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I also remember seeing a TV interview where the President of Iceland said that the citizens should vote on the bailout instead of the parliament making the decision. He said it was too big an issue to leave out the voters. (I'm paraphrasing) I can not find the interview, but I think it was on 60 minutes.
I also think that at the minimum US citizens should have voted on the bailouts as well.
To get back on topic with the H1B visa issue. IMO the US should only be importing workers that are on the level of Albert Einstein. That won't be very many people. This whole business of we don't have enough qualified workers is BS. And if by some miracle it was actually true why not just train American workers instead ? Shouldn't we be concerned with our own citizens first ?
There needs to be a wave of populists elected from both parties, instead of the establishment corporatists. That would go a long way on this.
For that to happen is not easy.
The populists from either side are going to annoy the other side greatly on social and economic issues.
They would not be acceptable. A leftist will not get the rights support. Similarly, a conservative middle class fighter will disgust the left on many social issues.
In fact, if you are a conspiracy theorist, you could even say that the two sides are working together on this. They fight over Social issues while the economic status quo remains. What you are suggesting is to break that setting by having populist candidates on both sides.
Microsoft, Google, Facebook , Amazon, Apple are all doing the same thing , each perhaps a little different as they have different needs ,but the impact remains the same. Americans either getting fired or never hired.
it comes down to this.
Hiring visa workers is cheap due to low turn over , lower wages and lower healthcare costs. they work hard, they work cheap and they are as close to indentured as you will get in the USA.
the next step which has already begun is the off shoring of core parts of Microsoft, google, apple etc....
Ten to twenty years from now we will wonder how we lost our tech companies to India and china, and they will laugh and tell us how we did it to ourselves.
just look at how MSFT is shifting some of its core products to made end to end in india, just a few years after promising to keep its core at home...
I don't see anything wrong with working hard. Why do people always accuse others of working hard? It sounds ridiculous.
What if Americans are willing to work for similarly low wages?
People. Take a look at the workers at Google and Facebook. They aren't exactly paid low salaries. What is low for you? Lots of visa workers have a great life here, eating out, traveling, having fun, and Instagram it.
It's really that these companies hire globally and talent comes from everywhere.
Not to mention that some do business with other countries and it benefits them to hire those from these countries they work with. Americans do not have the advantage of connections with another country.
That's as faulty a perspective as the one you're criticizing. The reality is that we have (had) a choice: Either we "lose our [businesses] to India and China" or we import their standard of living. There is (was) no choice to leave the world as it was. The rest of the world had great motivation to learn from us and become as good as us in many way, with no practical way of us preventing them from doing so that didn't involve indefensible imperialism, which itself was unsustainable.
Now we can chat about which is better - the H1Bs or the adoption of a south or east Asian standard of living. Arguably, H1Bs could be viewed as a delaying tactic for the eventual inevitability, as depressing as that may be.
Precisely.
How do you propose globalization would be "controlled"?
Good stuff. You have my vote. However, while I see how that would have some benefits for some people in the United States, at least for a certain period of time, and that's great stuff - don't get me wrong - but I don't see how that's going to stop the effects we're talking about here (as I outlined above). Specifically, I don't understand how you intend to impose this decision on other countries. One of Apple Corp's "problems" right now is that the vast majority of their liquid assets are in other countries. We can only control what happens in our country. It used to be that companies made money abroad and brought that cash home. Without radically changing our economy into what you would rightfully consider a third-world economy, nothing could make companies do that any longer. So what are you really suggesting?
We have to realize that we're not talking about "fixing" the system. The nation has exploited the brokenness of our global economic system since at least WWII, probably even since WWI, and perhaps going back to the Monroe Doctrine. What's happening is "fixing" that brokenness from which we have benefited for a very long time. So what people are really saying is that they want to stop and reverse the rest of the world from fixing the brokenness of the global economic system that disproportionately benefited us.
Amen.
