I could cry out the inherent racism of affirmative action til the cows come home and I know this crowd won’t hear it, so I’m not even going to go there.
What really troubles me is the idea of a nationwide infrastructure overhaul, tons of them large construction projects, without actual construction workers. In his blog, Reich clarifies his statement:
Many low-income and low-skilled workers — women as well as men — could be put directly to work providing homes and businesses with more efficient and renewable heating, lighting, cooling, and refrigeration systems; installing solar panels and efficient photovoltaic systems; rehabilitating and renovating old properties, and improving recycling systems. ……….People can be trained relatively quickly for these sorts of jobs, as well as many infrastructure jobs generated by the stimulus — installing new pipes for water and sewage systems, repairing and upgrading equipment, basic construction.
Robert Reich is just outwardly wrong on his facts. HVAC is not something you can just pick up in a few weeks. Programs usually run from 3 to 15 months, depending on what you’re learning. Also, these people would be expected to go through the normal certification process that an other HVAC personnel would be expected to. Would you want unlicensed people working in your home? The cost of paying for just the materials for this overhaul is going to be huge, let alone educating and licensing all the people executing it.
The construction projects are along the same line. Why would you want someone who is not a construction worker building a bridge? Because they are black or a woman? I understand that Reich is trying to promote an environment that gives minorities and unskilled people a job, but one has to wonder what is the cost of doing that going to be in the quality department? From the Big Dig, we know that construction projects have a way of going out of control, and if not done correctly, tunnel ceilings collapse and people die.
If Obama goes through with this project, every white, skilled construction worker better have a job before he puts an unskilled, never-been-a-construction-worker black person up on the scaffolds. I don’t want a freakin building to collapse with me in it because the president was trying to be racially inclusive. It’s not worth it.
Here’s the message I’d like Reich to get: Don’t create jobs in a field until every single eligible person who is already in that field has a job.
It’s all about velocity. How to get the money into an economy and get it moving from person to person.
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p>Q: How?
A: Get it i) quickly and ii) to the most people, iii) who will spend, not save it.
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p>Q: Who are those people?
A: Probably blue collar workers and the construction trade, who happen to be primarily guys who are white and hardest hit – in sheer numbers – in the job loss market.
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p>Reich is saying, “that’s not fair” and maybe he’s right. It’s not fair to the minorities, women, white collar, upper class, upper middle class. But if you targeted those groups, the money wouldn’t be spent so quickly. So the question is do you attempt to most efficiently create Keyian stimulus or spread the stimulus equality out of a sense of fairness.
Do you mean Keynesian?
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p>As far as the overall issue I think we are missing a huge point here that Reich is trying to make.
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p>Critical to any infrastructure project taken on a countrywide basis is to provide a self-sustaining cycle of growth. Priming the pump so to speak and if done right in theory has this effect I believe what the issue is that we need to Raise the lower class up economically and not lose sight of the fact that the divide between the haves and have nots has grown to rival the Grand Canyon. Also we cannot just talk about typical construction jobs like just roads and bridges. That was the need back in the 1940’s and 50’s when even President Eisenhower recognized the Strategic interest and the benefit of creating a system that allowed for greater expansion of urban to suburban life styles. Today we do need high tech infrastructure and we need real low-tech growth if we are going to begin to return buying power to the majority of the population. Don’t forget that not long ago President Bush and others spoke about “go Shopping” this although panned was a hint tot he fact that 80% of our economy is based on consumption, Well as we have seen with the current situation that 80% of the population is taped out and does not have the ability to pay the bills and spend enough to keep the economy going. it’s really just as simple as that, far to many of a conservative approach fail to grasp this simple dynamic. If you don’t have it you can’t spend it if you don’t spend business stops selling factories stop making and the entire economy slows and collapses in on it’s self as a spiral of self fulfilling events occur. So I don’t see this as an affirmative action approach but a practical discussion on how to spread the wealth to the likely consumers and to the majority of the 80% who have had to stop consuming because of a lack of Money.
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p>Stimulus package cannot favor one group over another and be effective. Roads and bridges need to be repaired and rebuilt and certainly much of that is in the plan but also needed is an expansion of the internet and Electric grid and retooling of simple basic manufacturing all the way down to the cleaning crews.
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p>As Usual Just my Opinions.
