CNBC: This recession isn’t as bad as ’80-’82 because the unemployment stats aren’t as high and that President Obama is talking down the economy, making things seem (and eventually, be) worse than it is (and would be).
If they’re trying to win me with the bit about unemployment stats, they might as well give up. Lew Rockwell recently blew that fish out of the water.
Then there is the matter of common sense. Jobs that existed and were not lost during previous recessions of the conscious lifetimes of most people that read this blog are disappearing during this recession.
And I think it’s representative of not just the usual crest-and-nadir cycles of the economy, but of a more fundamental sea change — with the quickly decreasing cost of global communications in the last few decades, not to mention the perfidy and treachery of the free trade/open borders lobby, big corporations can put jobs that were once unmovable into Bangalore. And if they can’t do that, they’ll move Bangalore here using H1B visas.
In other words, it was OK according to white collar workers if those blue collar jobs were moved to Mexico and China, because it affected “those” people — that was the sea change that the recessions of the mid-70s and early-80s represented. Now that accountants could be had in the Philippines for one-tenth of what American ones expect to be paid, then the job will be done in the Philippines. Now that a software developer can be H1Bed into Seattle from Mumbai for one-fifth of what an American one would want to be paid, you’re not going to be a software developer ever again.
And if a foreign conglomerate swoops in and buys the very business symbol of a city that stood for decades, because the fourth generation of that symbol thinks of their fathers’ and grandfathers’ and great-grandfathers’ creation as just one of their many toys that can be acquired and disposed of at will, thereby making many white collar managers redundant, and they lose their jobs, they’re not going to be middle managers anywhere ever again.
Those white-collar jobs are now lost forever, if not totally then to you. This is one down that we won’t come up from, if there are no drastic changes in government and culture.
