Are you now saying that the whole movement is based on the idea that somebody, somewhere, has more money than they do?
This isn't a step up from just being angry.
Are you now saying that the whole movement is based on the idea that somebody, somewhere, has more money than they do?
This isn't a step up from just being angry.
Was that to me? If it was, no...it was showing that the middle class/quintile hasn't experienced the same exponential growth as the top 1% (or 5%). It's been going on for decades, but only now associated with "anger". People who followed the rules, did all the "right" things, but now find the American Dream was either an illusion, a false promise, or a scam. I think it's more complicated than anyone admits. And that's partly why the Occupy Wall Street protesters confuses so many people....Originally Posted by Wraith
So it is just anger at nebulous things.
OWS is easy to understand. Those of us criticizing them are not confused in any way about them. They are a rabble running on pure emotion, with no consensus on what they're actually angry about, and as a group they do not seem to understand any of the issues involved in anything related to their non-specific anger. The entire movement is vacuous, and we don't take them seriously because they offer nothing to consider.
You could be taking a different tack to this, you know. You could divorce yourself from them, and just say that their disorganized whining, their confused and poorly defined complaints, do not in any way undermine your own legitimate grievances, whatever they happen to be. You don't have to attach yourself to any group just because they are angry and seem to be in the same general part of the political spectrum as you. It's okay to have standards. You can even reevaluate later, if these people ever manage to get their act together and produce specific complaints and specific plans with specific goals in mind.
But it seems part of their point is....legitimate grievances haven't been addressed. I can relate to that, because I've been "whining" about the same damn things for over half my life. That's some kind of messed up. I wasn't born early enough in the Baby Boom to be considered a "legitimate" activist, or even a Kosher anti-war hippie! (Even though my older sisters had boyfriends or friends caught in the Viet Nam mess, who either came home without limbs or didn't come home at all.) In fact, I've never been considered a "legitimate" feminist.
The previous standard used to be "Choice", but even that doesn't pass the litmus test now. Is it really a "Choice" if you do well in HS, find your way to college, spend 4 years and take out loans (because not everyone can get four year athletic scholarships for Football---or academic scholarship full rides, either) work and study hard....only to graduate with no employment prospects? But now deeply in debt and either unemployed, or working 60 hours a week at minimum wage? And your parents can't help you much because they can't maintain the mortgage, or rising property taxes, or one of them has been laid off for more than 99 weeks? Or they lose their home to foreclosure, or decide to walk away and send jingle keys to the mortgage servicer?
(I stopped there, at the "rambling moment"but it's still part of today's Discussion.)
All people have a voice in this "movement". Millennials, Generation X or Y, Baby Boomers, Sandwich Generation....all demographics. I think the common complaint, from all those groups, is that there's been a massive chasm created within the American Dream. A loss of trust in government, the private sector, and even "Do the right thing". A cynicism that laid its seeds decades ago has grown into visible things, and seeing that doesn't make anyone a conspiracy theorist.
Take a look around the world, at the dysfunctional governments, the economies that bought into promises of Financial tools (ie, current debt as future growth and profit, saying sovereign debt is "different") and it's pretty clear....kicking the can down the road eventually comes home, and someone has to pay. And here we are.
If you go to college and get a liberal arts degree, say your standard undergrad degree in psychology, sure you had a choice, and you made a poor one. Right now, even in these troubled economic times, there are a lot of companies that are looking to hire skilled engineers, IT developers, etc...
What are you saying, exactly? That only liberal arts majors are having trouble finding jobs?
That poor choices often have negative consequences. Thinking that simply getting a college degree in anything is a guarantee of financial security simply isn't true. Racking up tens of thousands of dollars in debt for a degree that a simple Google search could show to be worthless is a poor decision.
But that wasn't part of the American Dream, now was it? No, the "promise" and the social contract used to be: do well in school and follow your interests and/or talents, follow them into secondary education, and you will find a job, a career, and be "rewarded". Liberal Arts colleges actually turn out very good thinkers, analyzers, planners. Besides, our whole nation can't just have millions of STEM grads---science, technology, education, math.
I was clearly raised with a very different American Dream than you were. No part of my Dream indicated that success was guaranteed to me regardless of my life decisions.
Case in point. A cousin of mine went to a rather prestigious university for a degree in film-studies. He racked up over a hundred thousand dollars in debt for his undergrad education alone. This wasn't even a good school for the program he was interested in. You're saying that the American Dream dictated that because he went to a school he couldn't afford, for a degree that he will likely not use, he would end up taken care of... just because? These are the kinds of good thinkers that liberal arts degrees are churning out?
I didn't say the American Dream meant success was "guaranteed". But hard work and education was something most everyone could rely upon. Until we couldn't.
This is incredibly incorrect. Our 'social contract' says nothing about wasting your money and time getting a useless degree and then being outraged - outraged, I say! - that no one will hire you.
