.

As we redo the house we are doing it ourselves and keeping the cost down, but each time we replace something we replaced Incand with CFLs, as they die with LEDs, tv for a projector(less power) each appliance with an energy star, I check what other consumers have to say about quality, need for repairs(hard to get any repair person out this far) energy use etc. We have cut our power needs by a bit over half in 2 1/2 yrs. We are making the house as efficient as possible and growing food, trade food with neighbors. I am gathering stuff to build a solar furnace that will heat the house, we have a solar water heater but have not had the $ for the balance of system. on and on so we can be more or less independent as possible and tryin to reach near-0 fossil fuel.

We don't buy the latest gadget, we have 1 credit card and use it sparingly. One car is 2 yrs old, to replace the 1990 minivan that finally died and our other is a 12yr old truck.

I have called out corporations that have moved jobs away with a threat of not buying from them anymore, when Levis and Wrangler both moved their ops to Mexico I wrote and said I will not be buying your product any more, same with Hersheys chocolates. They all said we are looking out for our stock holders. to which I replied your stock holders do not make the product and you shit on the towns that have provided your employees of over 100 years, the same generational employees that made you a great and stable company, so FUCK you very much. I see your bottom line is the only thing you can see in your greedy profit grab.

I thnk if we all 200 million anyway said we will not buy from you and you and you until you move jobs back here.

Someone said Walmart should go directly to the chinese factories and buy direct no middle man..walton family IS the middle man they do buy directly from those factories and they forcefully drive down prices by telling those factory owners what they will pay and not a dime more.

are wringing out the last few dollars from us before the crumple us up and throw us in the gutter.

Tobacco really messed with the farmers. The would not allow farmers to build alternate markets to replace tobacco. They wanted to keep the farmers dependent on them as long as possible. It's been the tobacco companies that have fought industrial hemp and local farmer's markets.

Every word, and all the ones unsaid.:hi:

We have some very interesting times ahead of us.
:kick: & R

...I salute and THANK you - bookmarking.

and how is it that the tax break to corporations to outsource our jobs hasn't been the subject de jour?
We are going to have to re-invent ourselves lest we die and I mean DIE!
By the time the media gets through with Obama and Democrats, any benefits to workers will be history in 2010, thanks to corporate owned media.

They are like an octopus with so many tentacles that strangle us all. Their propaganda makes a charade of all human rights. Their greed ....oh well we all know by now how ugly it all is.

We are going to have to learn to care for each other somehow. God help us all!

Thank you Lyric.

For Activist Orientation Presentation
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3932487043163636261#



Theatrical version from the film for general audiences
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3932487043163636261#docid=7065205277695921912



Neo

This post has stirred up a lot of thoughts in my head. I live in Michigan of all places. In one of the most affluent counties in the state, but Michigan nonetheless. You may not see it on the surface around where I live, but scratch enough and you can see. Two family owned pharmacies that were around for years have been replaced by CVS and Rite Aid. A grocery store my mom worked at was put out of business as soon as Kroger opened up about five years ago. My family is pretty much upper-middle class. My dad has worked for the State forever, right now in the Liquor Control Commission. Even though the state has been making a lot of cuts, I'm pretty sure he's safe with all his seniority. My mom now works as a teller for Bank of America (hold off the throwing of rotten vegetables lol). So two pretty decent jobs. However, the wages have remained stagnant, and we have some trouble paying all the bills at the end of the month. My parents have had to get extensions numerous times. I've personally seen eviction notices on the door of our apartment before. They're taken care of, but it's alarming nonetheless.

I just graduated high school in May of this past year. I see myself as pretty smart, but didn't get that good of grades. I'm going to start at a community college in 2010, and hope to later transfer to Michigan State University, for a degree in Political Science. I am very scared. Both about how the hell we are going to pay for it (and how much debt am I going to accrue) and what kind of a job I can get. My grandfather, on an eight grade education, was able to work his way up to a fairly high position in American Motors. He died six years before I was born, so I never met him. I know I need a good education, because that kind of thing does not and cannot happen in today's world.

My real dream is to end up in Congress to make real changes, take on the injustices in this world. The stranglehold of the very wealthy in this country must be broken. If I do ever get in Congress, I will refuse to accept a penny from any lobbyists, except from the few organizations out there that advocate for the people. The only way to break the vice grip of the corporations is either to have sweeping campaign finance reform. But how is that going to happen as long as the very lawmakers who can do such a thing's pockets continue to be lined? The second option is to pick off the bad apples one at a time, regardless of party lines. The main two who I really see making a difference, the main two really trying to work for the people, are Alan Grayson and Anthony Weiner. Our hopes lie on them, until more people rise up and have their eyes opened.

