OT: The free-trader's agenda

The police would not suffer income losses if their pay was cut. Look at all the innovative things underpaid policemen is south america do to maintain a reasonable standard of living.

Ed Patterson

Reply to
Ed Patterson
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Sure he has. That number is defined to be "less than my retirement check amounts to!"

Nor would they be able to pay into the SS trust fund. Which is the present source of his benefits.

Jim

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Reply to
jim rozen

And *this* is not counting the unpaid, forced overtime, nor is it counting the illegals working there, either.

Jim

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Reply to
jim rozen

Things will even out in time as Mr/Mrs average Indian/Chinee consumer earns more and consumes more. This pushes up the size of the world market and pushes up the hourly rate of those manufacturing the goods. The American and European markets _cannot_ consume enough on their own to use all the potential manufacturing resources of themselves and India/China. This will result in displacement of work and pressure on prices until those consumers come on line. My guess is another 50 years.

I'm not an economist, That's just the way I see it.

Do you want rice with that, sir :-(

Mark Rand RTFM

Reply to
Mark Rand

The report on tonight's news here in Washington about AT&T sending work to India, with a specific mention of the lower cost of doing business, then, doesn't support that which I have been saying? I'm still wrong?

It has nothing to do with performance. It has to do

I'm pretty sure that the guys and gals that will be displaced because of the India connection don't really care about the reasons they will lose their cushy jobs, the only reality for them is that they will lose the job, and there are no jobs like them to take their place. If that were not true, we wouldn't be hearing from so many that claim to have lost jobs two years ago and they still can't find employment, in some instances even with a huge pay cut. I still maintain that if we worked for REASONABLE wages, the benefits of shipping work out of our country would be much smaller, perhaps even eliminated. The only thing I've suggested right along is for people to be happy with earned income in keeping with value, to quit trying to turn everything into a retirement plan. Again, I may be wrong, but the evidence at hand supports my views. We are losing jobs in all the sectors because we no longer can compete, and one of the reasons is greed on the part of corporations and the workers.

Thanks for your thoughts, Ed. I am way out of me element here, and don't even understand a lot of what you say. Again, a reflection of my lack of education. I appreciate your comments, and will look forward to learning more from you. The one thing both of us can hope for is that, as a country, we don't give up the farm due to our greed, arrogance and stupidity. In essence, I hope I don't have the opportunity to say to you "I told you so". That would clearly be a case of losing the discussion being the better choice. :-)

Harold

Reply to
Harold & Susan Vordos

Unless you have an unusual idea of what it means to "perform," then yes, you have it wrong, Harold.

Is working for peanuts what you mean by "perform"? I always thought it meant doing a good job. I haven't heard anyone say that programmers in India write better code. Maybe they do, but it isn't an issue I've head anything about.

All I've heard is that they work a lot cheaper, because they live in a country that's emerging out of abject poverty and a counterproductive social system.

The only countries to which we're losing jobs in any significant way are countries that are emerging from disastrous economic systems that have kept their people impoverished for decades or for centuries. Is there some reason that you think they're the ones who determine what the proper "income in keeping with value" should be?

I don't understand your reasoning, Harold. It sounds like you're blaming our current job losses to those countries on the effectiveness of our own economic system in raising our workers' standard of living to its present heights. You'll notice that almost all of Western Europe pays wages on the same order as ours. Why is it that India and China have suddenly become the arbiters of "value"? As far as I can tell, all they've been arbiters of is how much you can impoverish people before they'll rise up and slit your throat.

I don't think it's likely, Harold. I don't believe we'll allow ourselves to get into a race to the bottom.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

On Wed, 19 Nov 2003 03:57:52 GMT, "Ed Huntress" brought forth from the murky depths:

I'm surprised it isn't more, so that's a Good Thing(tm).

Perhaps, but they're putting more and more unemployed Americans to work. I don't see a lot of the gripes people have with them. ALL big companies try to give the lowest wages they can and haggle over perqs. I wouldn't want to work for them, but if I were out of a job and nobody else was hiring, who knows?

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Reply to
Larry Jaques

I hear from some people that it seems everything they see in Walmart says "Made in China." The actual numbers threw me for a loop when I first heard them six months or so ago. One thing it tells you is that anecdotes can really lead you down the garden path to completely erroneous conclusions.

If you want to work for an average of slightly over $13,000/yr., which is what they pay their "associates."

