we will show how the combinatorics of symmetric functions can give many new and classic results in the theory of permutation enumeration. among other things, a well known result of garsia and gessel will be derivied through this perspective. this is the second of two talks on the subject; however, this talk is almost self contained. for those not attending the first talk, we only assume familiarity with the elementary and homogeneous symmetric functions and the notions of descents and inversions for permutations.