My local bait store closed down also. Not because of economics, but the owner was in and out of the hospital due to poor health, and couldn't handle it any more. Thats why I had to turn to the pet shop to get my wax worms and grubs. I now have to get my shinner minnows at bait stores near Lake Erie and bring them home and freeze them for ice fishing use. I posted previously that I tried feeder goldfish but I was desperate at the time. I don't do that any more.
I , like a lot of people, am stuck in the job loop also. I work for a company that operates similar to wal mart.
I am in lower management. I do a great job, according to them, and they offered me a promotion. I asked all the basic questions and finally asked about the wage. The terminal managers response was, "I figured that you could do it for the same pay your making now". I was a little stunned, but not too much, as I am very familiar with their track record. I responded by saying, "You want me to take on double the responsibility, double the aggravation and stress, for the same pay as I'm making now? Your out of your mind!" I could get away with this as I know the terminal manager pretty well and I know that the decision came higher up on the ladder, and I told him so.
Not only does management at this company get paid less then half of the union employees, we had our health insurance raised three times. I now pay double the insurance cost of the union people because the contract has them locked in at the old rate. I say, good for them. I wish management could have a union, but its not helping me in the least. It actually hurt me because within two weeks of the final negotiations of the current contract, more money started coming out of my pocket. Management used to get bonuses for doing a good job. Thats gone too. I will get out of there when something better comes along but for now I will just have to deal with it.
Now to the wal mart thing. I, like so many others, are stuck in the wal mart loop. So I have to save every penny I can, and unfortunately, that means I have to shop at places like wal mart(notice how I use lower case letters every time because thats how I feel about it). Everybody's standard of living
is dropping to the socialist level because of the free trade agreement. Even though it was signed into law by bill clinton, george bush(again lower case letters for both) is trying to make it worse as in the following article.
This is from the Public Citizen:......
www.citizen.org/trade/nafta/NAFTA promoters - including many of the world's largest corporations - promised it would create hundreds of thousands of new high-wage U.S. jobs, raise living standards in the U.S., Mexico and Canada, improve environmental conditions and transform Mexico from a poor developing country into a booming new market for U.S. exports.
Why such divergent views? NAFTA was a radical experiment - never before had a merger of three nations with such radically different levels of development been attempted. Plus, until NAFTA, “trade” agreements only dealt with cutting tariffs and lifting quotas to set the terms of trade in goods between countries. But NAFTA contained 900 pages of one-size-fits-all rules to which each nation was required to conform all of its domestic laws - regardless of whether voters and their democratically-elected representatives had previously rejected the very same policies in Congress, state legislatures or city councils.
NAFTA requires limits on the safety and inspection of meat sold in our grocery stores; new patent rules that raised medicine prices; constraints on your local government’s ability to zone against sprawl or toxic industries; and elimination of preferences for spending your tax dollars on U.S.-made products or locally-grown food. In fact, calling NAFTA a “trade” agreement is misleading, NAFTA is really an investment agreement. Its core provisions grant foreign investors a remarkable set of new rights and privileges that promote relocation abroad of factories and jobs and the privatization and deregulation of essential services, such as water, energy and health care.
Remarkably, many of NAFTA’s most passionate boosters in Congress and among economists never read the agreement. They made their pie-in-the-sky promises of NAFTA benefits based on trade theory and ideological prejudice for anything with the term “free trade” attached to it.
Now, over a decade later, the time for conjecture and promises is over: the data are in and they clearly show the damage NAFTA has wrought for millions of people in the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Thankfully, the failed NAFTA model - a watered down version of which is also contained in the World Trade Organization (WTO) - is merely one among many options.
Throughout the world, people suffering with the consequences of this disastrous experiment are organizing to demand the better world we know is possible - but we face a race against time. The same interests who got us into NAFTA are pushing to expand it to include 31 more countries in Central and South America through the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). In 2005, Congress voted to extend NAFTA to five Central American countries through the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and the Bush administration is now looking to add Peru and Colombia to the list as well.
