[ Homepage ] [ Deism ] [ Christianity in America ] [ Debunking Islam ]
[ Article List ] [ Sullivan County, TN ] [ Bristol VA/TN ]

illegal immigration in Tennessee

The following is just hype. This bank isn't hiring and just wants a large pool of cheap, skilled labor. The very people he claims to want are losing their jobs every day. How about this: From the 6/29/06 report posted on World News Digest says it all:

"Regions's chairman and CEO, Jackson Moore, would become chairman of the combined company, while AmSouth's chairman and chief executive, C. Dowd Ritter, would be its CEO. The merger was expected to save the banks about $400 million through 150 branch closures and up to 3,600 layoffs. It was subject to approval from antitrust regulators. [See 1999 Mergers and Acquisitions: News in Brief]"

Or:

From Here: Regions Bank and AmSouth Bank, two big Birmingham-based financial institutions, are one. The estimated $10 billion deal, announced today, would create a Top 15 bank that would actually remain based in Birmingham. At stake: $140 billion in assets, $100 billion in deposits, 2,000 offices, 37,000 employees and more than 2,800 ATMs in 16 states. Closer to home, a combined 6,000 local jobs are on the line, with layoffs looming as an inevitable side effect of the deal. Wait, weren’t we opposed to same-sector marriages?

Or:

829 Layoffs Expected from Wachovia, SouthTrust Merger

(AP) November 26, 2004 BIRMINGHAM — Wachovia Corp., the new owner of SouthTrust Corp., plans to cut 829 jobs in Birmingham between January 2005 and March 2006. More layoffs are expected to follow...The job losses represent about 20 percent of the 4,000 people SouthTrust employs in Birmingham...

There is no labor shortage.

Second-class education hampers American workers

February 23, 2004

Robert Allsbrook, chief economist and senior vice president of Birmingham-based AmSouth Bank, thinks America needs to launch a massive effort - a kind of domestic "Marshall Plan" - to rebuild the nation's workforce.

"We have to have a giant Marshall Plan in this country like we had after the second World War to re-educate and retrain our workforce," Allsbrook says. "If we don't, we won't just feel sorry for our neighbor who is out of a job. We won't have a job."

That's the sobering assessment Allsbrook brought to town recently as he met with AmSouth clients about the nation's economic outlook. While Allsbrook sees an economy beginning to recover, he worries that too many workers - many of them in the South - lack the skills to compete in a rapidly changing economy.

The concern, unfortunately, is not new. For decades it has been apparent that the increasingly global nature of economic competition is causing a fundamental shift in the complexion of the nation's workforce.

Technological advances are making many traditional jobs obsolete. Still other, labor-intensive tasks requiring little skill are moving, as they always have, to those places where labor is least expensive.

Some lawmakers - particularly those on the political left - regard these changes as a sort of vast plot by corporations to maximize profits at the expense of American workers. But corporations that don't make an adequate profit go broke and employ no one. To pretend that such fundamental economic imperatives are a matter of choice is the cruelest form of deception to workers anxious about their future.

The changes being wrought in today's workplace cannot be reversed any more than can history. But that doesn't mean we can't take steps to prepare ourselves for them. Indeed, that's precisely why Allsbrook's idea of a Marshall Plan is a good one.

Of course, such a plan - and the billions it would cost - wouldn't be necessary if the nation's schools were doing what they should. After adjusting for inflation, education spending in this country has dwarfed the commitment America made to rebuild Europe many times over. Spending on education has increased more than fourteen-fold in constant dollars since it was first reliably measured in 1920. America already spends more on education than any other nation. The problem of low skills isn't due to a lack of money, but this nation's lack of commitment to high academic standards.

Recently, the 16 states which make up the Southern Regional Education Board, of which Tennessee is a member, pledged to lead the nation in educational progress.

Their bold pronouncement, laid out in a document titled "Goals for Education: Challenge to Lead," included a vow to move away from the negative labels of earlier eras and to reach beyond national averages.

But shortly after the ink had dried on that document, The College Board released the annual ACT and SAT state score reports. Serving as a reality check, the news - mixed at best - underscored the monumental challenge before SREB states if they are to live up to their boast of educational excellence.

While the student scores of most SREB states have improved and more high school students in the South are taking a college preparatory curriculum, SREB states have not kept pace on test scores with others in the nation.

In Tennessee, the news is particularly disturbing. The state has the dubious distinction - along with Mississippi - of showing a decline in its ACT scores the past decade. Tennessee also ranks near the bottom of the region and the nation in college entrance exam scores.

Nationally, there's not a lot of brag about, either. Approximately one-third of the population 16 or older cannot read a street map. One in five Americans reads at a level insufficient to adequately compete or perform in the labor market.

While the United States may be the world's only economic and military superpower, the nation's literacy rate ranks only in the top 15 in the industrialized world.

Some 44 million Americans cannot do simple mathematics or read a newspaper, according to the U.S. Department of Education. With those troubling numbers in mind, the nation's economic well-being, indeed its national security, is at long-term risk.

Whether America needs an educational Marshall Plan as Allsbrook suggests is, in some ways, a matter of semantics.

The United States will not long remain a first-class economic power if most of its citizens have a second-class education.

Copyright 2003 Kingsport Times-News.

Looking at Environmental Religion and general religious issues.

[ Grundy VA Fraud ] [ Social Apartheid ] [ Guestbook Archive

[ Killing Children ] [ George Bush Defends Saudi Terrorism ] [ Islamic Fascism ]
[ Palestine Myth ] [ Arlene Peck on Arabs ] [ Muslim Immigration Must be Halted ]

Visitors since
March 2002