during the Viet Nam years, the rest of the country will vote Kerry into the White House, based on economic issues.

As someone once said, "It's the economy, stupid".

To those who think that economy is in great shape, there's a sobering editorial in the LATimes today (8/21/2004) which notes that there's been 1/2 million applicants for 3,000 dock jobs in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Applications have been mailed in from across the country

You're probably thinking that these must be fantastic jobs to warrant such interest. Not so. These are part time and offer no benefits, but do pay between $21 and $28/hour. And there is the chance that they'll be able to join the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, with pension and healthcare coverage.

With the above 'tsunami of applicants', you don't have to wait for the next monthly jobs report to see that the U.S. economy is really hurting. All the pronouncements from George W. that "we've turned the corner" make him seem more and more like a latter-day Herbert Hoover, who often proclaimed that "prosperity is just around the corner".

Well, Nicole, as long as we still have your presence (and your great photos!!), how bad can things really be?

Still, there are many reasons to think that the economy is not "turning" around:

- The collapse of the supermarket strike in Southern California earlier this year, with management essentially crushing labor. Probably won't be seeing any of the "top-tier" workers after a few years, due to the new-hires at substantially lower wages and benefits.

- Oil at > $47/barrel. Good for Texas oilmen and Saudi sheiks, not too sure about the rest of us, though. Every recession in the last 30 years has been presaged by an oil shock.

- NASDAQ still hovering below 2000, down ~60% from the 2001 high, while the Dow has made no progress in over 4 years. Gee, how are our 401K's doing these days?

- And as for jobs, the below essay by George Monbiot is a must read for anyone whose job involves a computer or a telephone.

Because sKerry has made his Vietnam experience the centerpiece of his campaign. All Vietnam and no Iraq, no War on Terrorism, as liberal columnist Matt Welch accurately states:

"Ever since the Democratic Convention in Boston last month, the John-John ticket has been grumbling about having to fend off accusations that would-be president John Kerry previously fudged vivid details of his war record in Vietnam and (most controversially) Cambodia. There is indeed considerable merit to the notion that a nation at war should be focusing on 2004 instead of 1968, but if Kerry's convention performance was any guide, his go-to selling point for taking the reigns of the "war on terror" is the fact that he was piloting swift-boats up the Mekong back when Osama bin Laden was busy trying to grow his first beard. . . .

"How to handle Iraq is the most important question facing the president," wrote a disappointed Matthew Yglesias of the liberal American Prospect magazine, just after Kerry finished, "and he just punted.""

But he served in Vietnam! Superior tacticians my ass.

RLTW

It is instructive that the most reticent person in the Bush administration about going to war with Iraq when we did was Colin Powell.  Powell actually served in Vietnam and saw how poorly timed and inappropriate use of military power sometimes produced undesired results.
    Kerry's experience in Vietnam, as well as the philsophical changes that he has gone through as a result of that service are directly pertinent as far as effective resolution of the war in Iraq as well as the stabalization of Afganistan are concerned.  
    Kerry did not raise this issue, he has been attacked on it many times during the past during campaigns.  It would have been raised on him during this campaign if he did not get ahead of it.  The point that he appears to be making is that a president who has a full understanding of the limits of military power is more likely to make sounder judgements on how to use that power.
    I have said it before and I will say it again.  We should have not gone into Iraq before we had allocated sufficient attention to pacifying Afganistan.  Going into Iraq at the time that it happened, in my view, was a gross failure of policy that a person who understood the limitations that we face when taking on two conflicts at once would have been less likely to have comitted.  Yes Saddam was a badass, but there are plenty of those out there and they have killed plenty of their own people.  But there are ways of dealing with such people, it takes time and patience to utilize those methods before going to war, but the consequence of doing so is that there is more support for war once it is obvious that war is the only solution.
    Bush's war on terror has had some successes that all should acknowledge.  But his invading Iraq, without a clear plan on how to fully succeed there has created large numbers of new terrorists that a future president will have to deal with.
    It is instructive to see that some here quote from sources that they normally ridicule when it appears that those sources buttress their beliefs.

