Because The American Middle-class Deserves a Future, We Are All Occupiers Now - The Mainstreaming of OWS
Perhaps the most significant mainstream supporters, though, are the only two most Americans have heard of. “Despite the Times’s finger-wagging that the movement is often muddled and misinformed, none of that is the point. The point is justice,” writes self-help guru Deepak Chopra, who visited Zuccotti Park and led meditations to help protesters turn “anger into awareness.” Suze Orman, who has made millions telling feckless consumers how to pay down debt and live on a budget, sounds like she’s channeling Naomi Klein: “To deride the movement because it has yet to formulate a well-delineated platform says plenty more about the critics than the protestors,” she wrote in the Huffington Post. “Revolutions tend to be messy, especially in the early going. The unholy alliance of much of Congress, K Street and Wall Street that has set the agenda from day one of the financial crisis is simply trying to protect its turf by casting aspersions on the ad hoc nature of the movement to date. I suppose I shouldn’t expect anything less. After all, there’s no way they could stage a substantive rebuttal based on facts.”After the New Deal, essentially starting Reagan America embarked on that great experiment known as trickle down or voodoo economics. That didn't work out so well for a middle-class that had enjoyed annual growth under New Deal policies. Time to correct course, start rewarding work instead of wealth.
Alleged ‘Skills Gap’ Takes Spotlight Off Who’s to Blame for Massive Jobs Shortageby Roger Bybee
Perhaps far too much attention has been devoted to the government role in job creation and retention, when American CEOs need to demand more from their employees and from the U.S. educational system to solve the jobless problem over the long term, this narrative suggests.Everyone, especially conservative loons like Herman Cain, Rick Perry and the conservative bloggers want America to blame anyone except corporate America for unemployment.
But in reality, this whole “Education, Training, and Skills” narrative serves to divert attention from the massive shortage of jobs and Corporate America's misdeeds to “failing” teachers and supposedly under-educated workers. Corporate America has failed to produce virtually any net gain in U.S. jobs since 1999; the period was the only decade when U.S. employment grew by less than 20 percent.
In short, the Education, Training and Skills "frame” on our economic problems plays several useful functions for the CEOs and the rest of the richest 1 percent. It takes the spotlight off CEOs' decisions to wipe out decent-paying job opportunities. As Gordon Lafer writes in The Training Charade,
Workers are encouraged not to blame corporate profits, the export of jobs aboard, or eroding wage standards—that is, anything that they can fight—but rather to look inward for the source of their misfortune and the seeds of their resurrection.