I was listening to a piece on the radio a couple days back (yes, I've been listening to NPR a lot since I've been doing a lot of pointless driving) that involved a discussion with some 20-something guy who was leading some advocacy group for fresh graduates. They were talking about their challenges finding jobs, yadda yadda yadda. Then a whole bunch of recent grads called in, and they all had similar stories. They got a degree in, say, sociology, or anthropology, or glass blowing or whatever, and then were disappointed in the system that there was a limited number of opportunities available for them, so they had to retrain/shift careers/get a crappier job than they wanted.
This is ABSURD. There's no secret which jobs are in demand right now: pretty much anything technical (yes, your aforementioned STEM), and anything in healthcare. There's vast numbers of jobs available in some fields that simply aren't filled because not enough people are trained to do them. Yes, everyone probably could go into these fields, since jobs aren't a zero sum game, except for one-handed glass blowers. My own field is projected by the US department of labor to have over seventy percent job growth by 2020. That's incredibly high. There's continuing demand for people in CS, IT, traditional engineering disciplines, skilled manufacturing positions, modeling/computational work (e.g. all those mathematical finance guys, or the network theory guys snapped up by Facebook and the like, or the search algorithm guys, or whatever).
There are genuine hard-luck cases among our young graduates, but many are self-inflicted wounds. I have two sisters who got English degrees in college. One is now earning probably close to $200k a year (I don't know the exact amount, but let's go with that), the other is unemployed. What's the difference? Well, the high earning sister also completed a premed curriculum, went to med school, and now works as an attending physician. The unemployed sister decided to go into English education, got a master's degree in education (adding on a nice tidy sum to her loans), and surprisingly can't find a job in a subject that's generally oversubscribed and in a time when education budgets are strained or cut. If she'd become a science or math teacher, of course, that would have been different... or if she was willing to relocate to a part of the country that is in need or more English teachers, which she isn't. The point is that I'm fine with her 'following her dreams' as long as she doesn't complain when her dreams leave her with little employment prospects.
Not quite what I meant by the social contract, or an education leading to "outrage".
Well, what exactly did you mean by social contract, or an education leading to outrage?
You could make this point until you're blue in the face, but you're still wrong. Education and hard work do make it much more likely that someone will get a job and that they will be paid well. Education and hard work are not and have never been sufficient conditions for gainful employment.
Let's be honest here, this entire protest movement exists because the economy is in poor shape and unemployment is high. Unfortunately for the protesters, any of their "solutions" to the current situation would likely harm the economy even more and lead to even higher unemployment. As hard as it might be to believe, being outraged has never fixed an economy; neither has demonizing those working in productive parts of the economy.
Hope is the denial of reality
Yes, the protest movement is because the economy sucks, unemployment is high, and neither the private sector nor government has ideas or solutions. College grads in general fare better, but barely. Some of them haven't been "counted" in national numbers, but they're either underemployed or returned to school.
The protestors also haven't laid out any solutions, as far as I can tell. They're also not trying to demonize or fix any one employment sector, either. That's probably why the media can't figure out how to cover them, and why those who don't understand....well, they don't understand.
Some op-eds say this is just Americans acting spoiled, because we haven't really known this kind of stagnation with globalization before. Most of our recessions have bounced back faster, and even our previous jobless recoveries didn't look quite like this.
Let's play this again.
That was in response to wiggin and his two sisters who both had English majors, where one also went to medical school but the other won't move to where education jobs are. In other words, the social contract goes both ways, and we know that. English majors who get a masters in Education and are willing or able to move to where the teaching jobs are....probably aren't in the same group "complaining" with the Education Masters who also have a mortgage they can't get out from under, or those who got their Masters while raising a young family, or the teachers that were laid off when budgets got cut.
And yes, as Loki said....let's be honest here. As our Information and Technological Age has gone so far, it's easier to replace teachers first. But who's next down the line....when Watson is being used as a replacement for human actuarial and physician input at health insurance companies? Robotic surgery can replace plenty of ancillary staff, too. Para-legals and attorneys can also be replaced by Watson or other super-computers, or their labor sent across oceans to Asia. Even our Financial Industry is using super-computer math quants and algorithms to replace the human element. Maybe firefighters are next, using smoke detectors and automatic distinguishing chemicals, or non-human devices. Drones, anyone? The same kind of war-fighting-unmanned-military-drones that are capable of assassinating terrorists?
Still, we have young people wanting to be teachers, nurses, physicians, fire fighters, police, accountants, attorneys, soldiers. During the four to eight years they go to school for these degrees, they're competing with either the developed world with just as much information (and cheaper labor) or advancing technology that can easily replace them.
Apologies that wasn't clear. I was more saying that the actual amount of homelessness at any given time fluctuates and it's a difficult number to count, so implying that there are hundreds of thousands of homeless is sort of lazy journalism. It's also not easy to spot/count homeless people.That's why the NYC guy who formed The Rent is Too Damn High party was (temporarily) awesome. Housing in NYC is very expensive, in comparison to other urban cities, even when things like public transportation are factored in. That's another part of the American Problem dilemma.
