Factcheck.org takes on this doc in an email today:

Summary

A 28-minute political documentary released this week by a pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC presents a one-sided, often distorted and misleading view of Mitt Romney's years leading the venture capital firm Bain Capital.

Interspersed with appropriately eerie music, the video focuses on four Bain-financed companies and features heart-wrenching interviews with people who portray Romney and Bain as ruthless, quick-buck corporate raiders who reaped huge financial rewards at the expense of faithful employees.

But a closer look at the companies highlighted in the video reveals a murkier picture. The video often overstates, or outright distorts, Romney's culpability for job losses or bankruptcies.

*The film talks about layoffs at DDi Corp. and discusses questionable manipulation of stock prices after the circuit board company went public. But Romney had left Bain Capital a year before any layoffs and a public stock offering that ultimately netted Bain and Romney a big payday. The company's subsequent bankruptcy filing came two years after Bain had largely divested from the company, and was the result of the dot-com bust. Moreover, the company emerged from bankruptcy, and its current CEO credits those early Bain investments for setting the foundation for the company's current success.

*The film claims Romney was involved in the acquisition, management and demise of the now-defunct KB Toys. He wasn't. Bain bought the toy company nearly two years after Romney left Bain.

*Likewise, the closing of UniMac's plant in Marianna, Fla., occurred seven years after Romney left Bain and nearly two years after Bain sold UniMac's parent company to another private equity house.

More broadly, the video presents a myopic view of Bain Capital, cherry-picking some of the worst Bain outcomes to portray Bain in the worst possible light. Romney's record at Bain Capital also includes some success stories (see Staples and Sports Authority, to name a few) at companies that added new jobs.

Although factcheck.org just issued a debunking email today:

Summary

A 28-minute political documentary released this week by a pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC presents a one-sided, often distorted and misleading view of Mitt Romney's years leading the venture capital firm Bain Capital.

Interspersed with appropriately eerie music, the video focuses on four Bain-financed companies and features heart-wrenching interviews with people who portray Romney and Bain as ruthless, quick-buck corporate raiders who reaped huge financial rewards at the expense of faithful employees.

But a closer look at the companies highlighted in the video reveals a murkier picture. The video often overstates, or outright distorts, Romney's culpability for job losses or bankruptcies.

*The film talks about layoffs at DDi Corp. and discusses questionable manipulation of stock prices after the circuit board company went public. But Romney had left Bain Capital a year before any layoffs and a public stock offering that ultimately netted Bain and Romney a big payday. The company's subsequent bankruptcy filing came two years after Bain had largely divested from the company, and was the result of the dot-com bust. Moreover, the company emerged from bankruptcy, and its current CEO credits those early Bain investments for setting the foundation for the company's current success.

*The film claims Romney was involved in the acquisition, management and demise of the now-defunct KB Toys. He wasn't. Bain bought the toy company nearly two years after Romney left Bain.

*Likewise, the closing of UniMac's plant in Marianna, Fla., occurred seven years after Romney left Bain and nearly two years after Bain sold UniMac's parent company to another private equity house.

More broadly, the video presents a myopic view of Bain Capital, cherry-picking some of the worst Bain outcomes to portray Bain in the worst possible light. Romney's record at Bain Capital also includes some success stories (see Staples and Sports Authority, to name a few) at companies that added new jobs.

I really find it hard to agree with someone who argues that because it was made available you should not be upset when someone takes from it and wastes it.

I mean we're talking a lot of money here, and they turned around and paid out bonuses and went on vacations with that money. Never mind they pay it back without interest, they used the profits gained from that money to benefit themselves. And now turn around and say they need more cash to "create jobs".......what's stopping them from using bonuses and corporate vacation costs to create those jobs? A million dollar bonus would certainly cover hiring extra employees for a number of years.