We need people who start young and get elections and governance street cred. Maybe we can even get clean elections passed nationally so you don't have to spend so much time dialing for dollars.

Thank you for the response. I just read up on clean elections and they are a very good idea. This, along with ending corporate personhood, can finally make the government work for the people again.

And from a more or less sheltered life, still gets it.

Thank you for contributing to this discussion and may fortune and good luck be with you.

BTW, it might be of interest to you to note that many years ago, Nixon's Treasury Secretary Simon wrote a book and in it he detailed how college degrees became necessary as a response to the Civil Rights movement. So once a business owner could no longer refuse to hire a black youth to man the gas station pump, just on account of not liking their skin color, but they could say , "Do you have some college education?" then the race to have a college degree was on.

And the banksters like it - becasue as inflation affected the higher education sector more and more, then it was a gurarantee to the banks that those getting the jobs would owe at least some of their first five years of paychecks back to them.

Nailed it to the wall.

May good fortune attend you and all you love.
May you be joy-filled.
May you be safe.
May you be at ease.
MAY YOU NEVER GIVE UP OR SHUT UP.

For the gadgets we love, I suppose, but even some of those could be had without them, to some extent. For example, you can have a computer without buying Windows, which is made by one of the strongest proponents of exploitation of cheaper labor from off our shores.

Cars, I suppose, but we're going to have to decrease our use of cars anyway or else our progeny will suffer greatly as a result.

What puzzles me is why there isn't a stronger movement to create local economies in which we trade with each other and make it impossible, at least in whatever part of our lives we can live locally, for the supra-national corporations to suck out huge percentages of our productivity.

Of course, I'm a perfect example of exactly the thing I bemoan. Let me spend some part of today looking for others who are trying to create a local, non-corporate, segment of economy so I can begin to put at least some of my money where my mouth is.

Somehow the "powers that be" are under the impression that each and every one of us can train to be a rocket scientist or neurosurgeon. Okay, bad choice in rocket scientist . . . that's been outsourced. But, people are not equally motivated. A perfect candidate for years and years of education may, instead, prefer tinkering with machines and the satisfaction that can be gained from manual labor. It's not a bad thing to love a simpler life which is usually close to home and familiar surroundings. The people who stitched handbags and shoes and bound books and made paper products are the ones responsible for our communities. Sadly, the factories have closed and every small town is now a cookie cutter of the next with jobs that are low paid or nonexistent. Within 5 miles of where I am sitting, family farms were torn down and replaced by the miserable trappings of modern life: a couple of strip malls, a car dealership and the usual burger/taco/chicken chain-run joints. I wish we could turn back the clock.

We, the working class, get rid of them, the parasitic rich. Rather than bemoan our fate, we realize that there is no such thing as fate and instead work to create a brighter future by eliminating the social cancer that is capitalism.

might I suggest grad school? Colleges won't disappear (not in our lifetime anyway; I'm 32). I'll probably have a job not long after I get my PhD in 2011. Worse comes to worse, my field of study is sought by the government, because of things like Venezuela, Honduras and the Mexican drug war.

It's worth a shot. You might have to go into debt for it, but there are benefits.

My tentative plan right now is to get an MFA in poetry (which will only take 2 years, but means the world to me) and then perhaps law school to study family law so I can help low-income people who ordinarily couldn't afford legal assistance. I'm minoring in political science, so I'll have at least some background there. If not that, then maybe a PhD in Creative Writing for the purpose of becoming a professor. I'm not sure yet. I know that I want to write and I want to help people. I wouldn't mind writing books like Barbara Ehrenreich, save that my perspective as a poor person would be one of long personal experience rather than empathetic experimentation.

bullet and look for a job in journalism. Radical, left-wing journalism shouldn't be too meretricious and painful.

all the way to the poorhouse because those new low wages won't buy diddly.
At the heighth of the Reagan bust two of our sons graduated from high school and there were no jobs to be had even at McDonald's which still hadn't come to our suburban Chicago locale. The Pell Grants were cut and loans denied for college so they floated until almost the end of the decade. One is permanently scarred because he turned to drugs in his depression.
At any rate the two oldest still don't buy into the constant debt/consumerism that is pushed as the way to recovery this time. The youngest, who was forced into the Army, has done better but only by buying into conservative thinking (much to my regret). Working class and poor used to be the starting point not the end point of aspirations and many of us did pull ourselves up to buying homes, cars, taking vacations regularly, etc. That is now impossible and GM should be the first company that fails because of that attitude. It is time for a "peasant's revolt".