You can make arguments every which way with Walmart, but the thing that disturbs me is that they're so big, and they so overwhelm a community's retail sales when they move in, that they have excessive power to distort competition -- including competition for wages.

It's the old near-monopoly thing. When Walmart moves in, other retailers cut their wages in order to survive (there are actual studies to back this up; it's happened in many places). That isn't the market at work. That's monopolistic power at work, subverting the market as it would function if there was real competition.

I'm all for honest-to-goodness competitive markets. I just wish there were more of them. Consolidation and extraordinary growth, as with Microsoft or Walmart, are undermining a lot of our competitive markets. Walmart is great at keeping prices down but there's no free lunch. A community pays with lower overall retail wages when they move in.

Ed Huntress

Reply to
Ed Huntress

On Tue, 18 Nov 2003 15:33:23 GMT, "Ed Huntress" wrote:

You don't think Hillary is a Marxist? There is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Or are you saying she had no sway over the Slicksters economics? I think they walk in lock step. The only reason the Slickster would ever even "appear" to have a conservative economic policy (Allowing Hillary to try to ram socialized medicine down our throats shows how conservative he is, for pity's sake!) would be an attempt to discredit conservative ideas, which he could later blame on partisan pressure. Hillary wrote; "The individual loses all rights and everything is done in the name of the commonwealth". "There is only the rich and the commonwealth. If you are not rich, then you are a member of the commonwealth. The needs and wants of the rich come before the needs and wants of the commonwealth. In the commonwealth there are no individuals and no one has any rights whatsoever. All decisions in your behalf are made by the state. Your children are the property of the state and it is decided by the state what they will learn, who will teach them, and what will become of them. As a parent, you have little or no say in what becomes of your children, all decisions are made by the government and you accept or become an enemy of the state." From "It takes a pillage", by Hillary Klinton

Hillary Rodham did her post Yale Law school internship with Robert Treuhalft Esquire in Berkley Calif. He was the lawyer for the Communist Party of the United States. Probably didn't know he was a Marxist though, right?

Intense study get you that? I think you brought some biases into your study, as usual. You imply that you don't have biases, all of your views are based soley on your absolutely crystal clear assesment of reality. It's an amazingly blind opinion. (Oh, the irony)

Ok. How about Derek Shearer, his good buddy, an associate at the Institute for Policy Studies, you don't think it's possible that they agreed on economics? You think he was closer to Reagan than Shearer? JR Nyquist said this; WorldNetDaily 7/22/99 J R Nyquist "I first heard of Bill Clinton 16 years ago. Here is how it happened. I was getting a teaching credential, and one of my classes was on adolescent psychology. The professor in this course, who was a very admirable teacher, seemed to favor me. One day, after class, she invited me to a 7 p.m. meeting at the Science Lecture Hall. At the time I didn't know she was a Marxist, and I didn't know the meeting would be political. She said that if I cared about education in the state of California I would attend. Having the night off from work I decided on going, partly owing to curiosity. Well, I couldn't have been more surprised if it had been a coven of witches. Arriving early at the Science Lecture Hall, I found communist literature -- books and pamphlets -- stacked on tables in the lobby. A visiting professor was the speaker. He gave a rousing talk on overthrowing the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" in America. How would this be accomplished? By taking over the Democratic Party through its left wing. The speaker said it was possible to elect a stealth socialist president, who would effect a peaceful transition to socialism during the next great economic down-turn. Capitalism would be unmasked as a bankrupt system. The people would then support a new socialist system. All businesses would be nationalized by the government and run like the Post Office. This socialist president, said the speaker, could be elected in either 1988 or 1992. The only problem was that of timing. When would the next major economic downturn hit? Some days later I went to visit my professor at her office hours. We talked about the speaker and the book he had written. We talked about Marxism and the idea of changing the system. Then, suddenly, my professor said: "We have such high hopes for this young Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton." That was the first time I heard Bill Clinton's name. "

But perhaps he mistook Klinton for Reagan, as you have?

The Slicksters pastor (got to wonder what god these people worship!) claims to be a Methodist. J. Phillip Wogaman wrote; "humankind is now engaged in a great debate of worldwide and historic magnitude on the question of how economic life should be organized." After grappling with all possible systems and combinations of systems, he rejects the market economy in the strongest possible terms in favor of "democratic socialism." He adds "How could Christians support any other economic ideology?" The Great Economic Debate: An Ethical Analysis

But hey, it's possible that billy didn't know that, right? No, Ed, the people we call our friends, those closest to us, are mirrors of our deepest being. Bill may have hidden himself from you, but you are not the only observer around, and many see these things clearer than you do I'm afraid. Bill was and is sold out to socialism, and his wife makes him look right wing by comparison! I bet you'll vote for her though if given a chance.