What they are saying is, it's OK to borrow money, intentionally wasting it on non-recovery related expenses because it was offered. This is like going up to any take a penny leave a penny, free candy at the doctor's office, sample tray at the supermarket.....taking it all and being surprised when people are pissed off at you because hey it said have some. And this is maybe 5 bucks worth of cost at most in any circumstance. These people took billions, frivolously spent millions that has been noticed and who knows what they did with the rest of it. Then turn around and complain about tax rates and how they need more money...and try to use job creation as the excuse.

There's just no defense for that. Especially when you realize many of their lower tier employees are lucky if they are ALLOWED to take their vacation days, use their sick days, or generally use benefits allotted to them as part of their employment package. Perhaps discouraged to use their vacation days except for certain windows or threatened with job loss if they use bereavement days. It's OK if they take your tax dollars to go on vacation and get paid, but it's bad if you try to use the benefits you should have every right to use that the companies provide as part of the employment agreement. You shouldn't use what you are entitled to, but they can use what they are offered...to excess and then blame you for it.

They shouldn't just let these organizations fail, they should dismantle them whether by breaking them up or dissolving their corporate charter. Teach the rest of the pack a lesson in humility, you exist at the will and sufferance of the citizenship not to exploit them.

Around 50-52 minute mark you can predict what would happen during the crash. Bankruptcy due to job loss, health problems, or family problems (death/whatever). A lot of people lost their jobs, we've seen the long discussions about outrageously expensive insurance and health care costs, etc.

What I took away from it is that it's not possible to middle class in the US and stay out of debt unless nothing goes wrong. Versus in the past a similar middle class family could survive job loss, health problems, and deaths in the family financially because while they made less, fixed costs were lower and they had more flexibility to cut back and still meet their fixed cost demands.

She also made the point that more families with children will go through bankruptcy than will get divorced, but that they could hide it successfully with excuses of moving into a parent's house due to parent's failing health or moving out of the area for job opportunities elsewhere, etc. So the likelihood if you knowing someone who has went through bankruptcy seems pretty high considering how many divorces you see on a yearly basis.

I'm glad it's closing.

You have to remember the kind of "journalism" this paper printed. Like the one with the woman with the extremely large breasts which she felt may have seriously injured someone else. In fact breasts, celebs and football were basically it's staple currencies. Job losses are always sad but we're not losing anything here. This was not a great paper. It was a reservoir of scummy journalistic practices. The current editor claims he ran a clean paper which is laughable.

Like many tabloids it practiced the "dark arts" with which they bent and broke the law to get stories. The Sun will replace it no doubt and I can only hope it won't be as bad. Murdoch claims the paper is "toxic" though it's been like that for many years. Hell you could claim The Sun is still toxic for their Hillsborough coverage.

This is a huge story and isn't being covered enough because Murdock owns a third of the press in this country. David Cameron is a scumbag for seeing no problem in hanging out with Brooks and attending NI's Eyes Wide Shut party. And he's still defending Coulson. Amazing. When you throw in the bent coppers this could be the most disturbing set of institutional corruption scandals we've seen since, oh, MPs expenses. As some one on twitter said, this is playing out like The Wire.

>> ^quantumushroom:

You know even those numbers are lies, NR. For chrissakes, the liars switched from "jobs created" to "lives touched" late last year.

Hey, you're the one that put that article forward, not me.

I think it's impossible to actually track specific jobs created by the stimulus. You can make estimates based on theory, but that's not really evidence, either for or against.

What's a bit easier to measure is the overall employment trend. You'll love that these are Nancy Pelosi's charts, but they're based on BLS statistics (what the whole economic world uses as the source for data on employment, BTW).

Here's the chart of the recession through to May's jobs report (June's report will probably come out this week). The stimulus bill was passed in February of 2009. The trend changed immediately, with the job losses slowing, and then turning into gains.

>> ^quantumushroom:
Government jobs are not real jobs as they do not reflect market needs.

