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  1. #1
    Thailand Expat harrybarracuda's Avatar
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    America's "Beached White Male"

    It would seem the American male is becoming obsolete.

    America's stubborn economic woes have a new face: the BWM, for Beached White Male. He is the washed-up man who once drove the BMW. Named by Newsweek magazine, he is a college educated middle to upper-middle class professional or corporate suit who has lost his job at the age of 45 or above.

    There are millions of them, and they will never work again, marching off to the dole queue in the footsteps of their blue collar cousins, their jobs no longer needed.

    The terror begins with a slew of facts and figures. Three-quarters of the eight million white-collar jobs lost since the 2007 crash have belonged to men.

    The BWM gets the 'pink slip' while his wife stays on. The Bureau of Labour Statistics counted that 51 per cent of managerial and professional jobs are now held by women, up from 26.1 per cent in 1980; women comprise 54 per cent of all accountants, 45 per cent of lawyers, and 33 per cent of doctors. They fill 50 per cent of banking and insurance jobs.

    Nearly 20 per cent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 no longer have full-time jobs. There are 185 women graduates to every 100 men, so they are better qualified among the young of either gender to replace, cheaply, the expensive BWM.

    The New York Times noted under the headline 'Easing Out the Gray' that in a "lean and mean" executive market, the 45 and ups are "the first to go". The Economic Policy Institute says 'suits' are doing worse that at any time since the Great Depression. The Fiscal Policy Institute reports that men "in the kill zone" have lost jobs faster than any other group including teenage girls.

    The figures go on and on. But it is the effect that is sinking in.

    Last week the Washington Post/ABC poll showing that President Obama had lost the bounce he gained from the killing of Osama bin Laden within days, amid a slew of bad economic numbers, from falling house prices to rising unemployment.

    But the poll also recorded 61 per cent believing the country to be on the "wrong track". A majority of Americans, born to optimism, now record "pessimism" for the future. A pollster on a television news show declared this to be "the end of the American Dream".

    The first American awaking from the dream is the BWM. It is not just his own plight: his way of life was the goal of the factory hands and immigrants diligently working their way up the ladder.

    He is a sad sack. When all this began, he walked out of the office with his chest puffed out, his BlackBerry in hand, updating his resume and heeding the headhunters' advice to send out at least 100 job applications a week. The e-mails went unanswered. A few months later, he is dipping into dwindling savings for "recruiting seminars". Then it's job fairs and new business cards reading "consultant". Then it's the "support groups", where BWMs "network", and console each other.

    At home, the wife tries to be understanding, and the BWM spends time helping out with the kids and stretching the budget by mowing his own lawn. A poll found 45 per cent saying they lost interest in sex because they were failing to live up their own idea of manhood.

    Brian Goodall, 52, a gold medal Olympic swimmer in the 1976 Olympics, lost his job in commercial property in 2008, and has not found work since. He told Newsweek that he is now too ashamed to go the beach with his teenage son while his wife works extra to meet the mortgage.

    The divorce rate is rising. Social Security - the state pension - reports a rush of early applicants. And the latest? Suicides.

    Unemployment is devastating to these men, warns Dr Jed Diamond, author of Surviving Male Menopause. "The extreme reaction is suicide," he says. "But before you get there, there's irritability and anger, fatigue, loss of energy, withdrawal, drinking, more fights with their wives."

    You can be sure that both President Obama and his Republican rivals are paying close attention to the polls. There won't be much of a future for politicians who preside over the end of the American Dream.

    And the poor old BWMs had better pay close attention to those wives. These are questions raised just this weekend in the New York Times: How might these changes affect decisions to marry? Should women alter their expectations of what a husband brings to a marriage? That's a biggie.

    Read more: The beached white male: an American nightmare | News & Politics | News & Comment | The First Post

  2. #2
    Molecular Mixup
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    When it was blue collar workers, of whatever race , losing thier jobs many white collar workers would shrug thier shoulders and say its globalisation and therefore inevitable .

  3. #3
    Thailand Expat harrybarracuda's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by blue View Post
    When it was blue collar workers, of whatever race , losing thier jobs many white collar workers would shrug thier shoulders and say its globalisation and therefore inevitable .
    I don't call it globalisation when they are losing their jobs to women.


