The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It's a
cliché. One that Republicans despise and have put forth considerable effort to
disprove. They disprove it through a perversion of statistics. "Statistics can
be used to prove anything that's remotely true." said the philosopher Homer.
Homer Simpson that is.
Bush got some good news on the economic front. That is,
what we are told. A closer look reveals a mere continuation of the trend that
the conservative deity, Ronald Reagan began. Either become a wide collared
manager, computer programmer, analyst, or some other intellectual pursuit or
prepare for a life of flipping burgers, selling shoes, or greeting people at
Walmart.
You can almost see the conservatives like Draginol and
Anthony R who hang out with their smart friends arguing that the education
possibilities in the United States are such that there's more than enough demand
for the kind of intellectual white collar jobs that bring in the bigger bucks.
Of course, it's also conservatives like Draginol and Anthony R that foist upon
us books like "The Bell Curve" that makes a solid case that half of American
society isn't going to be able to program computer software or figure out ladder
logic Alan Bradley micro-controllers or sell integration services to insurance
companies. What about them?
What about them indeed. Historically, them, or as they
used to be called, the Americans who live between the coasts, worked in
factories making things. They worked with a material we called metal. Try saying
that world meh-tal. Or maybe they worked in textiles. You didn't have to be a
rocket scientist to work those jobs but they still paid really well. You worked
hard at those jobs. Republicans know what that means? No? Working hard isn't
about working long hours. It means using your arms and legs to do something
quite unpleasant for long periods of time. You would get dirty. Grungy.
Sometimes injured. But it was a job that produced real stuff and it made it
possible for men and women to raise their kids in relative comfort. It paid for
colleges that allowed their kids to find better work.
But Republicans only give lip service to that kind of
work. To save some money in the short term, they sent jobs to China by the
millions over the years. Why pay an American $20 per hour when you could have
someone in China do it for $2 per day? And folks, remember, Republicans are the
ones who claim to be hard on Communism even as they blissfully transfer jobs,
and wealth, to "Communist China".
So the hard working men and women in the United States who
once manufactured steel, cars or shoes are now, if they're lucky, selling shoes
at a fraction of they pay they used to get. But unemployment is down right?
Meanwhile the white collared people are doing just fine. You can see it in the
luxury homes they live in. The marketing of fancier cars. The big 60 inch plasma
TVs being sold for $10,000 at the store. They're doing just fine. So why should
they care if that 40 some year old Walmart stocker was once making three times
as much a year ago manufacturing plastic containers used for storing lubricant
for engines (both now produced in China)?
The big story today is how now these poor engineers are
losing their jobs to India. Shocking. Just shocking. Not the job loss but the
attention it gets that is. Oh poor guys. Welcome to the party, pal. This is
what's been happening in the manufacturing sector for 30 years straight. You can
think politicians like Bush and Reagan and their cohorts for this. They have
only the vaguest notions of what the middle class is. To them, it's all about
making goods cheaper for "average Americans" that they have no concept of.
Instead of imagining what the "Average" American is, maybe
they should start looking at what the "mean" American is. The typical. The
example. They're not stock analysts. They're not IT managers. They're not
engineers. They're hard working men and women who are increasingly being forced
out of manufacturing into services. And not all services are the same. At the
rate we're going, we'll have a hyper middle class that represents say 20% of the
population that is doing "great". And then the rest of America that's stuck
taking Pizza orders because of diminished opportunities that we can thank our
Republican friends for.