That's my point, the stimulus wasn't about creating "government" jobs, it was an attempt to reverse the unemployment trend in the private sector. Right now the biggest drag on the jobs reports coming out is job losses in the public sector.

Here's a chart showing the last year in the ongoing march of Obama's supposed socialist revival. Private sector jobs up, public sector jobs down.

>> ^quantumushroom:
Here's a RADICAL idea: let people keep more of their own money, across the board.

I know it was another thread, but that idea's been tried. Hell, it's still being done to a greater degree than it's been done since well before I was born. That idea has clearly and unambiguously been tried, and has utterly failed to produce anything like what Republicans from Reagan forward have claimed it would.

>> ^quantumushroom:
And lay off Herb Hoover, moonbats, he was an unwilling or ignorant ally of yours.
wiki:
<long quote about things FDR said on the campaign trail>

A couple paragraphs above that, you find a description of Hoover's actual policies:

Calls for greater government assistance increased as the U.S. economy continued to decline. Hoover rejected direct federal relief payments to individuals, as he believed that a dole would be addictive, and reduce the incentive to work. He was also a firm believer in balanced budgets, and was unwilling to run a budget deficit to fund welfare programs.[45] However, Hoover did pursue many policies in an attempt to pull the country out of depression. In 1929, Hoover authorized the Mexican Repatriation program to combat rampant unemployment, reduce the burden on municipal aid services, and remove people seen as usurpers of American jobs. The program was largely a forced migration of approximately 500,000 Mexicans and Mexican Americans to Mexico, and continued until 1937. In June 1930, over the objection of many economists, Congress approved and Hoover signed into law the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. The legislation raised tariffs on thousands of imported items. The intent of the Act was to encourage the purchase of American-made products by increasing the cost of imported goods, while raising revenue for the federal government and protecting farmers. However, economic depression now spread through much of the world, and other nations increased tariffs on American-made goods in retaliation, reducing international trade, and worsening the Depression.[46]

In 1931, Hoover issued the Hoover Moratorium, calling for a one-year halt in reparation payments by Germany to France and in the payment of Allied war debts to the United States. The plan was met with much opposition, especially from France, who saw significant losses to Germany during World War I. The Moratorium did little to ease economic declines. As the moratorium neared its expiration the following year, an attempt to find a permanent solution was made at the Lausanne Conference of 1932. A working compromise was never established, and by the start of World War II, reparations payments had stopped completely.[47][48] Hoover in 1931 urged the major banks in the country to form a consortium known as the National Credit Corporation (NCC).[49] The NCC was an example of Hoover's belief in volunteerism as a mechanism in aiding the economy. Hoover encouraged NCC member banks to provide loans to smaller banks to prevent them from collapsing. The banks within the NCC were often reluctant to provide loans, usually requiring banks to provide their largest assets as collateral. It quickly became apparent that the NCC would be incapable of fixing the problems it was designed to solve, and it was replaced by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

That all sounds very familiar to me as modern-day Republican policy proposals -- eschew direct assistance to the unemployed, try to boost employment by deporting Mexicans, attempt to defer interest payments on foreign debts, and ask banks to put in place their own policies to fix their own shortcomings rather than resort to regulation, and stick to preserving the gold standard at all costs. The only thing out of place is tariffs, but I've seen those mentioned from the conservative rank and file in discussions about what our response to China's ascendance should be.

In the election year of 1932, with unemployment at 25% and with people throwing things at his motorcade everywhere he went, he did start engaging in a little attempt at mortgage loan stabilization and fiscal stimulus, and they did seem to make a positive impact, but were too little too late, but they weren't policies that were the centerpiece of his administration, they were things he tried to do out of desperation.

It's also quite true that FDR in 1932 ran on a platform that included promises to balance the budget, but that's because it'd been the Democratic that had always been scolds on that topic up to that point. Besides, FDR was no student of Keynes; General Theory wasn't even published until 1936. I don't really know where the ideas for FDR's New Deal came from. I'm guessing just simple populism, and maybe some Keynesian influence amongst his economic advisers.