  4. #4
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    Haha

    Some always find a way to say women are to blame

  5. #5
    Days Work Done! Norton's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Peta
    Some always find a way to say women are to blame
    Not to blame. Maybe just better employees.

  6. #6
    CCBW Stumpy's Avatar
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    Awesome link HarryB.

    Ahhhhh man is this all hard reality. Very general in deed but deeply true. Once an executive at a large company in Silicon valley I watched as my colleagues slowly went under. Late Late 90's I gathered a glimpse of the future that US manufacturing was going to change. Gross Margin was the imperative. As most poorly ran companies do, they lay off middle and upper management. These execs do this to protect their jobs. Its called the GOBC (Good Ol Boys club). I watched hundreds of my colleagues start to disappear. I watched them not able to find jobs as they had driven themselves so deeply into the American debt dream they required a solid 6 figure position to sustain their personal little empires. Rather then learning to live with less they priced themselves right out of the market. Seeing this I decided time to aggressively save and liquidate debt. Stop with the big houses, fancy cars, fancy dinners, always picking up the tab at dinner to try and impress and importantly high ticket purchases. I wanted to be in a position that I could damn near live on UI benefits just in case I was part of the proverbial "Global Realignment" that was sweeping the US business world.

    Well I, along with a handful of colleagues, avoided all the restructuring/cost reduction imperatives and actually thrived and performed well enough to remain off the statististic board late into the 2000's. Fast forward to now and I decided to retire early on my terms and relax.

    The big picture here for the men in the age range reported in the US is to learn to live with less. Stop the compulsive buying of crap to impress your neighbors. The 35" Plasma TV is fine, you do not need a 50" nor do you need a TV in each room. The car you have is just fine, you do not need another. The house you are in is probably perfect, no need to buy the million dollar deal.

    It is sad to watch people build a world of material belongings only to lose them when the bottom falls out. Boats, cars, motorhomes, second -third homes. I can see why suicide is on the rise. They lost their toys. Their fragile ego's slowly being crushed. The neighbors pretending like they care all the while laughing at the demise in the privacy of their own home while they watch them pack up the moving van. Those "Friends" in the circles you associated with are all gone. You are seen as a loser. But Hey, wait. Facebook and Linkedin will save you....

    Tough indeed.

    The bigger question is, Has the generation coming up behind learned anything? My answer is NOPE..... Why, Because they think it will never happen to them....

  7. #7
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    Quote Originally Posted by harrybarracuda
    I don't call it globalisation when they are losing their jobs to women
    What do you call it, Harry?


  8. #8
    Thailand Expat harrybarracuda's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by BaitongBoy View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by harrybarracuda
    I don't call it globalisation when they are losing their jobs to women
    What do you call it, Harry?

    Good question. Based on this:

    There are 185 women graduates to every 100 men
    Work ethic? (a.k.a value to the employer).

  9. #9
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    Quote Originally Posted by Norton View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Peta
    Some always find a way to say women are to blame
    Not to blame. Maybe just better employees.
    Indeed. If Asia is a mirror for the global workforce, then surely we're living under subliminal matriarchies.

  10. #10
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    Absolute crap.

    English journalists love the American gloom and doom stuff. I think their readership must really love to soak it up too. Don't they have anything more interesting to write about? How come other countries don't seem fixated on this?

    Is the American, male, white collar worker a dying breed, or is the American, female, white collar worker an ever increasing breed? If all you look at is percentages, how can you tell? I like how they throw in a few examples like that proves everyone is like that. This article read like fiction through most of it.

    Oh well...I'm American, 47 years old, white collar, and the past few years have been some of my best. I have a lot of friends doing good as well. Wow...and most of them are men...who would have thought...I guess, not the English.

  11. #11
    Thailand Expat harrybarracuda's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by tuktukdriver View Post
    Absolute crap.

    English journalists love the American gloom and doom stuff. I think their readership must really love to soak it up too. Don't they have anything more interesting to write about? How come other countries don't seem fixated on this?

