"All that matters is if the President has the guts to serve the American taxpaying citizen there could be some actions to protect American jobs."

Jobs?... we don't need no steenkin jobs..

I remember our new 8th grade teacher telling us forty some years ago that the economy would transition to a new system where we would not be working 40 and 50 hour weeks anymore.. I didn't understand how that was going to work out but by golly he was right about Americans not having 9 to 5 jobs 40 years down the road.. The problem is he spun it as utopian when it actually turns out to just be a race to the bottom. We have been deindustrialized.. I didn't buy into his utopian spin back then and regretfully, I was right.

People should remember, it was the first black president Bill Clinton that sold our jobs out to Wall Street with the NAFTA Treaty. He picked up where George Bush had failed. NAFTA was a republican legislation and democrats, the working man's party, were against it. Good ol' boy Clinton came along and got the job done for Wall Street.. Clinton told congress, "the store is open" boys, pork all around! Wall Street used your tax dollars to deindustrialize your country.

At least one sold out cheap.. who was that Chicago democrat that sold out for a picture with the prez? He later went to jail for taking advantage of an underage page leaving a vacancy for other upcoming Chicago politicians.. it never ends..

Damn corporatists! I pretty much agree with what Nana Dot says.

Yours too Third Child, but please for once why don't you stop personalizing the issue, putting the blame on this individual or that one. Don't you know that it is a heck of a lot bigger than any one individual?

The real problem is the complacency of the American people. As the Pogo poster said back in my salad days, "We have met the enemy, and it is us".

We malign the French in our doltishness, largely because they were lucid enough to see that the Iraq War was at best a pig in a poke, a can of worms,or a can of something else too scatological to describe on this blog. We laughed, and called them cowards. How stupid of us.

The clarity of their thinking exceeds ours. They at least know what the issues are, and which are worth fighting for. If what has been done to the American worker, had been done to the French worker they would have shut down Paris in a heart beat, and brought the nation to its knees.

We get crapped on time, and time again by the corporatists. We meekly say o.k. and parrot the things they have taught us to say, such things as "in essence good health care equals socialism so we don't want it. We would rather have bad health care,and assure that a few capitalist pigs get rich." No, we don't say it in exactly those words, but that is what is meant by the words put in our mouths. Then we express thanks for the ever smaller cracker that we are given.

John Q. I am a bit troubled by your mass deportation of twelve million, which if the truth were known may amount to fifteen million or more. It is sort of like pouring water in a sieve to carry it. I guess the good thing is that it would sure create a lot of jobs to just round them up, hold them, and then carry them across the border, leaving them back on their launching pad. To keep them from springing right back like a yo yo on a string there would need to be a bunch of border watchers, so of course, more jobs. That might work for a while, but it is unproductive labor over the long haul, which makes it fatally flawed.

The better way to cause a mass exit of illegals is to nail those that hire them hard, I mean really hard, huge fines, and detention for executives of the companies that hire them. They would be gone or starved to death in six months.

Regretably nothing is going to be done, because the corporatists don't want it done, and we don't have the savvy, and guts to make them do it.

midniterebel - I think that you have bought the corporate propaganda line...

If your granparents died in the 70s- 80s, then they were probably Depression era grandparents. Please remember that before WWII, 80% of the population were agrarian/agricultural. After WWII, with the rush to cities and corporate pensions, the world changed. In the 50's, we had some of the strongest working class protections we have ever had, the middle class exploded, and everyone was 'prosperous' - thus all the nostalgia...

Today, those large corporations hiring workers are actively engaged in how to screw their workers for the sake of larger dividends for stockholders. The product or service they provide is ONLY a means to THAT end, scrimped on and cheated to increase stockholder dividends, and thus there is no pride of workmanship and no concern for those actually doing the work.

I think that instead of chastising young people for seeing the reality of that situation, we might better serve them by making 'work' and that work ethic you talk about an issue in our own workplaces.

We can amend the Constitution to say that ONLY natural humans have the rights reserved under the Bill of Rights - REVOKE CORPORATE "PERSONHOOD" under the law.

We can encourage and support employee-owned and cooperatively organized businesses instead of subsidizing HUGE corporations to take jobs offshore.

We can insist that if you want to operate HERE, you have your address HERE, pay taxes HERE, and pay prevailing wages HERE... no skipping to the Caymans, no child or slave labor...

OH MY GOSH! THAT WOULD RAISE THE PRICE OF EVERYTHING!! NO, the costs would be upfront, instead of snuck in on 'externalized costs', corporate welfare (which is **HUGE** compared to the HHS budget), etc, that we are paying NOW!

And maybe we need to change OUR tune from "he who dies with the most toys wins" to "United we stand, divided we fall"...

OKR, You should practice what you preach. You wrote:

"please for once why don't you stop personalizing the issue, putting the blame on this individual or that one."

Bill Clinton committed economic treason when he rammed NAFTA down our throats. Ross Perot was right.

"We malign the French in our doltishness, largely because they were lucid enough to see that the Iraq War was at best a pig in a poke, a can of worms,or a can of something else too scatological to describe on this blog. We laughed, and called them cowards. How stupid of us."

Thank you for finally admitting it.

You write:

"The real problem is the complacency of the American people."

Then you write:

"Regretably nothing is going to be done, because the corporatists don't want it done, and we don't have the savvy, and guts to make them do it."

This is slave mentality.. you have already given up. What's more, you are spreading the infection. Instead of waving the white flag to the cut throats that are destroying this country why don't you write and speak truth to power instead?

Quitter..

I have been much kinder than many people here, including Okie Reader. I won't go to the trouble to search back to show you old proof but the exchange in this thread alone shows that Okie's comments are much more junkyard doggy than mine. I believe you should document specific transgressions before making arguments of "enough" or censure of anyone..

The offensively named "Operation Wetback" had considerably fewer victims than you suggest, according to this information from pbs.org:

http://www.pbs.org/kpbs/theborder/histor...

NanaDot, on your food for thought link-some of that data seems to be slightly tilted. The one item that says that of immigrant households only 1% of them receive federal aid compared to 5% of American households. If you compare statistics 1% of twenty million is greater than 5% of over two hundred million in that category (I think). There is ten times the number of American households than there are illegal immigrants.

I'm hungry, gotta go.

There was a time when the food industry had strong unions and high enough wages so workers were a part of the middle class. When the unions were weakened and wages were forced lower by competition, especially from union busting non union manufacturers, the middle class folks were unwilling to work for the lower wages. Thus began the massive influx of undocumented workers hungry to work to provide for their families. The food industry had little choice but to hire those that would accept the new wages, and got a bonus besides because the new workers had a work ethic that was keeping a full work force at work every day.

mnr - i agree with the enema recommendation - that is called VOTE'EM OUT - but if you're working graveyard, your clientele is probably 'skewed' - it is the same 'burnout' issue that law enforcement, social service and ER personnel deal with... seeing things so 'up close and personal' also tends to blind a person to the larger picture - can't see the forest for the trees ...

We keep trying to 'blame' individuals instead of looking at the system itself... GATT, NAFTA, WTO, the 'trickle-down' rip-off, etc.

But -- whatever -- I agree with 'countryman' and news ....

Let's not forget the word "projected" in talking about the Clinton budget surplus. It's not like we had a trillion dollars locked away in Fort Knox that is now gone. Any time you still owe money, you don't have a surplus.