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:applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause:

You'd be the kind of person we really need on "Madison Ave", in light of the synergistic relationship the culture has with mass media.....

introducing some depth of vision into that {geez, what to call it? Petri dish? Two horsed cart (in that mass media both drives and is driven by its audience)? } social cauldron would be constructive.

Excellent essay. KnR

my thoughts on the question, "Now What?".....

"Ye are many - they are few", true, but to have the effect of our numbers, we need organizers. Many of us are women (60% of the working poor are women -- http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/herman/reports/futurework/report/chapter2/box2-4_text.htm).

IMHO, Women's organizations would do well to ally themselves with groups that have shown success in leading public action, such as Color of Change, or Move On.

words. You have a gift! Thanks from this reader for sharing it with us in such a clear and useful way. And we are, indeed, "many", and you can count me in with those who do rise up.:toast:

And getting fewer.

It's time to start reallocating the wealth back to where it should be.

This is the "financial revolution" that is killing us.

agriculture ---> manufacturing (industrial revolution) ---> financial "revolution"

Which is more important? But, where is the money?


They don't "need" us financially. All the money has been sucked into the fantasy of the stock markets, insurance, etc.
Jobs? Not necessary.

The only thing necessary is our ignorance, and obedience.

money that CorpAmerica wants. This is really our only leverage. But if we wait until we are broke, which is coming soon, it will be too late. IMHO a massive devaluation of the dollar is coming soon to a theater near you.

And I think we all know that, even though it sounds cool, going to the streets with pitchforks will not end well for us.

We need to organize and start actions now. Boycott the worst of CorpAmerica and reward the best. Invest in honest politicians. Stay away for the stock market trap.

Their goal is an unfettered pipeline of cash directly from our bank accounts to theirs.

And our happiness or satisfaction is irrelevant.

That's why the "mandate" is sure to be included in HCR.

They LOVE a captive wage-slave audience.

Their society actually still employs artists and writers. I was watching a great episode of Rick Steves one day. I don't remember where he was but the majority of the people in the town he was in were master violin crafters. These violins were so expertly crafted and sounded heavenly. Our society in America doesn't really appreciate art at all anymore. I think our closest thing to art in this country are the theatres and museums in New York.

like, you know, uh, dudez who can write good and stuff r super kewl!

being able to clearly communicate is a valuable skill in any number of disciplines and industries. if you have a desired skill, you can get paid for it. period.

i honestly have done no research on this at all, but I would imagine the overwhelming majority of famous poets (or at least working poets) started out in other careers, like journalism or communications.

Perfect.


Peace,
Max

I have bought made in USA more than half the time that I've looked for it. And there are so many other ways to fight the powers. They feel they don't need us - but they DO.

great job in your post, I know it's not about being told good job, but the fact you're expressing what you want others to hear. I agree with your sentiment.

Right now you can buy programs that do most jobs that once were considered professional or quasi-professional. There are programs out there that run a law office - generate all the paperwork and you just need a lawyer and one assistent.

Medical expert systems do a better job at diagnosis and treatment plans than most MDs in many fields.

Airline pilots? Autopilot, landing, taxiing done by CAT IIIc - and better than humans.

Truck driver? Robots

We are going to get to a point where most people will not have the intelligence or skills necessary to find work in this or any other fully industrialized country. Then the real problems begin. Will most people be content to be on something like Social Security disability all their lives since they are too dim to figure out how to be useful in this modern world? Probably. But everyone else better make enough money to pay the taxes to have hundreds of millions on the dole.

Be one of their assistants, rather than the lawyer's.

And there still are a lot of IT jobs - go out and search as if you wanted one. Most of the articles on the subject of what fields are still good even now mention it.

Even on the low end like network administrator, one needs a pretty high IQ. You can't do that work with an 85 IQ, like factory work.

Works like a charm, huh?

And I think you exaggerate the state of things a wee bit. Things are getting bad, but if they were as bad as you make them seem, there would be a much stronger public outcry. We just haven't reached that tipping point yet. Yes, the non-upper classes are feeling more stressed than ever, but we are downsizing our lifestyles and making it work...for now.

My suggestion is that if you're as good as you say/think you are, then please please please become an educator (and yes, you will make much more than 14k a year...geez). There's nothing our corporate overlords love more than an uneducated citizenry - they're easily manipulated and there's no chance of change to the power structure. You'll do much more good as an educator, than some angry fool screaming with a sign on a street corner.