In this country, if you don't push paper financial instruments around on your desk, your skills are devalued and possess no market value. American labor is being ruthlessly reduced to irrelevance by the monied class in this country.
IBM want stimulus money in the form of project contracts. Meawhile, they're laying off thousands of people. Not from lack of work, but from the desire to chop wages. You see, just because IBM has yet to suffer any significant effects from our ongoing economic meltdown, that's not good enough for their shareholders.
No.
Will Congress do something about this crap? EVER?
After 30 years of republican rule (and yes, I lump Clinton into this crowd; the only difference is that he was a fiscally competent de facto Republican, who presided over a massive wave of job offshoring in this country), skills that a man should be able to perform to fulfill his role as a productive member of society are being systematically stripped from him. Let's have a quick list of the professions and professionals that are now completely worthless in this country:
a) Auto manufacturing (good luck finding work there!);
b) Construction/carpentry (skills that any man should be able to do when an urgent home repair or remodel is called for, but GOOD LUCK getting a JOB doing these things!);
c) Musician (are you kidding me?!?!?!);
d) Any technical job that ISN'T being a programmer;
e) Any programmer who DOESN'T know the very latest half-dozen or so scripting and structured programming languages, such as ASP/Java/Ruby/Flash/yada yada yada... even though many of these so-called languages offer nothing innovative or any significant functional differences that can't be reproduced by other more established languages;
f) Any decent, highly skilled white-collar professional who doesn't possess an expensive college degree from the right schools;
g) Writer, professional in any category. And no, blogging does not count if you have to support a family;
h) Production-level graphic designer. Those jobs have vanished along with all the other technical jobs whose requirements have suddenly soared out of sight.
Companies hold the whip hand in this country. You, as an employee, have absolutely no rights. You no longer have any leveerage. During the last number of years, peoples' only recourse in many cases was to simply find a better job with another company in the same or a related field.
Good luck with that now.
And IBM has the fuckin nerve to rub it in our faces! Fucking bastards.
I swear to God, if Congress and President Obama don't do something RIGHT FUCKING NOW to STOP this Goddamn offshoring, it's gonna be tar and pitchforks time for some of these assholes. The average American is getting RAPED by Wall Street and big business in general, what does Obama's economic team do? Shovel out trillions more!
I just had a job interview with a compny in Silicon Valley. Wanna know what the FIRST FUCKIN' QUESTION was out of the startup CEO's mouth during my interview? Why didn't I live in the local area? Yeah, as if I could EVER afford to buy a freakin' house down there on my income. So even though I possess the perfect qualifications for the position (long story) I won't get the job simply because this fat, obscenely rich Silicon Valley CEO has the NERVE to expect me to hock myself to the eyeballs to take his fuckin' job.
The rich people in this country continue to fuck us. Nothing has changed since January 20th. Look at Obama's revised bailout plan! Companies like IBM expect to get huge chunks of the stimulus money, MONEY THAT IS CPOMING OUT OF OUR POCKETS while they fire thousands of guys like me to give the jobs to Indian workers.
No more.
IBM, I just have one thing to say.
Fuck.
You!!!
And Congress:
Do something NOW or it's hunting season on you.