I found it interesting (and missing the biggest point) when Chicago's Board of Trade high-rise employees put posters in the windows, strung across maybe a half city block of street-side windows), saying, "We Are Part of the 1 %".
They're not, they're actually part of the 99% (secretaries, human resources, account managers, entry-level traders, data collectors, IT units, compliance specialists, para-legals, CPAs, etc.)
That said, if they are focused on anything, these protests don't seem to be focused on homelessness. And if you want to get into a discussion of housing costs while we're in the middle of a real estate price collapse, so be it.But housing costs remain high in NY because of a number of things, including high demand, rent control, barriers to new construction and the proliferation of "landmarked neighborhoods" in more crowded/expensive places like Manhattan.
That's amazing about your examples is that almost all of them lead to more employment, not less. Robotic surgery? Requires a great number of skilled people to perform the surgery (no difference there, it just makes some things easier in the surgery), and on top of that you need the people to design, build, and maintain the robots. Prove to me you can replace the fairly complex skills of an attorney with a computer and you might have something to talk about - though of course you'd need someone to provide correct inputs to the computer, someone to design, build, and maintain it, someone to design the algorithms and update them with changing legal circumstances, etc. I've already covered you mathematical finance and algorithmic trading adds jobs rather than takes them away. If we could replace the incredibly dangerous job of firefighters with machines of some sort, that would probably be great! But they'd still need someone to direct them, someone to make split-second judgment calls about the stability of a building, someone to maintain/repair/etc. the systems, blah blah blah. Drones may have removed one person from the loop - the pilot in the plane - but there's still an army of people who keep each UAV up in the air, and there's still a pilot, albeit sitting in a room in Nevada or whatever instead of the cockpit. On top of that you've added all of the jobs involved in manufacturing and designing the drones!
These jobs aren't going to disappear overnight, and even if they did, you'd still need that knowledge set and skills to direct the machines/robots on what to do. This is exactly the same issue with xenophobic ranting about immigration: jobs are not a zero sum game.
GGT's problem is that she sees a specific job at time x lost and automatically assumes that this means a net negative for the overall job market. The reality is, as you mention, that any job lost through innovation, is generally replaced by jobs elsewhere in the economy, and these jobs generally require more skill (and are therefore higher paying).
Hope is the denial of reality
Some friends went to the Occupy Ground Zero rally today and were mighty disappointed. I'll find out details when I see them tomorrow, but when I asked what happened the texts I got here, "Apparently democracy smells funny" and "Ironic that protesters fighting for 'rights' don't know about the first amendment."
I'm talking about the fundamental shifts in employment, with gaps in skills and education during the Transition. Same things paper newspapers and Border's faced with websites and Kindles, secretaries replaced by Blackberries, retail stores closing as buying on-line exploded, the ability to use legalzoom.com to draft wills and contracts, software programs to do our taxes. Those are great things, I don't dispute that! But the jobs needed will be for high-tech engineers, designers and repair/maintenance with advanced degrees. That's great, too, but during the Transition there are millions of people in the gaps without the education or training, maybe without the ability (or capacity) to get that degree, or return to school and change careers. There are supposedly 3 million open job positions, many in IT and engineering, without enough people to fill those spots (except by H1B visa workers).
The switch to computerized work has been faster the last decade (also great thing) but there's still the practical question of....what do the people who've been replaced do now? As those surgical assistants and para-legals are replaced by robotics engineers, they'll still need a job. Back to school and/or find a job waiting tables (underemployed), sounds different to a 23 yr old than a 60 yr old, or a parent or homeowner. Our schools haven't done a very good job of keeping students well educated or competitive. (There are still career counselors encouraging Fine Arts degrees and taking out massive loans.) These are the facts on the ground.
Of course this is how innovation and progress works, I've never disputed that (Loki), but the Information Age / Digital Age creates one job that can destroy ten. Economists call it creative destruction, okay. The dilemma is for those ten displaced workers. In addition to people delaying retirement, or retirees needing to find work again because their retirement funds tanked, and 25% unemployment for youth 17-25 yrs old.
Would idiots be too nice a term?
Hope is the denial of reality
Was there something factually incorrect in what they wrote, or were there just too many complaints?
Marcher Goldie Petkov, a 92-year-old Center City resident, told the Philadelphia Inquirer, "They should've been marching months ago.""Unemployment is overwhelming," the petite retiree said, "and they're spending all this money on wars instead of building bridges, schools and positive things."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44829459.../#.TpD8Z822BUM
I rest my case.
Hope is the denial of reality
I might go to this today.
Hope to see this guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLSvK2eIoBs
It's hard to see that this is any different than any old anti-capitalist protest. Used the military to prevent freedom of the press?
What does his sign say? Something about Nazi's?
Something about "Nazi Wanker Wall Street"
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote