Originally Posted By Kar2oonMan Just for clarification, Carly "Formerly of HP" Fiorina is running for the US Senate seat against Barbara Boxer. Meg "Formerly of eBay" Whitman and Jerry Brown are competing to be the next governor of CA. Fiorina was the one who made catty remarks about Barbara Boxer's hairstyle while her mic was on. Whitman pretty much only speaks through television ads.
Originally Posted By tiggertoo Well said, Gadzuux. My only quibble would be this: <<Cat claws and a bundle of money are all Whitman's got to work with.>> She also has an ignorant, impressionable populace willing to vote for any "R" over any "D" regardless of qualification, intelligence, or integrity. Indeed, it's times like this that remind me of why the Founders feared democracy and placed buffers between "the People" and governance.
Originally Posted By wahooskipper Politicians lie because they are human. Lying has become our national pasttime. People lie on the computer, people lie at work, people lie in school. And, it seems like we have become ok with it.
Originally Posted By Mr X Sadly, it's true. And the worst part is, liars tend to succeed very nicely these days (caught in their lies or not, doesn't seem to matter) while the rest of us get rolled underfoot (not that I've never lied...it's just that my conscious actually has something to say about it when I do, thus I'm not particularly good at it and could NEVER lie as confidently or happily as the real pros do). I wonder if I should instruct Little X accordingly.
Originally Posted By DAR <IIRC, Czarly's (that's how we used to call her at HP) words were "Americans don't have a God given right to a job."> As the Joker would say "and here we go" You don't have a God given right to be handed a job. You do have the God given right to pursue a job.
Originally Posted By ecdc >>You don't have a God given right to be handed a job. You do have the God given right to pursue a job.<< Except she used it as an excuse to send thousands of jobs overseas to save a buck. Is that acceptable? And if it is, how exactly will Americans pursue jobs that aren't here? There's more people than there are jobs.
Originally Posted By wahooskipper She is hardly alone in sending jobs overseas. My extremely liberal father in law spent several years going back and forth to Mexico to plants his company built just south of the border to take advantage of cheaper labor. The problem is that Americans want to buy things cheaply but also want high salaries and great benefits. It is hard to marry the two.
Originally Posted By DAR <<Except she used it as an excuse to send thousands of jobs overseas to save a buck. Is that acceptable?>> Of course not but I was just focusing on that quote and the context it was presented in. And I still believe, and yes I know nobody said this so don't get you're panties in a bunch, that we don't have a right to just be given things.
Originally Posted By fkurucz >>You don't have a God given right to be handed a job. You do have the God given right to pursue a job.<< Kind of hard to do when CEOs are obsessed with offshoring everything it sight, or as Czarly called it: "right-shoring". But to be fair to HP, it does not consider itself an "American" corporation. >>The problem is that Americans want to buy things cheaply but also want high salaries and great benefits. It is hard to marry the two.<< I call BS on that. Multinationals will charge prices that the local markets will, regardless of what the overseas costs actually are. Consumer prices are basically the same as before offshoring. Offshoring was done for one reason and one reason alone: to fatten the bottom line of corporations. Of course, now the piper has to be paid as consumers are now broke and can't afford to buy all those shiny foreign made toys.
Originally Posted By fkurucz ^^^Multinationals will charge prices that the local markets will bear I need to proof before I post. Anyway, they don't pass the savings onto customers.
Originally Posted By ecdc >>and yes I know nobody said this<< And yet your statement that >>As the Joker would say "and here we go"<< certainly seems to imply that we all think that way. Otherwise, why make the statement at all? You have this weird idea in your head that a bunch of us think people are entitled to everything in life and then you respond to that. Even when no one has said it, you're aware that no one has said it, you POINT OUT that no one has said it, yet you still respond as if it has been said. Weird. As for your statement that >>You do have the God given right to pursue a job.<< If you truly believed that, then you would be a liberal. You seem to think that businesses and workers are on an equal playing field. But that's just not true. Large businesses, through lobbyists, have gamed the system so much that workers are screwed. If it's not off-shoring of jobs, it's stagnant wages and ever-dwindling benefits, all while businesses post record profits. In order for someone to have a god given right to pursue a job, there have to be jobs out there.
Originally Posted By fkurucz >>You seem to think that businesses and workers are on an equal playing field. But that's just not true. Large businesses, through lobbyists, have gamed the system so much that workers are screwed. If it's not off-shoring of jobs, it's stagnant wages and ever-dwindling benefits, all while businesses post record profits.<< This is the somber reality we face. The worst thing of all is that we have an economy where small and medium size businesses are getting steamrolled by Corporate America. Even Main St. is in Corporate America's crosshairs. People sometimes joke that we'll all eventually work at WalMart. While that won't happen it does seem like we are all destined to work for Corporate America, that is if we can get a job at all.
Originally Posted By fkurucz >>In order for someone to have a god given right to pursue a job, there have to be jobs out there.<< Get ready for the double dip, its gonna be a doozy!
Originally Posted By plpeters70 <<But to be fair to HP, it does not consider itself an "American" corporation.>> There's the rub - they don't consider themselves American, so what do they really care about American citizens. As long as someone in the world is buying their products, and they can find cheap labor somewhere in the world to make them - preferably somewhere with very little regulation to protect workers, and as long as their stockholder are happy, then what do they care about American workers? We seem to have crossed a very scary line where country boundaries matter very little to large corporations - all they care about is making the most money possible, where ever they can get it. In a way, we deserve this treatment - this is how we treated the 3rd world for years and years. What did we care if people were being paid peanuts a day, and could barely sustain a living in some foreign land - just as long as our American companies made money and we got cheap junk. Well, now the shoe's on the other foot, isn't it. And frankly, I really don't think there's much "we the people" can do about it.
Originally Posted By SingleParkPassholder What no one here has mentioned- both Whitman and Fiorina are talking about the need to put people to work and how they have experience at doing that where their opponents don't- yet it is hard to find two people together responsible for putting more people out of work. The hypocrisy and dishonesty is mind blowing. So getting into a discussion about whether someone has a right to a job derails the primary point here- would we even be talking about this if these two didn't set such an example for so many other companies?
Originally Posted By SingleParkPassholder One other thing- Whitman has said that if elected, because there's "so much waste" in government, she'll give an across the board order to lay off an arbitrary 30,000 t0 40,000 government workers. Forget that she has no power to do that, but what the heck, she'll find a way. How does one reconcile that, her offshoring with ebay, and a platform to create jobs? You just don't, is the answer.
Originally Posted By DyGDisney >>> People sometimes joke that we'll all eventually work at WalMart.<<< I'm thinking Buy n Large right now!!!
Originally Posted By DyGDisney I assume the Republicans are fine and dandy with 30,000 California Government workers losing their jobs since they are anti-big gov't, but I bet when that shoots California's unemployment rate way up they will blame the President!
Originally Posted By gadzuux >> Forget that she has no power to do that, but what the heck, she'll find a way. << She doesn't actually have to do it - just peddle the rhetoric that conservatives want to hear in an election year. For some unexplained reason, conservatives consider american workers the new 'boogeymen' - public sector jobs, unions, nurses, teachers - all of them are just feeding at the public trough. And all have been villainized and demogogued by republicans.