Great perspectives. What Americans mean by fixing is actually defending the fruit of an unjust international system. And this is the great hypocrisy of the American left, giving lip service to the global south while wanting to eat the fruit exclusively.
What makes you think that drastic measures can turn the country around? Especially given you don't know what the answer is, why do you think that there is an answer that satisfies the criteria for an answer vis a vis the expectations that you and I and others have spec'ed out regarding employment and work earlier in the thread?
How would that do anything other than make things get much worse in some areas much faster than they would have otherwise? What that sounds like is a plan to try to retain a high level of satisfactory economic standing for some Americans longer by making things a lot worse for other Americans sooner.
Maybe it does maybe it doesn't but I don't see how anything you've said supports the contention that it does.
It's hard to even get a regular bill through Congress not to mention drastic measures. Do you really think that drastic measures have any chance of becoming policies in this country? We are too big, too diverse, two divided, too arrogant, and two entitled to have any of this. I find it ironic that the political left created much of today's America by subscribing to their ideologies and idealism such as diversity, multiculturalism, etc. whether they did this consciously or unconsciously, we might note that this has become the most ideal environment for nobody but multinational corporations. How did all this happen. You have to laugh at ourselves.
Someone like Sanders will get Silicon Valley and the tech industry very annoyed. And these industries are highly influential today. his stand on H1B visa's and immigration is something that the business community will not tolerate. This is one of those bottom line issues. I think that's the business community well resort to racializing the debate and it will become compassion for immigrants, Ellis Island, and all the related social and cultural rhetoric. Our business community is very good at taking what is popular, left or right, and make it fit their goals.
I also remember seeing a TV interview where the President of Iceland said that the citizens should vote on the bailout instead of the parliament making the decision. He said it was too big an issue to leave out the voters. (I'm paraphrasing) I can not find the interview, but I think it was on 60 minutes.
I also think that at the minimum US citizens should have voted on the bailouts as well.
To get back on topic with the H1B visa issue. IMO the US should only be importing workers that are on the level of Albert Einstein. That won't be very many people. This whole business of we don't have enough qualified workers is BS. And if by some miracle it was actually true why not just train American workers instead ? Shouldn't we be concerned with our own citizens first ?
You think? The left is crazy about how I'm documented immigrants are beneficial to this country. The right is crazy about how corporations can hire anybody they want from the undocumented immigrants to H1B high skilled workers. The left that also says this country needs high skilled workers and those against them are racists. Take a look at South Carolina in Arizona. The right that says they want a wall between the US and Mexico? And secretly businesses continue to hire undocumented immigrants.
Great perspectives. What Americans mean by fixing is actually defending the fruit of an unjust international system. And this is the great hypocrisy of the American left, giving lip service to the global south while wanting to eat the fruit exclusively.
Except that the American right is inclined toward the unjust international system as well, and even inclined toward a comparably unjust domestic system. The collectivist versus anti-collectivist dispute permeates all aspects of government. It is the "basic principle" underlying policy perspectives such as that which supports the unjust international system you referred to. Americans, in general, are more conservative in their attitudes toward world community than the citizens of most other the nations, but the American left is less conservative than the American right. The American right's anti-collectivist attitude, and therefore the self-ratifying intention to exploit the world for personal benefit, runs far deeper the further right you go on the political spectrum, so much so that on the extreme edge, with the most conservative folks in the nation, the exploitative intention is worn proudly when it would not hurt the cause politically.
A great example of how deep this contrast between left and right goes in America is the contrast between Massachusetts, clearly a left-leaning state, and Georgia, clearly a right-leaning state. Massachusetts has effectively no county governments and practically everything is administered at the state level, encumbering the state with the responsibility to try to even out some of the geographic injustices. There are areas within Massachusetts that receive more funding for schools (for example) than is indicated by the taxes raised within that area, to a much greater extent than is true in Georgia. Meanwhile, Georgia not only has county governments which are almost completely responsible for the state's schools, but a great deal of what is considered state purview in the United States is concentrated in the county governments in Georgia. There is no consideration of whether one county is exploiting another county - competition between counties for business, for example, is considered the American way. And state support for schools is inconsequential by comparison to Massachusetts. The "mandate" to support quality basic education throughout the state is considered a sacred matter in Massachusetts, while it is treated as a suggestion in Georgia, and underfunded. That's right, there's an actual formula written into the law, and the state simply isn't following the formula. It's considered a county problem, and the state assistance when offered seems to be considered generosity rather than obligation - a voluntary charitable contribution, in line with the anti-collectivist perspective that underlies the state's right-leaning governance.
