Job Outlook Bleak for HCC Students and Faculty

By Stephen A. Miller
Staff Writer

Desperate times require desperate solutions. The American depression of job losses and home foreclosures is in no way similar to any of the previous recessions including the great depression of the 1930’s. America is now in a class war.

The good news is that the low class would easily win the war against the high class if the low class becomes aware that there is a war. That is the purpose for writing this opinion.

Jeff Faux was the founder of, and is now distinguished fellow at, the Economic Policy Institute. His latest book is The Global Class War. Dr. Faux said this,

“For two decades, leaders of both political parties have assured members of Congress and the public that de-regulating imports and exports would make the typical American working family richer. It was said to be Economics 101: Americans were better educated and harder-working than other workers and had access to the world's best technology. Therefore, they could easily overcome both the advantages of cheaper wages in poorer countries and the government subsidies for health care and pensions in other advanced economies. Indeed, free trade was said to be "win-win" for workers all over. Americans would go up the wage ladder and workers elsewhere would get jobs on the bottom rungs.

When skilled blue-collar jobs started going overseas, policy elites told workers that they -- or their children anyway -- would get better jobs providing services in the new "information economy." Then the call centers, computer programming jobs, and routine technical positions of that very economy left the country too. Soon, accounting, design engineering, and radiology work began to be shipped overseas to places where college graduates could be hired for less than half the U.S. price.”

The massive, endless Wall Street welfare bailout has transferred more than a trillion dollars to 214 financial institutions while millions of average people have been forced from their homes and their jobs. The Boards of Directors of the financial institutions have looted $18.4 billion in full view of law enforcement. They call their embezzlement of funds a “bonus”. President Obama called it shameful. Media broadcasters call it corporate irresponsibility.

"Globalization is a cover for American imperialism, but the beneficiaries are not the American people at the expense of foreigners but corporate executives at the expense of the working class. Jeff Faux offers a comprehensive and devastating analysis."

Faux, founder of the Economic Policy Institute, critiques both Democrats and Republicans for protecting transnational corporations "while abandoning the rest of us to an unregulated, and therefore brutal and merciless, global market."

The issue that needs to be raised to the entire HCC student body and faculty is to learn if we collectively want to fight the class war or do we want to continue losing the war without ever knowing any war exists.

In the past, American workers had nothing to fear from cheap labor abroad. Americans worked with superior capital, technology and business organization. This made Americans far more productive than Indians and Chinese, and, as it was not possible for U.S. firms to substitute cheaper foreign labor for U.S. labor, American jobs and living standards was not threatened by low wages abroad or by the products that these low wages produced.

Outsourcing jobs is the common practice that has been destroying entire industries, occupations and communities in the United States. The devastation of U.S. manufacturing employment was waved away with promises that a "new economy" based on high-tech knowledge jobs would take its place. Education and retraining were touted as the answer.

As the tidal wave of job losses and home foreclosures continue to grow, there will be growing desperation that will result in burglaries, muggings, and other forms of crimes in the Bridgeport area. If the students attending classes here at HCC prefer to ignore the demise of our great country, the future outlook for jobs will keep shrinking. If students decide to fight the class war we need to register a response. Students are encouraged to join in this discussion and tell us their opinions by joining us on FaceBook as well as our online paper “Perspectives”.