    Is the American, male, white collar worker a dying breed, or is the American, female, white collar worker an ever increasing breed? If all you look at is percentages, how can you tell? I like how they throw in a few examples like that proves everyone is like that. This article read like fiction through most of it.

    Oh well...I'm American, 47 years old, white collar, and the past few years have been some of my best. I have a lot of friends doing good as well. Wow...and most of them are men...who would have thought...I guess, not the English.
    Did you actually read the article? Or did the title upset you?

    The expression "BWM" was coined by Newsweek, and referenced by the New York Post.

    Dead Suit Walking
    If this isn't the Great Depression, it is the Great Humbling. Can manhood survive the lost decade?

    Fredrik Broden for Newsweek

    Brian Goodell, of Mission Viejo, Calif., won two gold medals in the 1976 Olympics. An all-American, God-fearing golden boy, he segued into a comfortable career in commercial real estate. Until 2008, when he was laid off. As a 17-year-old swimmer, he set two world records. As a 52-year-old job hunter, he’s drowning.

    Brock Johnson, of Philadelphia, was groomed at Harvard Business School and McKinsey & Co., and was so sure of his marketability that he resigned in 2009 as CEO of a Fortune 500 company without a new job in hand. Johnson, who asked that his real name not be used, was certain his BlackBerry would be buzzing off its holster with better offers. At 48, he’s still unemployed.

    Two coasts. Two men who can’t find jobs. And one defining moment for the men in the gray flannel suits who used to run this country. Or at least manage it.

    Capitalism has always been cruel to its castoffs, but those blessed with a college degree and blue-chip résumé have traditionally escaped the worst of it. In recessions past, they’ve kept their jobs or found new ones as easily as they might hail a cab or board the 5:15 to White Plains. But not this time.

    The suits are “doing worse than they have at any time since the Great Depression,” says Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute. And while economists don’t have fine-grain data on the number of these men who are jobless—many, being men, would rather not admit to it—by all indications this hitherto privileged demo isn’t just on its knees, it’s flat on its face. Maybe permanently. Once college-educated workers hit 45, notes a post on the professional-finance blog Calculated Risk, “if they lose their job, they are toast.”

    The same guys who once drove BMWs, in other words, have now been downsized to BWMs: Beached White Males.

    Through the first quarter of 2011, nearly 600,000 college-educated white men ages 35 to 64 were unemployed, according to previously unpublished Labor Department stats. That’s more than 5 percent jobless—double the group’s pre-recession rate. That might not sound bad compared with the plight of younger, less-educated workers and minorities, but it’s a historic change from the last recession, when about half as many lost their oxford shirts. The number of college-educated men unemployed for at least a year is five times higher today than after the dotcom bubble. In New York City, men in the 35-to-54 kill zone have lost jobs faster than any other group, including teenage girls, according to new data from the Fiscal Policy Institute.

    As if middle age isn’t bad enough. The moribund metabolism. The purple pill that keeps your food down. The blue pill that keeps another part of your anatomy up. Now you can’t get an effing job? Stuck in your own personal Detroit of the soul, with the grinding stress of enforced idleness. The wife who doesn’t look at you quite the same way. The poignantly forgiving sons. The stain on your masculinity for becoming the bread-loser. The night sweats and dark refuge of Internet porn. The gnawing fear that this may be the beginning of a slow, shaming crawl to early Social Security.

    There’s been little research on the psychic toll of the Mancession. But this month NEWSWEEK conducted an exclusive poll of 250 unemployed (and underemployed) men ages 41 to 59. Most of them are married, white, middle-class, and looking for work. The results (see chart) provide a rare window into the BWM and a characteristically male contradiction between feelings and action. As in: I’m never going to get a job as good as my old one, but I refuse to sell the house! Or: I’m depressed, I can’t sleep, my sex drive is shot, and my wife now has to support the family, but I don’t need marriage counseling! I’ll just give Mommy a back rub, do some housework, and we’ll be fine!

    It might be tempting to snark at these former fat cats suffering lean times. But when Beached White Males suffer, so do their wives and children. Lives, marriages, and futures are at stake. Examining who these guys are, and what washed them up, is not an exercise in schadenfreude. It’s a cautionary tale. To quote Arthur Miller on the most famous Beached White Male, “Attention must be paid.”