The assertions that neither side in the political landscape supports a resolution to the problems raised by the OP in this thread are essentially true. However, the implication that the right is not much more guilty of this accusation than the left is incorrect. While the left generally supports American exceptionalism it does not do so as strongly as the right - its support for American exceptionalism is much more moderate. Moderation is one of the reasons why the American left is so significantly derided by the hardcore left. We are going to have a very interesting political season as we see a true leftist, in Bernie Sanders, go after (for lack of a better word) a hardcore moderate, in Hillary Clinton. Clearly, Sanders supports those policy perspectives that will favor employees, so by comparison Clinton will appear to be a pro-business right-winger, favoring the employer side of the equation. Meanwhile, while Clinton remains the clear front-runner for the nomination, we'll see her attacked as a socialist, by all the GOP candidates. Someone's going to be lying... One question is whether the American people will think Bernie Sanders is lying or Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Donald Trump, etc., are lying about Clinton. Another question is how will this political process drive both parties with regard to their policy perspectives regarding work and employment?
What makes you think that drastic measures can turn the country around? Especially given you don't know what the answer is, why do you think that there is an answer that satisfies the criteria for an answer vis a vis the expectations that you and I and others have spec'ed out regarding employment and work earlier in the thread?
How would that do anything other than make things get much worse in some areas much faster than they would have otherwise? What that sounds like is a plan to try to retain a high level of satisfactory economic standing for some Americans longer by making things a lot worse for other Americans sooner.
Maybe it does maybe it doesn't but I don't see how anything you've said supports the contention that it does.
It's hard to even get a regular bill through Congress not to mention drastic measures. Do you really think that drastic measures have any chance of becoming policies in this country?
I believe you misread the message you replied to. I didn't say anything to indicate that I thought that drastic measures had any chance of becoming policies in this country. I asked the previous poster a somewhat unrelated question, highlighted in bold in the quotation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Costaexpress
We are too big, too diverse, two divided, too arrogant, and two entitled to have any of this. I find it ironic that the political left created much of today's America ...
I think these comments are far too anti-left biased to worthy of response. This is not a political forum. While politics has a role in the matters of work and employment, they aren't illuminated by baseless political rhetoric. Let's stick with reasoned comments such as what you said later in your comment:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Costaexpress
Someone like Sanders will get Silicon Valley and the tech industry very annoyed. And these industries are highly influential today. his stand on H1B visa's and immigration is something that the business community will not tolerate. This is one of those bottom line issues. I think that's the business community well resort to racializing the debate and it will become compassion for immigrants, Ellis Island, and all the related social and cultural rhetoric. Our business community is very good at taking what is popular, left or right, and make it fit their goals.
Very true. The reality is that we essentially have four political perspectives running for POTUS: Hardcore left-wing (Sanders), moderate (Clinton), right-wing (most of the GOP), and Trump (who doesn't reflect the values of either the Democrats nor the Republicans). As you've indicated here, the smart money says that extremist perspectives don't have a chance of prevailing.
However, that doesn't tell us what the end-result will be for work and employment policies for the next four years. The extremes cannot win, but they can lose. The left-wingers can make the Democrats lose, resulting in a win for right-wing policies, that undercut the situation for employees far faster and more critically, and bolster the fortunes of employers faster and more substantially. Someone like Trump can make the Republicans lose, resulting in a win for more moderate policies, slower erosion of the employee's situation, and slower expansion of pro-business policies.
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