Love Mr. Reich.
I totally agree w/ this explanation, but why doesn't he mention predatory capital and job losses? Why does he stop at "wages" and "taxes". I guess he's not ready to condemn neoliberal/globalism for what it actually does to workers.

What's wrong with this guy? Doesn't he know that what you do is you send a memo threating if Obama wins you'll have to fire over 300 people, then fire 388 people, buy yourself a private jet and yet another mansion, then send another memo blaming those job losses on Strickland (Democrat former Governor of Ohio), then send another memo implying that the cost of health care insurance went up 22% because of Obama but you managed to hold it at only 6%.

I'd agree with this, if BP were making it possible. They were withholding the numbers, giving lowball estimates of how much oil was pumping out of the break. They began dumping chemicals into the oil to disperse it to the bottom of the ocean, but that just made the problem worse. When they were told to stop, they continued, and as far as I know they are still dumping chemicals into the water today. These are the same chemicals used in the Exxon spill where workers got sick, and there has never been much looking into it because back them Exxon withheld the information on the chemicals used in making these concoctions. So, now BP is using the same or similar mix of chemicals with no idea how if they were the very thing that caused all those workers to get "the crud" and all the cancers that came about from exposure 10 years down the line.

As said before BP is withholding respirators from clean up workers, even though by accounts they have enough to outfit nearly everyone provided by aid agencies (but controlled by BP). They are letting people go out into these environments where the EPA is saying the level of chemicals in the air alone is dangerous, and people are already beginning to show signs of health impact from being out on the water running boats and ships without the proper gear that BP holds distribution control over.

The crops in the area are beginning to develop spots and wilt from the chemicals raining down on them. There is no official statement on this yet from BP or the government. I have seen no information on how you could even volunteer to help down there, or how you could apply to be compensated for expenses to bring machinery or operators down to run machinery to help in the clean up. It's been 2 months, there are hundreds if not thousands of miles of beach that need to be cleaned up. There miles and miles of ocean to clean up. There is just no possible way they have the man power, machinery needed, and organization needed to make any of this happen without an open exchange of information.

I think the general thinking here is that once they cap the well, or at least stop the spillage via relief well...that the trouble will be over. At least in the eyes of government and BP. But that will just be the beginning of the shit storm they have unleashed and because they delayed information and didn't prepare for something like this to happen or for it to continue happening....we can not reasonably clean it up now. The oil itself will be coming back to haunt us for decades, and the chemicals they dumped into it? Who knows, the scientists who could possibly look into it are employed by BP because BP won't release the information to others. And BP has demonstrated a complete lack of being able to deal with this situation, if this is the best they have to offer. A situation where volunteers are ALREADY becoming sick, crops are sick, and the clean up technologies are not installed, maintained, or monitored properly.

I wish I could remember the video off the top of my head but there was a Rachel Maddows video where she said the oil companies said they could deal with a spill 2 or 3 times as big as this one easily. If this is "dealing with it"......I am not sure why BP is left in charge. Them paying 20 billion dollars and a few million a day for clean up is something they have to bear, and in any reasonable world they should have to bear all costs that the oil spill has caused. If it puts them out of business? Cautionary tale to the rest of the oil industry who make hundreds of billions in profits each year. Invest into research and bettering technology, don't operate in unsafe conditions, be prepared for problems, if you can't handle certain problems...don't tell the government you can just so you can drill.

Costner's water/oil centrifuge machine? He couldn't get oil companies or governments regulating oil companies to even take them for free on a trial basis when they had minor spills. And now that a major spill has happened, when they could have implemented them from the beginning if they had researched and tested them prior...they had to test them DURING the crisis and order more (which I doubt they ordered enough).

Relief well waiting in the wings? Other areas of the world require oil companies to do this. Perhaps they should have insisted on having relief wells to the government, perhaps the government should have made them do it. Either way, paying off your regulation body and running fast and loose with your company for high profits does not absolve you when something goes wrong.