Some people on this site have told me NOT to use FOX as a source and find some other “reputable” sites. I searched MSNBC, ABC and CBS but couldn’t find any reference to Robert Reich saying this racial remark, nor did I hear it reported on any news channel (other than conservative talk shows). Finally I did see people talking about it on Lou Dobbs show and another show. All three Democratic pundits speaking about this dismissed it as a “silly” remark. All three used the word “silly”. What would the MSM say about something said about black people like this? I’m very sure the word “silly” would not be one of those words.
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p>The thing that bothered me beside Robert Reich’s “silly” remark, was the complete dearth of the comments from any coverage (including BMG). I realize BMG is a Democratic support site but some things transcend party. Maybe this is a great example of Chris Matthews quote about doing everything he can to make Obama successful, including omission of reporting facts/stories which may look bad for Obama. Dobbs went on to criticize MSM for not reporting on this remark by Robert Reich.
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p>Obama was elected by a lot of white people, certainly the majority of his voters/supporters were white. I believe many voted for him not only due to their economic situation, but because he was going to transcend race as an issue. You could tell Obama tried valiantly to stay away from the Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton black figures in order to appeal to whites. It was a good plan and it worked. While I didn’t vote for Obama I do not believe him to support racist comments like Robert Reich’s. But if Obama wants to keep the voters who “took a chance” on him, he better be careful. He should condemn remarks like this for starters. After that he should stick with his campaign promise of going over spending with a magnifying glass and apply that comment to the Stimulus package and cut out all the pork from the Democrats.
JoeTS: “HVAC is not something you can just pick up in a few weeks. Programs usually run from 3 to 15 months, depending on what you’re learning.”
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p>R. Reich: “…could be put directly to work providing homes and businesses with more efficient and renewable heating…”
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p>A few weeks might not be realistic for many large businesses, but it is certainly attainable for homes and small businesses. The slow part wouldn’t be the work, it’d be the overhead in how the funds got appropriated for such a program.
RE: “relatively quickly”
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p>3-15 months is relatively quick compared to training engineers, architects, nurses, CPAs, lawyers, physicians, teachers, computer programmers, lab techs, and other professions that largely require bachelor’s degrees.
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p>Furthermore, I think the grammar of the transcript is deceiving. I think, judging from your last two paragraphs, that you make it more about race than it actually is. It sounds to me like Reich is saying “I think stimulus money has to be money spent on the long-term unemployed, people who are not necessarily construction workers or high skilled professionals. Traditionally, the long-term unemployed are disproportionately minorities and women.” It stands to reason then, due to population statistics, that unemployed, non-skilled White people would probably be the largest group to benefit from something like this.
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p>So, I know Republicans aren’t big on welfare, but this seems like a reasonable way to prevent some people from being on welfare. As Reich states in his blog:
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p>If the US doesn’t increase the pool of labor skilled enough to work this green stimulus plan, there will be less hands and less competition for the proposed work – this means that the projects will materialize slower, it will cost more, and less will be accomplished. In short, more workers mean cheaper costs and more progress.
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p>Reich does say:
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p>It’s not about taking jobs and economic opportunity away from White men; it’s about growing the opportunities to include in a federally-funded stimulus plan people who aren’t fortunate enough to have access to the training to work in these fields – and as a result are chronically un/underemployed – and create careers that will provide for these people over a lifetime rather than perpetuating the trap of low-skill, low-pay jobs.
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p>The demand is there; the existing skilled White men will maintain their jobs and continue to have plenty of opportunity. But it benefits everyone to grow this specific workforce in an intelligent and equitable fashion.
Shouldn’t these workers be unionized and subject to senority rules?
But another good point is raised – Unions, which many Republicans decry, would protect against what Joe is afraid of, the placement of unqualified workers on these trade jobs.
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p>For instance, if a stimulas-package bridge was to be built in Boston, it would definitely be a union job. And Joe talks about the Big Dig tunnel collapse as evidence of faulty work in construction projects; the tunnel collapse was not the fault of the labor or union workers, but the fault of the general contractor, Modern Continental and the people who “inspected” the work, like Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff. In other words, not random unskilled laborers who were incompetent, but college-trained engineers and management who wanted to save a few bucks by intentionally doing a half-assed job and motivated by profit margin.