Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Bill Clinton Blames Unemployed Americans for "Skills Mismatch"



Of course it is absurd to claim America has a skills shortage. We have sky high unemployment rates, across the board, relative to their past rates, with highly skilled and educated people.”
-Robert Oak, The Economic Populist



Blame Employers for the Jobs Crisis, and Blame their Public-Private Political Enablers, Too


Neo-Feudal Valley, USA – While there are not enough jobs for  educated Americans and the Republican controlled Chamber of Commerce is taking it in the shorts for outsourcing American jobs, click on the above video link and watch good old Democratic Bill Clinton hammer the rickety old saw that educated American citizens are unemployed because they have a “skills mismatch” with corporations! Yes, the same corporations who are of course, even trained to deliberately NOT hire Americans in favor of cheap imported labor from India and China.  Simon Lomax and Miles Weiss report here that while “Clinton’s campaign against poverty in poor countries is making room this year for programs to aid unemployed Americans”, the former president makes the bogus following claim:

The “biggest problem” that stands in the way of boosting employment is a “skills mismatch” in the U.S. economy. This means the jobs that are being opened don’t have qualified people applying for them. If job-specific training were provided to 5 million unemployed workers, the jobless rate would fall to around 7 percent.”

As Bill's Indian lobby buds and he himself know full well, the biggest problem that stands in the way of boosting American employment is a “moral character mismatch” between millions of educated Americans of good character and horribly sociopathic pigs who choose to feast at the trough on cheap imported labor. Skills mismatch, MY ASS! Beating the drum about some mythical “skills mismatch” is neo-feudal state speak for greasing the skids for more age and local discrimination, slave wages, labor arbitrage and more immigration at a time when there are not enough jobs for our own citizens.

Our friend Rob Oak at the Economic Populist takes us for a comprehensive stroll through the land mines of this war on America's educated middle class with his mother of all “skilled labor shortage myth” posts entitled Blame Employers for the Jobs Crisis. 

Oak provides detailed articles, charts, graphs and links that debunk the lies and propaganda from the perpetrators waging genocide on America's educated citizenry. In particular, he includes the above must-watch video clip with Bill Clinton on Dylan Ratigan's show where Clinton makes the shocking claim that while 5 million job openings exist, millions of educated American citizens who need them are NOT educated or skilled enough to be hired by most U.S. corporations and are in need of “training.” Indeed, the long-arm of Clinton's good intentions seems to stretch globally, just not locally.

What WOULD possibly possess former president Bill Clinton to claim that while 5 million job openings exist, millions of educated American citizens who need them are NOT skilled enough to hire? Since when is it suddenly academia's responsibility to train the already educated American unemployed workforce for corporations at the very expense of unemployed educated Americans? Could there be some underlying profit motive there? Not only do corporations not want to hire Americans or pay them decent salaries and healthcare, they are hellbent with replacing them with cheap foreign imported workers. Could The Cash Cow of Indian Outsourcing and Clinton family ties to the India lobby (h/t Rob Sanchez) who have made Billary very wealthy Connecticut “farmers” and the cheap labor itch have something at all to do with the LIE that there is an American skilled labor shortage?

Included in his post is a new website and database from the AFL-CIO which allows you to see who is exporting jobs by zip code. How are your friendly local companies holding up? In addition to many technology companies (ahem, including the nation's supreme sociopathy pit, Hewlett-Packard) I even found a bread company in my zone that apparently can't find qualified Americans to work for them. A bread company! With so many people locally out of work, local companies continue to discriminate.  Oak writes:


Those of us in STEM know what skills shortage really means. It means enabling more outsourcing, more foreign guest workers and more immigration. There is no skills shortage, there never was a skill shortage. There is a shortage of good employers who do not discriminate, age discriminate, ship jobs to India, China, Brazil and treat their workers like cannon fodder. There also is a shortage of jobs, pure and simple. Put U.S. workers first. Demand these employers quit their inane, harsh, wage repressing, discriminatory labor practices.”

Where exactly is Clinton's explanation of what these mysteriously missing skills are that Americans are supposed to be lacking? Anyone who starts a job in a company is trained, period. Never mind this horseshit excuse of educated Americans not being qualified and that somehow only an inexperienced, dubiously and unverifiable, cheap foreign worker magically shows up with all the right “trainability” because they overwhelmingly always don't.

Rob Oak is right. Corporations are to blame for not hiring educated Americans. And if corporations stopped discriminating against educated American citizens of all ages and started hiring them instead of importing cheap foreign workers, politicians and former presidents would be relieved of making excuses for them. But they would also be relieved of a few zillion ruppees, too, that keep them all fat and happy
down on the farm.

Rob Oak doesn't hesitate to call it like it is when it comes to this ruse from Clinton about educated Americans needing “training” as he offers this excellent comment below:

As a techie, I can tell you a main STEM skill is the never ending ability to learn and self-teach. You'd be dead in the water without that ability for technology changes every 6 months. That said, acting like people cannot learn new skills on the job, when the entire United States learned skills on the job to become the biggest military machine in history and win the war...
just infuriates me. I mean come on, the entire planet is currently addicted to iphones and facebook. All of that requires learning new skills...i.e. the younger crowd is all thumbs, literally. Think they cannot learn some skilled manufacturing trade if they can figure out how to text at 80wpm with just their thumbs? What is wrong with these corporations and politicians?”


After reaping so much wealth, it is a shame that the Clintons would still choose not to stop this war on America's educated middle class, many of whom supported them. As yours truly has previously reported, Follow the Drinking Gourd.

Party on, plebes!


-2Truthy

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What exactly IS Clinton's plan to extend help to "domestic" people kicked to the curb? (dunno, is he talking about US Citizens or borderless beings from other countries here?) I couldn't find anything in the article link that specified. It is sickening that Clinton is on the side of the greedy and hateful corporate crowd who are destroying the smart people of our own communities. I have an undergraduate degree from a top ten school with graduate work along with medical training. With over twenty years of work experience, I have been unemployed for over three years now. No health insurance, either. I have applied for jobs and told I am 'overqualified" (code for too old, too smart and too American) which totally NEGATES the Clinton/corporate claims that I and millions of others like me are "unskilled" and that some imported foreign worker is going to be their silver bullet.

prezdumas said...

The "skills mismatch" is that Americans can't live 14 to an apartment; subsisting on rice; and skimping on soap.

Jobs Americans won't do include:

brain surgeon--minimum wage

Jobs Americans will do include:

Dangerous crab fishing--with a cut of the haul

Get the drift? Let's get specific: There is a supposed to be a "nursing shortage." Why that's odd, because there is high under-employment of RNs! How can that be? Because hospitals don't what to pay the prevailing wage. QED