Imagine if another well on any other coast line in the US or neighboring nations were to catastrophically fail right now, or even in 2 years. With this one fresh in the public's mind...do you think they would tolerate misinformation, delays, and mysterious chemicals being dumped into the water again? They shouldn't have to tolerate it in the first place because doing so creates a problem no one but BP can attempt to solve because no one but BP has the numbers. And no one but BP can visit the site without BPs permission, which they are not going to allow because they are intentionally withholding the information..............to keep their stock prices up.


>> ^Mcboinkens:

I am as pissed about this as anyone else, but can we stop and think for a minute? The Deep Water Horizon spill was largely caused by mechanical failure. Sure, a few people gave orders to pick up the pace. But what were they supposed to say? Slow down, everybody! We don't like being productive! Everyone's company is like that, time is money. Some of the people(even here on the Sift) want to take down BP as a whole. That would result in hundreds of thousands of job losses, all because of a few people at the company. Imagine you are at work, and someone from your same company that you don't even know screwed up something. Now your company goes under and you lose your job. You had nothing to do with it, but now you are unemployed. That would be the case for almost all of the workers at BP. Even the people directly involved could not really have done anything different, since it was such a freak accident. They set aside $20,000,000,000 for recovery and lawsuits, plus the millions of dollars each day for the actual clean-up. They screwed up, big. But now the nation has its top scientists and engineers trying to clean it up, and I hope for all of us that they find a way to clean it up.

[redacted]

For the most part, I felt the presenter should STFU. Most people who try to claim that society is out to get men are disenfranchised men looking for something to validate their feelings of inadequacy due to the perceived threat on men's priorly assumed dominance.

That said, there are interesting points in here. One is 90% of homeless people are men. I'm not sure where the statistic comes from (I haven't seen numbers that high anywhere I've looked), but in my follow up research I found the following to be rather interesting.

The abstract of this paper states that out of 227 homeless people surveyed, men cited unemployment, alcohol abuse, and jail release as the top reasons for their homelessness. Women most often cited eviction and domestic violence. Now, this to me suggests that homeless men are self-reliant people who have 1- lost their livelihood for whatever (unstated) reason, 2- ruined their ability to be self-reliant due to substance abuse, or 3- were coming from a place where their self-reliance was based on illegal activity and that illegal livelihood was taken away, along with the likelihood of their actual rehabilitation and ability to (re)enter the workforce due to prison time & a criminal record. Women, on the other hand, are positioned as being reliant on others. Being evicted from a home should not make one homeless. If a self-supported person were evicted, they would stay with a friend or relative and find a new place to stay. This is the same for domestic abuse. Often women who suffer domestic violence have no perceived alternatives. They are dependent on the abuser in one way or another, financially primarily.

Now, when reading the abstract, it felt willfully omissive, though I didn't know how. This paper's abstract elucidated what makes the other feel incomplete. Men cite job loss, discharge from an institution, mental health problems, & substance abuse most often as causes for their homelessness. This is the same as the first paper + mental health issues. Women were more likely to cite eviction, interpersonal conflict, and "someone no longer able or willing to help". This really drove home the pattern that was not so overt but nonetheless emergent in the former paper: women who end up homeless have been under the care of another and that care has, for one reason or another, been removed.

I think this illustrates the societal trend that people are just less likely and less willing to help men in need. I'll grant you that men in need are less likely to ask for help, but I believe we enter a chicken/egg situation there. Men are less likely to ask for help because of the societal presumption that they ought not to need help. This is an example of institutionalized misandry.

I probably should leave this thread well enough alone, but I'm a glutton for punishment.

@Winstonfield_Pennypacker, you need to do better research when it comes to finding data to support your argument. For one, your quotes of Obama would not accurately be paraphrased as "All economists agree with me", they would be paraphrased as "No credible economist would agree with what you just said", with the "what you just said" conveniently left out of the quote.

