Last night, my boyfriend and I watched McCain's speech together. It was an OK speech - I'm getting annoyed with the 9/11 references and so much of his argument revolving around his time as a POW about 40 years ago, but it was still OK. I don't dislike McCain...I just like Obama more. My boyfriend, on the other hand, has admired McCain for years and traditionally votes straight Republican ticket.
So we were watching the speech, feeling kinda "Meh" about it, until it got to this part:
Quote:
I know some of you have been left behind in the changing economy and it often seems your government hasn't even noticed. Government assistance for unemployed workers was designed for the economy of the 1950s. That's going to change on my watch. My opponent promises to bring back old jobs by wishing away the global economy. We're going to help workers who've lost a job that won't come back, find a new one that won't go away.
We will prepare them for the jobs of today. We will use our community colleges to help train people for new opportunities in their communities. For workers in industries that have been hard hit, we'll help make up part of the difference in wages between their old job and a temporary, lower paid one while they receive retraining that will help them find secure new employment at a decent wage.
|
After hearing that, the two of us wanted to throw something heavy at him. These are the same words George Bush said back in 2002 or 2003, and he was off base then and now McCain is off base. It was a huge disappointment to us to hear that McCain is so out of touch with the American worker.
I was laid off from my first job out of college in 2001, then again from a nonprofit in 2002. I graduated from a Tier 1 university, had big student loans to prove it, and yet I couldn't get a professional job to pay the bills...it seemed like no one I knew could. At that time, not even the temp agencies had jobs to offer. I remember coming home one night after spending some time at the "work source" office and turning on the State of the Union address to hear George Bush tell America that people like me needed to go to community college to learn the skills necessary for today's jobs. And I remember the tremendous sinking feeling I had of realizing that he truly did not understand what was really going on in this country...and that he didn't even know people like me existed.
If George Bush and John McCain would go into unemployment offices around the country, they would learn a lot. I have to think that they haven't done this, because if they had, they would know that unemployment offices today are filled with many white collar, educated professionals in addition to the factory workers that I think they're thinking of. In 2002, when I was called in randomly to sit through a "training" at the unemployment office, the office was filled with professionals with bachelor's degrees, MBAs and, yes, PhDs! The instructors were ashamed to be "instructing" people who just days or weeks before had been at the top of their ladders to look into community college classes. They knew that their offices had nothing to support us.
At the same time, my boyfriend, who has an engineering degree from Michigan and an MBA in Finance from a good school, had been unemployed for several months. He was laid off and replaced by engineering contractors from Russia, here on work visas. He was on unemployment for a while, but then it ran out, and President Bush decided not to expand federal unemployment benefits. He took a job in another field, and moved around the country trying to get back into engineering. A few years ago, he finally got his dream job at Boeing...nearly 15 years after he graduated with his aerospace engineering degree.
So I would like to ask John McCain, What are these jobs that haven't and won't disappear? Manufactering is already gone, and without major tax penalties to corporations they won't be coming back. And now science and technology jobs are either being offshored or taken by foreign contractors here on visas. We graduate people with tech and engineering degrees, but then don't offer them the jobs...because we can bring in people from India or Russia that will work for less. Even software engineering is being done in India now.
What kind of a job is a community college supposed to secure us in the future economy? Because right now the only thing I see our economy supporting is the service sector. Some business services, such as my field of marketing, and lawyers, will stay here, but even my company just recently sent our accounting/billing overseas. Are we supposed to be a country of bartenders, waiters/waitresses, hotel clerks, medical assistants and massage therapists?
I think what John McCain and George Bush really meant was that factory workers who lost their jobs because Americans are obsessed with cheap crap should go to community colleges to learn computer programming or something like that. But - DUH - that's not a stable choice anymore either! What ARE the jobs that will stay here?!
Threaded Mode