Reply to
Glen

I don't think Hillary has anything to do with whether the Clinton administration's economic policies were conservative. The policies stand on their own. You appear not to even know what those economic policies were.

Glen, I like to think you're an intelligent guy, and you sometimes show a flicker of it, but I have to say, after reading this, that only someone in serious need of couch time would believe that Hillary Clinton wrote this in her book.

In fact, what you just quoted is from an unsigned piece published by the Jeremiah Project, a gaggle of right-wing Christian (?) fundamentalist mouth-breathers, titled "Socialists In The House." It has nothing to do with anything Hillary said or wrote. They made it up in their very weird, very sick imaginations. Where did you get the wacky idea that she wrote it?

Anybody who knows about the "movement" lawyers of the '60s and '70s knows who Robert Treuhaft (not Treuhalft) was, Glen. He was a lawyer for a lot of union causes back in the '50s, and famous as one of the best trial lawyers in the US. He was also well known as a former member of the communist party, which he quit in 1958.

Hillary also was a member of the Young Republicans in 1965, when being a Republican on campus was considered just one step up from being a child molester. She wrote one of her important papers in college about Barry Goldwater, whom she admired.

Now, the question is, are you implying that she was indoctrinated by her advisor? My academic advisor in college was George Will, one of the most intelligent leaders of the Young Republicans, who later became famous as an editor for Bill Buckley's _National Review_ and then as one of the architects of the New Right that helped get Reagan elected. Do you think I was indoctrinated by George Will? If not, then why do you think Hillary was swayed by her advisor? She's a lot smarter than I am. How did I resist the influence of George Will, who was a VERY powerful personality, while Hillary couldn't resist a little trial lawyer?

Your political view is full of ghosts and conspiracies and your head is full of True Believer crap. It doesn't surprise me that you quoted at length from a book you never read, nor that you misattributed the source of those nutty words. No doubt you believe everything you read on the right-wing blogs.

What amazes me is that you would think that Hillary Clinton, who, if nothing else, is a very astute politician, would write such a thing in a book that carries her name. The question isn't why you screwed up on your quote; it's how in the hell you could believe it was truly from her book. It suggests that your perspective is so far out in right field that you'll believe anything another right-winger tells you. What you need, even more than a better approach to checking your facts and your quotes, is an exorcist.

Ed Huntress

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Depends on the part of the country too. For example, in the Atlanta area Walmart starting pay is $8.00 an hour, average pay is $9.33 (average worker has been there less than 3 years). Costco is $10, Home Depot is $11, and Lowes is $10.25. So Walmart is the lowest of the big box stores, but it isn't

30% lower.

However, in Salina Kansas, Walmart average pay is $6.50. But then there isn't a Costco, Home Depot, or Lowes to compete for the workers there. (Note that Walmart grew to the size it is mainly by locating stores in areas near small to medium size towns. So it has more stores in low wage areas than the other big box store chains.)

BTW, for those looking for work, QuikTrip (a Stop & Rob type convenience store chain) in the Atlanta area starts store managers at $52,425 a year according to the recruiting signs they have in their store windows. (They don't list an average life expectancy for their store managers, though.)

Gary

Reply to
Gary Coffman

----- Original Message ----- From: "Ed Huntress" Newsgroups: rec.crafts.metalworking Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2003 8:15 PM Subject: Re: The free-trader's agenda

No, I mean it exactly as you do, and was making a point that unless these folks couldn't perform (do this good job we both are speaking of) the chief reason they are not able to find employment then must be their pay scale is too high, they are not competitive, and the job has gone across the pond.

Agreed. And that's what we must combat by some means, or lose the jobs.

In my uneducated approach to things, that's exactly what I'm doing, but only because the standard has been raised artificially high. As long as we had the walls up and didn't rely on other countries for our goods, it worked, apparently quite well. Now that we're interacting with other countries on a huge scale, it doesn't seem to fit so well, and achieving equilibrium with them so we are competitive is one of the things that seems to be a viable solution.