It was obvious back as far as early March that Kerry was going to be the Democratic candiate....If this issue by these swift boat veterans was so damn important, then why did they not speak up then?.....Furthermore, as far as the swift boat vets saying their not being motivated by poltics, this excerpt should shed light on who's behind them:

"According to Salon, the Swift Boat Veterans' website "was put up courtesy of William Franke, a St. Louis businessman with longstanding ties to Attorney General John Ashcroft and the Missouri Republican Party. Its chief financiers, according to the group's last quarterly IRS filing, are Houston builder Bob J. Perry and the Crow family, both major Republican donors from Texas." During the past four years Perry has apparently given "$5 million to candidates and causes, nearly all of them Republican and extremely conservative."



-- Modified on 8/21/2004 8:00:25 PM

Especially propoganda aimed at greater fears?  

The most conservatives could say now is that Kerry will make everything worse, economically, militarily, socially.  That's exactly what their doing.

OT: I disagree that Vietnam is a distraction, it's central to the breakdown that got us here.  We wouldn't have gone into Iraq if not for Vietnam, if not for the way it has divided our nation. Both sides learned the wrong lessons. Liberals learned to never fight,  to drug themselves, and to drop out. It was the tepid, disheartened but pacified, drugged and dropped out liberals who Ronald Reagan defeated.  Meanwhile, conservatives needed to show how Vietnam could be "done right."  Iraq gave them the opportunity.  

Somehow, Kerry's experience is so indicative of what happened to this nation with Vietnam.  Then, a liberal could fight bravely, and get five decorations. The attacks on him now presume that a liberal war-protester could have never been that brave in warfare.

Myopic?  We can only think about issues like economics if the world we see is real, and not the fictionalized ones we needed due to the trauma of Vietnam.

/Zin    


 

What I am saying is that the members of this board are strangely out of touch with the public.  They just don't care as much as you do about all the Viet Nam issues.

Bush will lose because too many jobs have been lost in the battleground states.

when they vote on Nov 2.

It blows my politically obsessed mind.

But on-topic, this is a wretched economy, and it's remarkable how its true nature flies under the radar of official economic statistics.  It seems that something over four million jobs were lost under Bush, while while 2.4 million were created.  That's a loss of 1.6 million at least.  

Almost all the created jobs were at lower wages.  

Consumers have thought, wrongly, that they could spend themselves out of this, better the economy through spending.  For a while, they did, but they've been financing the further outsourcing of consumer-oriented jobs.  Also the unemployed and underemployed have been forced to rely on their credit lines, too.  So, total consumer debt has sky-rocketted.  Consumers can't take up the slack anymore.  Once all of these debts are written off, even the rich are going to feel this as their investiments are gone and banks fail.    

Sounds like all gloom and doom, but after it's over, we could then build a better economy.

/Zin

campaign needs to lay off the Vietnam issue and focus on portraying Kerry as the true liberal he is.  If the last several Prez elections have taught us anything, it is that those candidates that run on a liberal platform don't get elected (think Mondale, Dukakis.  Remember how Clinton moved to the center to get elected).

No, EVERYBODY has fallen for this Bush tactic of making a mountain out of this particular mole hill.

The media loves it cuz it uses file footage.  A campaign of ideas would feature lots of talking heads wonking- not so nice to put on TV.

Blame America's bizarre fascination with essentially a minor cold war side show, as if it was a major war.  The French don't even care  this much about their lost colonial honour!  It was a pimple on Algeria's butt as far as they see it!

You don't see the brits waxing on about Malaya do you?  And they WON that one!

A real conflict of ideas would be too hard for the avg yank to digest!  Or a strain on the TV stations.

Of course, either way the Bushies would be lost.  But they can keep it closer this way until their vets actually think for a second and realize a guy who went and came to see it as a waste is more representative of them than a guy who spent his war dorking their wives at home and partying.  But thinking is not an american virtue- we tend to distrust it and prefer just doing or being.  I hold out hope that these holier than thou guys will cogitate for once in their lives, but I done bin let down every time.

Mencken may have been an anti-semitic fuckhead, but he pegged the American people as dim and he was right on.