Two articles in the New York Times today, one about employee wages being squeezed, one on the outsourcing of lawyers. Oh, for the rage of Howard Beale.
All this outsourcing began thirty years ago when blue collar manufacturing jobs moved to the unregulated, anti-environmentally protected, anti-union South. And don't forget how the most "beloved" president in American history launched the first of many salvos in the battle to destroy organized labor, firing striking air traffic controllers. But while the South prospered for a little while, the good times eventually stopped rolling. Those shuttered factories of the rustbelt were mirrored in places below the Mason-Dixon line when those solid blue-collar jobs moved to Mexico, Thailand, Vietnam, and China. We shouldn't be making televisions and clothes, the economic experts told us. We should be a nation of technocrats, idea men and women.
Fast forward to today, as increasing numbers of white collar jobs—those idea jobs—are being offshored in professions once thought sacrosanct. IT workers were hit first more than a decade ago, then the med tech guys, engineers, and banking support staff. Now, it's the lawyers' turn.
It's nice to know that, while globalization pays workers in those "rising" countries a few dimes more a week today, it is also depressing American wages—and with it Americans' pride and their hope for the future. American labor is like those beautiful, fecund marshes that Saddam Hussein drained and turned into desert. Sure, Americans aren't perfect. But they do work hard. Very hard. Yet that fact matters little to Wall Street and its shareholders. The economy has become a zero-sum game. And most of us know which side is which. Unfortunately, too many citizens are so confused or willfully ignorant or blinded by greed or the false dream that, well, hey one day they'll be rich too, to fully appreciate what is happening even as they watch their own livelihoods erode. But why truly understand when it's easier to blame a "usurper socialist" faux president with a foreign-sounding name.
Who will be left to buy all those televisions and Wiis, all those smartphones and tech gear? Not the growing number of citizens scraping out a living on the salaries paid in the service industries. For years, state governments and corporations reneged on funding workers' pension funds and funneled their workers' contributions to the great rigged casino that is the markets. Instead of stabilizing taxes (or horrors, raising them on the wealthiest who benefit the most), they cut them. You can have a free lunch with all the trimmings, they told eager Americans who, like children, want everything—but don't want to have to pay for it. Now, as the gaping holes caused by their poor governance become glaring apparent in budgets written in red ink, they use the old tried and true, blaming it all on the workers and their greedy demands. Of course it's nonsense. Yet again, a gullible and blind electorate go along, saying yes! workers just expect too much.
The only winners these days are the wealthy who have gamed the system. These ruthless robber-barons are well on their way to taking America back to the time of William McKinley, economically, politically, and socially. They are supported by those on both sides of the aisle in congress who blame the unemployed and the uninsured for their plight while giving billions in corporate welfare to big agribusiness, big banks, and big pharma. It's not pretty, and it's not going to get better anytime soon, not if people vote in the very types who caused this mess over the course of four decades in the first place in the November midterms.
And so it goes.