Maybe my approach is wrong, but the way it looks right now, it's happening exactly that way, but not by choice. No one is volunteering their wages to be cut, so instead their jobs are being eliminated in favor of cheaper imports, to say nothing of the smaller headaches of dealing with unreasonable people that still demand higher wages when their jobs are in jeopardy of being eliminated. I think that bothers me more than anything. The unreasonable demands of the work force, everyone expecting to live like a Doctor, but not even preparing themselves enough to be hired as a ditch digger. Makes no sense. Don't get me wrong, I have no quarrel with those that make decent money, I've never resented the rich, but I sure don't appreciate folks making money for doing nothing, because all that does is raise the cost of living for all of us. There is no free lunch, the money has to come from some place or some one.

You'll notice that almost all of Western Europe pays wages on the

And I would assume that they, too, are going through the same things we are, in some way.

Please don't get the idea I feel they are the arbiters of value, I would like to think that they are not, and have so alluded. I feel they are not reasonable, but they are, in part, the problem. We have to dance to their tune to some degree, if we want to dance at all, anyway. Left unchecked, at least in the short term, all our jobs (those that *can* be done elsewhere) will be gone to "them". That's the part that I'm hoping you understand far better than I do, and I'm wrong, and that's why we're having this conversation. These are things that I don't understand well, things that I see as black and white. I don't have your ability to see them differently, and it is for that reason I'm trying to learn something from you.

We may not do it willingly, but it appears it's happening without our permission, anyway, a result of staying the course we've held so long. I guess time will tell. It's really a horrifying thought to think that it could take 50 years for this to get resolved, though. That's a long time for the younger folks to not be able to find a job of their liking. It is unlikely to have a large effect on us old goats.

Harold

Reply to
Harold & Susan Vordos

Unfortunately, we have no choice but to compete with them in the global economy. They are marketing the same products in the same markets. Ed, I'd be interested to know who you write for?? Greg Sefton

Reply to
Bray Haven

I don't think there's a "blame" for the job losses (12 million I heard quoted yesterday). Simply economic reality and supply & demand for labor. I'm not sure those people are in poverty as you say. They have much lower cost of living. They might live quite comfortably with some luxuries, at what we would consider poverty as far as income goes. There may be some upward pressure on wages in those countries but not as much as we would like to see. Greg Sefton

Reply to
Bray Haven

I wonder what that numbver would be with foreign outsourced components, packaging, etc of "American" products. It would also be interesting to see the total imported percentages from Wally's. Greg Sefton

Reply to
Bray Haven

Yep, I'm an ignoramus, one who cannot keep ahead of orders, who doesn't have time for this though we recently hired another guy to help keep up. In my simple little mind I see that as meaning Bush isn't doing too bad untangling Klintons vile web of deceit. But I expect someone more to your leanings will come in and undo it all, and it will be years becoming undone, and then the next Republican in office will have to spend even more years bringing good times back. The pendulum swings back and forth, and no, I don't have all the facts, but I see such a bias in you that I don't trust you to report what the facts mean Ed. You can't help yourself.

Reply to
Glen

These things are reaching their eventualities, they cannot be stopped. A fax goes across the Pacific, in two days a thousand parts arrive via UPS at prices that put a lie to the costs of tooling alone in the US. That's the way it is, that's the way it will be only more so. Eventually it will all change again as capitalism brings it's changes to eastern markets. Just slogans, or maybe it's the way things really are.

Reply to
Glen

Harold, isn't there a flip side to your view of wages?

If there's going to be a large market force that bears down and depresses wages, that means that 'folks were making too much money.'

But if this happens, then the result is that they will have less money to spend on goods and services. So the price of those goods and services will drop as a result. Which means that the companies were charging too much for those goods and services - they were being greedy. The market will correct this desire for excess profit then.

I think the trouble may be on *both* sides of the street then. Don't just walk one the one side.

Jim

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Reply to
jim rozen

On Thu, 20 Nov 2003 05:15:25 GMT, "Ed Huntress" brought forth from the murky depths:

It would beat unemployment by $13k/yr, wouldn't it?

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drivers would appear to be on the opposite end of that blue-collar spectrum, but they work a teensy bit harder than the average WallyWorld drone.

There is always a downside when companies go that large. Look at our government. 'Nuff said?

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Reply to
Larry Jaques

Ed, Any ideas why fundies, right-wingers, gun nuts, thumpers and conservatives think that they should always be telling such lies?

Do they think everyone else is equally stupid or that they have to lie as they have no valid arguments or actual thought themselves? It does seem to be quite the habit for them.

Just curious ... you seem to know a few of them .

Reply to
Cliff Huprich

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