    Consider Brock Johnson, the executive who walked away from a Fortune 500 company two years ago and hasn’t found a job since. On a rainy Friday over lunch near his six-bedroom home, Johnson says his wife and five kids are wondering, “How much money do we really have? How long can we stay in this house?” He sends out 40 emails a day in search of the job that will put him back on top.
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    This wasn’t supposed to happen. At Harvard, friends joked that Johnson had “the CEO look.” At 6 feet 4, with a full head of close-cropped hair, he not only looks but talks like Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy character from 30 Rock. His résumé lists his strength as “transformational change management.” On his LinkedIn page he describes himself as a CEO, as though it’s an immutable characteristic, like his lake-blue eyes.

    At first, he felt as if he was on vacation, but moved quickly into disbelief and despair. The family dynamic started to fray. “What was he thinking?” his preteen daughter asked her mom one night. “In this economy?” Every couple of weeks his middle-school son comes into Johnson’s home office to check on him. “Dad?” he begins. “Have you found any jobs you might like?”

    “It’s humbling,” Johnson says. He started going to networking events, which only brought him lower. “A bunch of people get together, hang out, trade contacts. For me it’s kind of depressing … I’m not trying to be arrogant, but I have better contacts than most people.” At this thought, his cheeks redden. When he was employed, he didn’t do much to help those who weren’t. “I’m embarrassed to admit that.” He vows he’ll treat people differently now. He looks away.

    The corporate warrior has begun to cry.

    In California, Brian Goodell tells a similar tale of entitlement denied. The Olympic medalist is the kind of Wheaties-box hero whom corporations used to hire just to put on the golf course with clients. Those days are over. “I was one of the most recent hires, so it didn’t surprise me I was laid off, especially since we’d already experienced a round of layoffs. But I was surprised no one was hiring. I’ve always been able to find something within a few months. The negative thoughts,” he says, “can overwhelm you.”

    Goodell, who is married to a successful real-estate agent in their Orange County suburb, says his joblessness has added “a lot of stress to the marriage. She feels like she can’t take a breath. She works around the clock, she’s so afraid of my situation. She’s under extreme pressure, and she resents it. So I can’t take a breath. My boys’ll say, ‘Hey, Dad, you wanna go to the beach?’ and I have to think about what she’ll think if I’m at the beach. I have to tell ’em, ‘I don’t think I better do that.’ ”

    What whacked guys like him was nothing personal, just business. From the financial meltdown in late 2007 that led to the recession up to now, the rolls of all unemployed white professional men have more than doubled, to a million (not including sales jobs, which add another 300,000). Wall Street and the broader world of business culled the most, laying off more than 300,000 from their trading desks and cubicle farms. Firms that draw on computer skills also thinned about 50,000 men from their ranks. Architects and engineers, the hardest hit by the housing crash, saw almost 90,000 casualties. In each category, the unemployment rate doubled—and then some.

    In some ways, it was inevitable. Automation isn’t just a blue-collar problem anymore. Powerful software programs replaced armies of financial officers, accountants, computer-chip designers, even lawyers, who now feed millions of documents into “e-discovery” programs. Job growth in management, technology, and other white-collar professions slowed to nearly zero. The media business has been perhaps hardest hit by technological change. Last year ABC News pink-slipped nearly 400 people—25 percent of its workforce.

    Many of these guys may be great on the back nine but totally lack the skill set to get them through anything like this, says Judith Gerberg, a Manhattan-based executive career coach. “If you went to the college of your choice, married the woman of your choice, and bought the house of your choice, you’ve never dealt with rejection. You’ve never had to develop fortitude.” She gives her clients a chart with all the hours of the day, because corporate types are used to having other people color-code their life. If not quite the Great Depression, it is certainly the Great Humbling.

    As the clock ticks toward noon, another supplicant shifts in the hot seat, trying to impress an interviewer who has seen it all. It’s day two of a six-day boot camp for unemployed professionals at Brandman University in Irvine, Calif. The atmosphere is a cross between a 12-step meeting and The Apprentice, complete with chest-pumping team names like “The Closers!”

