The Blame Rests Squarely on Washington,

not with "unskilled" workers or, according to the new mantra peddled by Wall Street crooks and globalist cultists, technology has decimated the American workforce and nothing can be done about it. The politicians, including Obama, are so enamored with the discredited and debunked neoliberal ideology and have been so bought off by the crooks who benefit from it, they are willing to destroy the American economy to do it.

This economy is being deliberately killed by Washington politics. Period.

link

Economic determinists — fatalists, really — assume that globalization and technological change must now condemn a large portion of the American workforce to under-unemployment and stagnant wages, while rewarding those with the best eductions and connections with ever higher wages and wealth. And therefore that the only way to get good jobs back and avoid widening inequality is to withdraw from the global economy and become neo-Luddites, destroying the new labor-saving technologies.

That’s dead wrong. Economic isolationism and neo-Ludditism would reduce everyone’s living standards. Most importantly, there are many ways to create good jobs and reduce inequality.

Other nations are doing it. Germany was generating higher real median wages until recently, before it was dragged down by austerity it imposed the European Union. Singapore and South Korea continue to do so. Chinese workers have been on a rapidly-rising tide of higher real wages for several decades. These nations are implementing national economic strategies to build good jobs and widespread prosperity. The United States is not.

Any why not? Both because we don’t have the political will to implement them, and we’re trapped in an ideological straightjacket that refuses to acknowledge the importance of such a strategy. The irony is we already have a national economic strategy but it’s been dictated largely by powerful global corporations and Wall Street. And, not surprisingly, rather than increase the jobs and wages of most Americans, that strategy has been increasing the global profits and stock prices of these giant corporations and Wall Street banks.

Robert Reich will have no seat at the "Democratic" administration table, let me tell you.

News

The haves and the have-nots are increasingly divided over the ability to access high-speed internet.
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Mitt Romney is not over with by a longshot. He's going to be the nominee anyway barring some sex scandal.

Only Newt is immune to the latter.
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Vote rigging is key to getting into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.

For the humor-impaired, I am only kidding.

I wish I were kidding about presidential elections.
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An airport worker gets fired for doing the right thing.

The dog in question apparently survived.

"The Transportation Safety Authority officers couldn't even get the dog to stand up to be X-rayed," said Jones, who was then an employee of Airport Terminal Services, the facility's contractor.

"Everyone who saw it, the TSA people, the Airport Police officers, the girls at the ticket counter, was concerned. The dog was so weak and torn up. It didn't look like it could survive the flight."

Jones said her supervisor told her to load the dog on the plane because the animal's paperwork was in order and its condition wasn't her concern. She said she was warned she would lose her job if she kept carrying on about the dog.

"I was crying," she said. "I kept saying that dog could not be put on a plane."

There is a Problem

when technology is pushed to "replace" a tangible item, whether it is audio CDs, newspapers, or books.

You NEVER own anything that is "virtual." While I have an iPod and enjoy it tremendously, it hasn't replaced my CD or DVD collections. If I ever bought a Kindle, it would not replace all the books I have. Besides, you never own a book.

Well, fuck that.

Why is this important? Because Kindle is the kind of technology that challenges media freedom and restricts media pluralism. It exacerbates what historian William Leach calls "the landscape of the temporary": a hyper mobile and rootless society that prefers access to ownership. Such a society is vulnerable to the dangers of selective censorship and control.

Digital rights management (DRM), which Kindle uses to lock in its library, raises critical questions about the nature of property and identity in digital culture. Culture plays a large role – in some ways, larger than government – in shaping who we are as individuals in a society. The First Amendment protects our right to participate in the production of that culture. The widespread commodification of access is shaping nearly every aspect of modern citizenship. There are benefits, to be sure, but this transformation also poses a big-time threat to free expression and assembly.

I don't think print is "dying" at all, but I despise this tendency to digitalize everything and strip us of our right to own anything.

And the rich, of course, will still have books and other tangible items.