David Brook's spin on Obama's speech

[EVDebs]

A Speech About Nothing
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: April 15, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/opinion/15brooks.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

In this op-ed hit piece on Obama, Brooks speaks of a "mass upper class" in the US. Where is it ? It's just a small Bush elite of around 1 and a half percent of the taxpayers. He also claims Obama misses out on major points re technological change but he himself misses the point that Obama is addressing remedial measures to address the chaos those technological changes have caused.

Brooks imlies that Obama has "outsourced (his) brain to political tacticians", while Brooks himself is the mouthpiece for any conservative naivete that comes down the pike (or from the White House).

He quotes a study, "As Robert Z. Lawrence of the Peterson Institute for International Economics wrote in a recent study: “The recent increase in U.S. inequality ... has little to do with global forces that might especially affect unskilled workers — namely, immigration and expanded trade with developing countries", but doesn't mention his co-worker, David Cay Johnston's book Perfectly Legal, which shows that tax incentives certainly DO cause corporations to offshore and outsource jobs to overseas venues ! Are we to suffer this fool gladly or what ?

Furthermore, Brooks doesn't look at the government's or other journalists evidence for proof that globalization isn't such a great thing for the average US citizen:

"The Hard Truth of Immigration
By Robert J. Samuelson, Newsweek, June 6, 2005
The "huge and largely uncontrolled inflow of unskilled Latino workers into the United States is increasingly sabotaging the assimilation process" of immigrants, says Robert J. Samuelson, one of the world's leading journalists on the topic of economics.
Samuelson notes a recent study completed by Harvard economists George Borjas and Lawrence Katz which found that Mexican immigrants in particular, especially unskilled illegal immigrants, are largely relegated to low-wage, dead-end jobs. The study also found that the children of Mexican immigrants do not advance either in levels of education or in the job market.
Samuelson also notes that the Pew Hispanic Center found that inflation-adjusted weekly earnings for all Hispanics, both foreign and American-born, has actually dropped by over 2 percent for the last two consecutive years.
Samuelson writes: "For today's Mexican immigrants (legal or illegal), the closest competitors are tomorrow's Mexican immigrants (legal or illegal). The more who arrive, the harder it will be for existing low-skilled workers to advance." posted at

http://usinfo.state.gov/eap/east_asia_pacific/chinese_human_smuggling/smuggling_in_the_press/labor.html

If you haven't swallowed the NYTime's bs about Thomas Friedman and globalization, you certainly will like to see what Milton Friedman has done since the '50s mostly in a covert fashion as Naomi Klein's book Shock Doctrine , on disaster capitalism, shows us. The two Friedmans have done more damage than they can fathom !

Brooks somehow makes spilling ink easy but as for making sense of anything HIS work is more NOTHINGNESS, and certainly more meaningless, than Obama's. No, Obama's speech was a speech about The Great Awakening, as Jim Wallis puts it, especially the book's subtitle, Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America. We can only hope that Brooks has his head examined soon.

[Cant trust em]

1. This article offered no counter point

If Obama didn't talk about the important things that are hurting the manufacturing sector, then what is the solution, Dave? The article criticizes Obama for apparently missing the salient detail of what he mentions in the opening of the article, but offers no solution to any problems. We all know that it's not just technological change that has created the exodus of manufacturing jobs. Brooks is kidding himself if he believes that trade deals like NAFTA and CAFTA have been good for blue collar wage earners.