    Right now, the focus is one-on-one. John Hall, a 72-year-old silver fox known locally as the “John Wooden of career coaches” (after the legendary UCLA basketball guru), is conducting mock job interviews. It’s only an exercise, but the interviewees get nervous and forget their lines. You can feel throats going dry, shirts moistening with flop sweat.

    MOCK INTERVIEWER: “Did you have any trouble finding us?”

    INTERVIEWEE: “Nope, I did a drive-by yesterday, so I knew exactly where to go!”

    MOCK INTERVIEWER: “Tell me a little about why you’d be right for this position.”

    INTERVIEWEE: “Oh, OK. Well, uh … ” [Awkward pause.]

    It’s like a particularly grim night at the Improv. And it might be funny, if it weren’t so painful to watch.

    Get them together, and it’s like group therapy. During a half-hour lunch break, some of the men in the class—all in their 40s and 50s—pull out brown paper bags and unpack the anguish that brought them here. “I feel like I’m wearing this neon sign on my car saying, ‘Unemployed Bum,’ ” says Chip LeDoux. At 42, he’s the baby of this luckless group, laid off from a sales job six months ago. Dave Santos, a 56-year-old former telecom salesman, has a longer tale of woe. He’s been unemployed for three years, but only his wife and sons know. When his mother calls, he lies. The hardest part, he says, is “looking in the mirror every day.”

    While laid-off Europeans blame the System, Homo americanus blames himself. “It gets turned inward,” says Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History. “ ‘What’s wrong with me as a man?’ ”

    They’re hurting, these men of a certain age. Losing their livelihood isn’t the only “transition” they’re going through. Dr. Jed Diamond, author of Surviving Male Menopause and The Irritable Male Syndrome, calls it a “double whammy.” The first: “a change of life, hormonally based, affecting our psychology and emotions from 40 to 55.” The second: unemployment. “It’s devastating. The extreme reaction is suicide, but before you get there, there’s irritability and anger, fatigue, loss of energy, withdrawal, drinking, more fights with their wives.”

    And sex. Or lack thereof. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, 45 percent of men admitted to a diminished interest in sex. It’s a vicious cycle, Diamond says. “You don’t feel as manly because you lost your job. You don’t feel as sexy, so there are more problems with you and your wife.”

    Intellectually, women can say, “It’s not his fault, he’s working hard to find a job.” Emotionally, it’s another story. This is a generation caught between two ideas of manhood, says Coontz: “Old enough to have been brought up with a model of male breadwinning. Young enough to feel they shouldn’t be threatened if their wife has a job.”

    When downward mobility is being disguised, it’s often by the wife. UCLA sociologist Jennie Brand studies the life trajectories of “socioeconomically disadvantaged populations,” which now includes white males. When people lose jobs, she finds upticks in depression and declines in social participation. Others have found divorce—as well as a transfer to kids, whose report cards suffer. “Everything I’ve done so far suggests that there will be long-term ramifications,” says Brand. “Not only in two or three years, but 10 years from now we’ll be dealing with the effects of this recession.” John Wells, whose acclaimed drama The Company Men is about four BWMs laid off by a Boston manufacturing firm, calls it a “lost decade.”

    If the career and life you trained for don’t exist anymore, one might tactfully ask, how about retraining? Companies used to pick up the tab for outplacement of canned personnel. Today those programs are rare. Some states pick up the slack with their own initiatives. But few seem to work. A 2008 Labor Department study found that the largest government retraining program offered “small or nonexistent” benefits. One unspoken reason: age.

    Texas A&M economist Joanna Lahey found that 50-year-old white men are less likely to land jobs in states that enforce age-discrimination laws. Why? Firms, it seems, don’t want to get involved with members of a contentious group. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reports that age-discrimination complaints rose by 28 percent in 2008, a year when three quarters of job losers were male, and rose again in 2010, surging past 23,000. No wonder graying men are dyeing their hair.