Also, both quotes were part of a dialogue about health care, and you keep citing articles about the stimulus, plus a single article about what the CBO said about an exceptionally early draft of HCR from last summer.

Now, a statement that I couldn't really contest, would be this quote, from this article you linked:

During a time of controversy, the best way to win over public opinion is to convince the public that there is no controversy. Sometimes, when an issue is too complicated for the general public to make an informed decision on their own, they rely on the opinions of experts, and politicians stop debating the points of the issue, and start debating the consensus. That’s a consensus war. It’s happening with the global warming issue, and it’s happening with the economy.

Totally true, and accurately calls out a tactic Obama is really practicing, without engaging in strawmen and false quotes.

He's very good at it though, and it's part of why I think he's so good at the political game -- if you take any of his quotes in their proper context, they're all fastidiously accurate, though they're usually legalistically narrow, while sounding tremendously broad. For example: "Those job losses took place before any stimulus ... You could not find an economist who would dispute that" sounds like "All economists agree with me", but that isn't what he actually said.

Even the boys at Cato, who the article was about, made this mistake:

Recently, Obama attempted to shut down the controversy surrounding his so-called “stimulus” package by saying “there is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jumpstart the economy.”

They then cite 300 economists who "disagree" with this statement by Obama, and sign a letter that asks Obama to take action by our government, namely:

To improve the economy, policy makers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.

Which is to say, they agree, action by the government to jumpstart the economy was needed, it's just that the fiscal policy they wanted was deficit-funded tax cuts instead of deficit-funded spending.

Granted, I think the people at Cato knew exactly what they were doing. They were intentionally misconstruing the quote to mean something it doesn't, to try to stir up a big fuss about people disagreeing with Obama over what government action they want, and then pass it off as evidence that Obama lied. All because they don't want to admit that Obama's right -- the debate wasn't whether government should take action, but how government should take action. That's relevant to the politics because Republicans were already talking up their general opposition to any stimulus at that point, which went contrary to the consensus among mainstream economists that some sort of stimulus was necessary.

Oh, and because Democrats ultimately won that legislative battle, part of what got done was that people's taxes got cut, making them lower than they've been since the 60's.

First, you're not actually challenging the facts of what Obama said in this clip. Second, you're going to have to cite your "quote", since I bet you're overstating what he said.

You are hard pressed to find a speech where Obama DOESN’T pull this rhetorical stunt. But specifically, the example I was thinking was at the Republican retreat in January. I mis-remembered it being about health care, when it was about job creation & stimulus spending. There was some other health care event where he did the same thing, but I can’t remember which one it was. I think it was the summit in March, but I’ll have to research that. Anyway, here’s an Obama-isms like what I'm talking about from the retreat…

OBAMA: “The notion that I would somehow resist doing something that cost half as much but would produce twice as many jobs -- why would I resist that? … The problem is I couldn't find credible economists who would back up the claims that you just made.”

OBAMA: “Those job losses took place before any stimulus…could have ever taken into effect. Now, that's just the fact, Mike, and I don't think anybody would dispute that. You could not find an economist who would dispute that…”

What were their names? What are their credentials? When did he talk to them? What did they say? Obama just waves rhetorical magic wands and conjures phantom armies of ‘economists’ who all agree with him when he wants to justify some stream of BS that sluices out of his piehole. Health care, foreign policy, cap & tax, NASA, you name it - he does it. Bank on it. When ANYONE challenges him - Joe the Plumber, a reporter, a politician, a climatalogist, an industry expert - whoever... Obama will pull this trick as his response and just bat them aside. Why? Because he's a childish douche who can't handle it when reasonable people disagree with his baloney.

Third, the CBO said it would reduce the deficit, and reduce the final cost to all Americans relative to the status quo.

