Unfortunately, in order to get the local weather, I feel compelled to turn on the television set. The hubby did me a favor this morning and left the television on for me to see that we are in the negative numbers in terms of temperatures. It's so cold, that some schools are remaining closed.
I remember walking to school in much worse, but that is another discussion entirely.
At some point I realized it was on CBS morning news. Not that it really matters. Most mainstream media to me is canned crap on a stick at this point. And the discussion I witnessed with a republican strategist did not disappoint.
A question was put forth to this person about the people out there who have been unable to get a job for the past several years. Sometimes the news media refers to them as a chronically unemployed.
And the strategist's answer to that was sad and disappointing, but not surprising given his political loyalties.
He was asked what the GOP should tell or do for these chronically unemployed individuals, and his response was basically, that if they are not trained in something "Meaningful" that they are not employable, and the GOP cannot force corporations to hire them.
And then he went on about how our public school system was failing to give children the skills they need to succeed.
My response to this take was --business as usual.
Offer the public a bullshit answer that fails to address the complexities of the problem while the GOP ignores the problem.
He said that Minimum Wage increases do not help people because of cut hours due to Ombama Care implementation. That this will not help in the --oh how I hate the following phraseology, "The War On Poverty."
If there is one thing I have learned in this lifetime, it's that when the US government declares war on anything, it is an announcement, that they themselves are going to do their best to look effective while being anything but. And to me this is no exception.
He might as well been wearing a McDonald's hat and waving a Wal*Mart flag.
1. Older workers are being discriminated against. And when I say older, I mean people in their 40s and 50s. They are trained, they are skilled, but many companies do not want to pay these people for their seniority. Because you know--in the old days, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, the longer you were around and the more experience one acquired, the more one got paid as a result. Corporations have found a way around this. Fire all the "old" people, which is code for expensive workers, and hire a couple of interns in their place for almost nothing.
2. The corporations appear to be playing kick the can with these older workers. They don't have another 20 years of work left in them to get retrained and take on another mountain of student loans, so there they are. Unemployment benefits cut off, no-one hiring them due to age and seniority, while their retirement funds like 401Ks have taken a beating throughout the Wall*Street induced housing crisis. All that work for nothing, and not even a pot left to piss in.
3. The school issue is often GOP inflicted too. Budget cuts, constant attacks on curriculum based on religious weirdness, etc., Public Schools and Colleges are perfect examples of the kind of skilled labor the GOP wants for free.
4. The GOP wanting everything to be "free market" which is code for--to the highest bidder violates any notion of public or social good when it comes to training and education in college. Why bother to pay all that money for a degree in anything if there is an unstable job market, that adheres to a very mercurial policy. These corporations do not show loyalty to the worker any more. So job security isn't something that people can depend upon. You want us to spend YEARS OF OUR LIVES training and training for jobs that may not last a whole year, and then blame us because we didn't take training in some other job that is just as short lived.
To which I reply:
MAKE UP OUR FUCKING MINDS ALREADY GOP!
That is not a strategy, that's a massacre.
If the government hadn't had it's head so far up the insurance industry's ass all this time, maybe the American people could have been able to participate in an insurance structure that didn't throw people with "pre-existing" conditions out on the street to die. And then no one would have felt the need to rewrite the insurance laws.
There is this thing known as Public Good GOP. And you all clearly do not know what that is, which is why people like myself laugh our asses off every time you pretend to go to church or claim to be religiously moral. We laugh because you do not know how to build a healthy community.
You think that if you punish adults like children that it will shame them into a better performance, while ignoring the fact that many are set up for failure by your own policies.
My labor is not free. No one's labor is free. And if you think that running a fry vat is an unskilled job, then I invite you to run one any time in any store, without training at any time. But don't look to me to call the Ambulance when you burn your arm or hand. In your world that's how that works right?
If you think that waiting tables is unskilled or running a cash register is unskilled, or flipping burgers or watching kids, is unskilled, then why do people have to be trained? Why does it take them so long after being trained to break into the job and become good at it. Where the training happens, is not as important as the fact that it has to happen.
And people who spent years getting an education--if we cannot find them work, it's because we don't want them work. They are looking for higher paying jobs, not out of greed or laziness, but to keep up payments on homes, cars, and their kid's educations. If we cannot find a place for educated professionals, then it's because we don't want them. Not because they cannot work, and certainly not because they don't know anything, but because we don't want them and don't want to pay them for their experience.
That's called Cheap. Not frugal, but cheap.
So if you want a miserable, cheap-ass America, then go with the GOP plan for shit-pay for everyone. What that means is that only the very wealthy will have a say in how things are run, because the rest of us will be too busy dancing for our dinners and panhandling for our kid's braces.
GOP--They know the cost of everything and the value, of absolutely nothing.