    Many of the newly jobless rebrand themselves as consultants. The number of so-called independent contractors is up by more than 1 million since 2005, according to Jeffrey Eisenach, an economist at George Mason University. More than one in five of them work in management, business, or finance. Boutique employment agencies are springing up to exploit this labor pool, which is attractive to companies that would rather not shell out for benefits or a 401(k). The New York–based Business Talent Group has a deep bench of BWMs (and some BWFs) for hire, many of them M.B.A.s with two decades of experience as managers, directors, or C-level boardroom players. BTG is on track for record growth this year, says Jody Greenstone Miller, an ex–Time Warner executive who founded the company in 2005. “We want people who treat this type of work as a permanent career,” Miller says. It typically takes executives six to nine months of looking for staff jobs, she adds, before they come around to the idea that no matter what you were before, you’re now basically a full-time temp.

    Brian Goodell, who finished John Hall’s boot camp a month ago, is trying hard to be resilient. He and his eldest son, who just graduated from college, go to networking events together, as well as to the “job ministry” at Rick Warren’s Saddleback megachurch. And he’s training again with his old Olympic coach. The tough part for this onetime elite athlete is the pity. “Say you have a disease, like cancer, and you’re trying to be real positive and everyone’s like, ‘How are you doing?’ I’m like, ‘Don’t pity me. I’m strong. Don’t pity me.’ ”

    He held the phone out to his wife, Vicki, who had just walked in and was running into the shower, taking a work call on her cell.

    “Hey, hon!” Goodell called out, following her into the bathroom, laughing. “I think she’s taking her phone into the shower. Wanna talk to NEWSWEEK?”

    You could hear her heels kick off onto the tile, the water turning on.

    “No!” she shouted.

    “She’s way too busy,” Goodell says.

    Or she doesn’t want to talk about it.

  12. #12
    CCBW Stumpy's Avatar
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    I am an American, Just hit 50. Was employed my entire life since the age of 16. I was gainfully employed and could still be that way now if I chose too.

    As the US off shores virtually all manufacturing and sources products globally what you find in the US are corporate office buildings full of cubicle workers. There is virtually zero ROI. In fact most become "Cost Centers" on the PL. This isn't about a man being smarter or harder working then a woman or the other way around, this is simply about Gross Margin. Look at the avg base salary of a woman compared to a man while considering your bottom-line. Who are you going to hire?

    The jobs the US lost will never return. Fact is fact. Most companies now NPI straight out of the factory they have established in the various pacific rim countries.


    As for the consultant/contract jobs rise.....I find it the funniest business sector. Most are the "kicked to the curb over priced execs" going back to the companies selling the latest greatest office managing fad. They repackage it, add a few different slides. Come up with a cutsy little jingle and hope it makes it to be part of a companies culture. I would guess 90% of those never even last 2 months.

    Face it, The US is lost on how to manage business. Money covers a lot of sins and ineptness but now they are having to work for it and most CEO's are incompetent.

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    America needs to follow Golgafrincham's example in dealing with excess numbers of middle managers.

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    Quote Originally Posted by tuktukdriver
    Oh well...I'm American, 47 years old, white collar, and the past few years have been some of my best. I have a lot of friends doing good as well. Wow...and most of them are men...who would have thought
    Me; Healthy American 65 year old real estate broker for 32 years, little too old to start new carreer so trying to hang in there while the young turks (just like I was once) are hustling and making deals but as I look around me I see middle class neighbors losing their jobs their homes and their marriages and hope while the shit head in the Whitehouse vacations and plays golf (78 rounds in 29 months), what the hell happened to true Presidents with real work ethics working 16 hours a day taking care of the country, shit even jimmy Carter did that and he was at the time considered the worst President ever

  15. #15
    Thailand Expat harrybarracuda's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Carnwadrick View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by tuktukdriver
    Oh well...I'm American, 47 years old, white collar, and the past few years have been some of my best. I have a lot of friends doing good as well. Wow...and most of them are men...who would have thought
    Me; Healthy American 65 year old real estate broker for 32 years, little too old to start new carreer so trying to hang in there while the young turks (just like I was once) are hustling and making deals but as I look around me I see middle class neighbors losing their jobs their homes and their marriages and hope while the shit head in the Whitehouse vacations and plays golf (78 rounds in 29 months), what the hell happened to true Presidents with real work ethics working 16 hours a day taking care of the country, shit even jimmy Carter did that and he was at the time considered the worst President ever
    Only people of your age think the President of the USA actually runs the country.