During the whole debate process - Obama was claiming it would save money. The CBO disagreed as far back as July of 09, and through February of 2010.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/16/AR2009071602242.html?hpid=topnews
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/feb/23/plan-sweetened-for-gop-baffles-cbo/

I find it very interesting now that the bill has passed that the CBO can magically rush a favorably report in a couple weeks - even though many of the plan's details are not yet final. Good enough for places like HuffPo I guess, but they conveniently ignore a lot of the bad stuff.

http://blogs.investors.com/capitalhill/index.php/home/35-politicsinvesting/1524-five-reasons-the-cbo-figures-are-phony

Regardles, Obama’s claims were that it would cost less than 900 billion. It doesn’t. And the point was that Obama goes around bragging about how “every economist” says his plan is great. But that’s untrue. Even economists that are in his back pocket are (at best) saying HCR is kind of a wash, and it takes 20 years to accomplish it - and you can only do it by counting 10 years of taxation for 6 years of benefits. Move out of the realm of Obama administration puppets and there are TONS of 'economists' who stridently disagree with his plans.

Political game at work

I don’t really need to play the political game as I’m in a research position. I’m not trying to manage. However, I am put in a position where I supply data to business leaders, and all too often see the data ignored by “Obama” types who prefer to act on guts, instincts, and opinions – often resulting in millions of dollars in losses because they wouldn't listen to basics. It’s no skin off my nose at work, as I can shrug and move on to the next project. It's dissappointing to see bad decisions made in the headwind of facts at work. In the government it is alarming.

>> ^Psychologic:
^ I don't think anyone is seriously questioning whether humans will be required for jobs... it's more of a question of how many will be needed. With people living longer and healthier lives, many of whom are willing to stay in the workforce, the question is whether or not job creation will outpace the growth of the available workforce. I have my doubts, but I can't exactly see the future.
Technology won't completely replace manual labor, but it will slowly reduce the number of people needed for any given task. It isn't some cataclysmic event, but I think that people with limited education will find it increasingly difficult to find jobs over the next few decades.


But isn't the core of the automation argument about processes replacing our jobs? Where else did these jobs go? In many cases, software and hardware has caused a job-loss, but my observation is that many more jobs will be created to maintain automation than jobs that are taken away.

Also, I disagree that people with less education will be out of jobs. I work in a technical field that hires people with little to no education. Obviously if you want a job as a programmer, you'll need to be outside this demographic -- but take this into consideration: over half of our company is related to customer support or quality assurance, which does not require higher education. They are full time positions and there is no end in site, only growth. We also have many positions which require you to simply have the proper skillset, not a degree.

As more and more technology is introduced into the general population, people gain the necessary skills to perform these new jobs. From my vantage point (which is very much a global perspective of new trends not seen until halfway through the first decade of the twenty-first century) this appears to be the way our world is turning. The company I work for, in fact, has spawned leeches in many other countries, namely China, where jobs like the ones I assure you require no education employ entire factories of workers.

EDIT: Twenty-first century, not twentieth. Old habits die hard.

I agree with you in basic principle, but I don't think the job-loss to job-replacement is at a one-to-one ratio when true automation and computer technology comes into play. In my mind there's a U-shaped regional employment curve relative to technological growth, with technological progress over time as the independent axis and employment level the dependent. Employment starts at one level along with a given level of technology, some big progress takes place that causes employment to drop, and then over time the region will adjust its educational and business practices in order to bring the employment curve back up to near former levels. And then the process would repeat itself. Sort of a sine wave... but every period the amplitude is reduced unless external factors (mainly political) mitigate the drop-off ratio.

So in the USA manufacturing jobs are going bye-bye, as are many IT jobs, as a consequence of economic and technological change, along with the shrinking disparity in education levels between the USA and mainly BRIC countries. Most of the newly unemployed will find replacement jobs, or be trained to work in off-shoot industries or newly arised industries. But again not all of them will find re-employment before the next drop off, unless the politicians are really doing their jobs.