Bad management screwing the American Worker

Productivity by the American worker has had massive gains in recent years, yet incomes have not kept pace with inflation. More and more American workers do not even receive healthcare from their employers, instead burdening taxpayer funded government insurance plans.

Jobs have been offshored, this is old-hat, to finance an increase in the middle classes (or creation of) in places like China and India.

Where have the benefits of these reduced labor costs gone? Have median incomes in the USA gone up? No. Have shareholders been reaping the benefits of the cost savings through increased returns, ie Dividends? No.

Billions have been lost through the subprime debacle, and although the blame could be fairly widely spread on this - CEOs walk away with million dollar parachutes for running their companies into the ground. Who cares if you're taking on bad loans like a ship taking on water, if you have a golden yacht alongside waiting for you to depart?

Companies do not pay dividends anymore. Finally, after carnage in the stock market lately, dividend rates are up from the jokes they had been 1-3% (not outpacing inflation).

Governments and businesses are top-heavy, the American worker does the real work and will likely be shouldering the burden of cuts and lay-offs to come due to the economy.

Employees and investors are too busy pulling off incredible feats of productivity to call management on the carpet. To go to their union and complain about wages, to complain to management about the dividend policies. The time has come. The managerial revolution is over.

The American citizen should have been turned into a business owner of sorts during the offshoring of jobs (opportunities). Companies that offshored jobs should have faced taxes and/or tarrifs for so doing, and these should have been passed along to US citizens. Not as welfare, a government handout, but as a reward for making a good deal on unit labor costs. Work sucks - I'd rather be a business owner than an employee anyway.

What about employee owned companies? Eliminate management altogether. There would be an incentive to run things properly as everyone would have a stake in the success of operations.

If you don't work then you don't eat is what I say. The American worker works harder and better than any labor force in the world, and guess what? We're hungry.

Thinking for yourself

I really respect the type of knowledge that results from an intelligent person looking at the world around them, drawing from their reservoir of experiences and learning and coming to their own conclusions vs "going with the flow."

Culture comes with presuppositions, the languages we speak condition our thought. We slowly begin to be molded into a society, losing our ability to think for ourselves. We hardly know that there is anything missing. Until the electricity doesn't work, or our car breaks down, and we realize what boobs we've been for not having a flashlight, or a tire iron, cellphone, or 25 cents or whatever.

That's why I respect the hard-fought knowledge of folks like Howard Ruff. He has a new updated version of his classic from the 70s - How to Survive and Prosper in the Coming Bad Years. Folks like Ruff will prosper - because they do their own analysis. If you base your decisions off of CNBC you're screwed - you are the "Sheeple."

Same thing applies to any subject. The modern, cognitive-behavioral psychologies treat people like stimulus-response animals. Very pragmatic, but a poor excuse for a philosophy of man. Concepts like "empathy" are virtual trash to me, instead I prefer the insights of Heidegger and Medard Boss. Once again, we are not ghosts in the machine of a body. We do not need science to tell us that we communicate with others, that we use empathy.