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    Whingers. Go see what it has been like in South Africa the past 15 years for the white male.

    Here's the good news. Despite the attack the white male has been under worldwide he will still find a way overall to rise to the top. Of this I am convinced, despite the whooshy way the new generation has been brought up. A little adversity and evolutionary genetics will ensure that.


    Howls from the peanut gallery.

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    Though the author in the OP was indeed quoting a Newsweek article; he did play a bit fast a loose with the statistics.

    In the 5th paragraph he makes the following observation:
    Nearly 20 per cent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 no longer have full-time jobs..
    Now this would be a startling statistic, particularly to the non-USA readership of the article. Certainly more startlingly then the actual facts that pertain to the subject of the article.


    Through the first quarter of 2011, nearly 600,000 college-educated white men ages 35 to 64 were unemployed, according to previously unpublished Labor Department stats.
    The Newsweek article does go on to say that the 5 percent is over double the pre-recession figure, but nevertheless, 5% is somewhat different then the 20% number the OP author used.

    Not that I think the author was trying to slant or sensationalize the article or anything
    TH
    Last edited by Thaihome; 15-06-2011 at 02:17 PM.

  18. #18
    Excitable Boy
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    Quote Originally Posted by Carnwadrick
    (78 rounds in 29 months)
    Eisenhower used to play twice per week- he logged over 800 rounds in two terms.

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    More U.S. economic news.
    I must be easily bored or annoyed or couldn't give a fuck today.

  20. #20
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    The big picture here for the men in the age range reported in the US is to learn to live with less.
    Thats the lesson for everyone.
    I am absolutely staggered and sickened to learn (today) that my niece and her husband, late 20s with 2 kids, living in his parents 2nd home (no rent or expenses) and on 120k PA have absolutely NO savings, but both have new cars and all the latest iwank gadgets and according to her "full wardrobe rotation" every two months.
    I think we need a war or a recession to jolt some of these punks into reality.
    Last edited by Cujo; 15-06-2011 at 02:57 PM.

  21. #21
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    Quote Originally Posted by harrybarracuda View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by BaitongBoy View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by harrybarracuda
    I don't call it globalisation when they are losing their jobs to women
    What do you call it, Harry?

    Good question. Based on this:

    There are 185 women graduates to every 100 men
    Work ethic? (a.k.a value to the employer).
    Gender Quota's....

  22. #22
    Thailand Expat Boon Mee's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Carnwadrick View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by tuktukdriver
    Oh well...I'm American, 47 years old, white collar, and the past few years have been some of my best. I have a lot of friends doing good as well. Wow...and most of them are men...who would have thought
    Me; Healthy American 65 year old real estate broker for 32 years, little too old to start new carreer so trying to hang in there while the young turks (just like I was once) are hustling and making deals but as I look around me I see middle class neighbors losing their jobs their homes and their marriages and hope while the shit head in the Whitehouse vacations and plays golf (78 rounds in 29 months), what the hell happened to true Presidents with real work ethics working 16 hours a day taking care of the country, shit even jimmy Carter did that and he was at the time considered the worst President ever
    You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Carnwadrick again.

    Another Green on the way when the system permits. Good post Carn...
    A Deplorable Bitter Clinger

  23. #23
    Thailand Expat Boon Mee's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by FailSafe View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Carnwadrick
    (78 rounds in 29 months)
    Eisenhower used to play twice per week-
    No comparison with the punk in the WH today. Ike & the Allies won WWll in Europe and Africa. This failed community agitator only got to be where he is due to affirmative action...

  24. #24
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    A close friend, over 55 and then some, found himself in desperate straits and decided to get an online MBA which he financed with student loans. He thought he would be highly sought after as a university teacher. Now, still facing an uncertain future he is getting his online PHD. Waste of time? I think so.
    Who's going to hire an aged prof? And the worst part is he is going to be 80k in debt and the IRS is very zealous about garnishing social security payments for unpaid student loans.

  25. #25
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    Quote Originally Posted by Carnwadrick View Post
    real work ethics working 16 hours a day
    Work smart not hard. French rate higher than US in work efficiency and they only work 35 hours a week.

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