F.I.S.T.

[cryofan]

F.I.S.T. == Federation of Inter-State Truckers

It is the name of a 1970s movie by Stallone, set in the 1930s, it tells the tale of how the union organizers fought for the rights we now take for granted.

Those people back then worked together to give themselves power.

Back in the 30s they were moving towards giving the workers the right to control the workplace. Hell, they were almost there. Chomsky is right: union power is where it is at. Look at the countries with the highest standards of living: NW European countries. They are the ones with the union membership percentages taht absolutely DWARF what we have here in America.

We let our leaders sell us out. We bought a pig in a poke when we let the investors and owners take high-capital-investment manufacturing out of the country. We COULD have stopped the exodus. And I do not buy the idea that the service economy is the end-all, be-all of work. Check out this URL:
http://www.pushhamburger.com/edge.htm
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Eamonn Fingleton: I mean those engaged in advanced manufacturing. Specifically, industries that are both highly capital intensive and highly know-how intensive. They typically are many orders of magnitude more capital-intensive and know-how intensive than the most advanced of "New Economy" services, such as computer software developed in the last three decades.
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Although Japan is known in the West for its leadership in certain consumer products such as cars and television sets, its area of greatest leadership is in much more advanced industries that largely are invisible to the consumer. Specifically, Japan leads almost right across the board in the sort of advanced materials, high-tech components and production machinery that are driving the electronic revolution. Some products may be assembled in the United States, but their key manufacture - the manufacture of the advanced components and materials - is done in Japan.
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The manufacturing jobs are gone, and the U.S. standard of living has been impacted badly by this. When I first came to the United States in the 1970s, I was stunned at how wealthy Americans then seemed. Since then, Western Europe largely has closed the wealth gap with the United States, so that living standards even in a country like Ireland that seemed poor a few decades ago are not far behind American levels.
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Meanwhile, the United States would be well-advised to follow the lead of the Japanese, the Germans and the Swiss by maintaining and enhancing its position in advanced-manufacturing industries.
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How do we stop these trends and get back to where working people were in contact with each other, and worked together to give themselves more power? The INTERNET! But we need more bandwidth and we need it a lot cheaper. I see one path: use of the radio frequencies so that wireless broadband can flourish. But the govt is stopping this using the excuse that those freqs are needed for military and ham operators.

[Cleita]

1. Thanks.

I have nothing to add, but people need to know where their job rights are from.

[BiggJawn]

2. Don't blame the Ham Operators

That's who the broadband interests want you to blame. Why? because it would be easier to picket the FCC into taking away spectrum from the hams than the Military, who are the TRUE spectrum hogs.

Wireless broadband uses microwave frequencies. Sure, hams have allocations up there, but outside of Broadcast relay, sattelite, and the hams, who do you think "owns" the biggest chunck of spectrum? The US Military. They control allocations that were used for systems that have been obsolete for 40 years, but instead of dumping the allocations back in the hopper and letting some new users go at it, they SIT on those allocations. Why? Because they're the Military, they don't need no steenkin' reason.

Case in point: Hams used to have an allocation at 220 Mcs. UPS needed space for some truck tracking package tracing system. Did the Military have to give up some of their un-used space in that area? Frequencies that haven't been used since WWII? No. They took space from the hams, then SOLD it to UPS. Our "free" airwaves, sold.

Blaming Hams for not having enough room for wireless broadband is like blaming out-of-work minority people for your taxes being "too high".