If underemployed/unemployed, read this.

[raccoon]

DU folks, if you are intelligent, educated, competent…yet unemployed or underemployed, here’s your problem—

You’re NOT an incompetent, stupid fuckup!

In today’s America, it’s the incompetent, stupid fuckups who get the highly paid, well-benefited jobs, complete with stock options, company jets, fabulous retirements, etc.

The proof?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=2181678&mesg_id=2181678

I have suspected this for a long time; now I know. :silly:

[Jack Rabbit]

1. My post on the other thread:

I repeat: The world would be a better place without GM

Those who say that we need well-educated elites to run businesses and government must really have a hard time defending their thesis nowadays. It's not just that people like Bush (Yale graduate and Harvard MBA) run the government, but look at decision like this one from the private sector.

Can you really convince me or any one else that the assembly line blue collar workers with their high school diplomas and a year or two of college couldn't make a better decision than this? That they would even consider making a bonehead decision like this?

I'm not a socialismo o muerte kind of guy, but if this is capitalism, let's try something else. This kind of thing doesn't help either consumers or workers. It's just stupid and the problem looks to be systemic.

[Pharaoh]

2. Unregulated capitalism

will totally enslave and destroy the world............:nuke:

[Jack Rabbit]

6. The problem is corporate elephantitis

We are told that one of the advantages of capitalism (for the consumer) is competition.

That's only true if there is a competitive market. So what happens when there are only a few, large producers? The producers are more efficient and can provide profits to their stockholders, but forget about competition. There isn't any to speak of.

When Henry Ford was the only auto manufacturer, he could say "America can have any color car it wants, as long as it's black." When other manufacturers rose up in the market and gave consumers different colored cars, Ford fell in line. Now there are only two or three significant auto manufacturers in America (depending on whether one considers Chrysler to be either American or significant), and we are being told that we can have any American automobile we want as long as it's a gas guzzler.

We can buy Japanese cars, but that would put American auto workers out of work. Of course, they may end up out of work any way after Ford and GM move their plants to Mexico.

Marx spoke of contradictions in capitalism, but usually in terms of a contradiction between capital and labor. He didn't say much about the contradiction between capital and the consumer. Competition benefits the consumer, but not the capitalist. When the capitalist succeeds in eliminating his competition, the consumer gets less variety and shoddy merchandise.

This system doesn't work.

[raccoon]

9. Yes!

"Can you really convince me or any one else that the assembly line blue collar workers with their high school diplomas and a year or two of college couldn't make a better decision than this? "

Of course they could! And as a result of this beyond stupid decision by the higher-ups, (they might as well say to the blue collar workers, "Go Cheney yourself!") the rank and file will be the ones whose lose their jobs and end up working at WalMart.

Edited to add the following:

Think any of these ex-GM rank and file workers will buy these SUVs, on their WalMart wages?

Or maybe the line workers in China will buy them?

Any further suggestions for customers for these SUVs will be welcome.

[bloom]

3. That is nuts

CNN ran a show about peak oil on Saturday and they showed how Brazil had acheived fuel independence with small, Flexible fuel cars that can run on sugar cane fuel - that they have fields and fields growing.

Our country is so fucked.

[supernova]

4. Though no one says it;

it's generally acknowledged that the incompetent, if they are socially adept, keep getting kicked upstairs, where they can't harm people on the line that really do the work, nor annoy customers. :eyes:

[ArbustoBuster]

7. That sounds related to the Peter Principle:

"A worker will rise to the level of his incompetence."

That is, a worker will keep getting promoted until he/she screws up his/her job; that's where the worker stays.

[raccoon]

11. I think you're right, and I just don't get that.

In this day and time, with at will employment in so many places, why keep these droofuses when there are probably umpteen who would move from Lower Slobbovia to take their places?

[Hidden Stillness]

5. Thank You

Thank you for this wonderful, truthful post--for many reasons. The investment capitalists of the "new" Republican Party are completely ripping up the infrastructure of local employment and neighborhood life, one region at a time, one industry at a time, and replacing it all with about five huge, global/monolith corporate masters. It is the end of employment-with-a-future and the end of regulated democracy. There aren't even the kinds of jobs an intelligent adult would want to do, or pay you can live a middle class life on, at all anymore--and it will only get worse.

[raccoon]

10. "It is the end of employment-with-a-future "

Exactly. I sympathize with young people just starting out today.

Even people in the professions (of any age)--I wonder how they are doing today. For example, dentists and orthodontists. As fewer people have dental insurance (probably nearly extinct) and fewer have MONEY to spend for such luxuries as keeping their teeth or having a healthy bite, I wonder how their incomes are doing.

[RaleighNCDUer]

8. For 30+ years American business schools have taught that the

raison d'etre for corporations is to generate stock returns for the owners. We've had two generations of MBAs who adhere to that philosophy. Nevermind that every company ever created was designed to produce a product and get it to the market -- that is of secondary importance now.

These MBAs have come out of school and gutted our industrial base, broken the unions, turned healthcare into an industry and skyrocketed our national debt, all in the pursuit of the highest next-quarter profits.

Two generations ago people worried about the teaching of science being divorced from ethics; worried that while we 'can' do something, like nuclear power or genetic engineering, if we 'should'.

How did Harvard Business School escape the same scrutiny? Couldn't anyone predict that following this path we would wind up destroying our own economy?

How did this happen?

[raccoon]

12. Good question. I wish I knew. nt