Maybe I don't have a right to respond to the "Open Call". I really haven't lost my job to the recession since I got sick and lost my job due to health. Probably, I would still be working at my last job if I hadn't since it was both a union and a government job. That aside I did spend most of my working life in a part of the U.S. that never recovered from the Reagan economy.
I spent most of my life down in southern Illinois. We were mostly a coal driven economy but, we were also well represented in manufacturing as well. Sure we didn't build cars or that kind of thing but, we did make everything from batteries to swingsets and washing machines.
The truth is that the eighties missed us here, so what may be a new and difficult situation on the more prosperous parts of the country have been the way of life here for the better part of forty years. I know people that celebrate getting a short term minimum wage job just so they can be less broke for a while. Few people here short of the professionals every make enough money to get off of food stamps. They may work six or seven days a week but, the employers use vague interpretations of wage and hour laws to manipulate a "work week" to minimize the possibility of overtime pay while workers generally spend at least some time six days a week at work.
So, how does this affect me? Well it forced me to pack up and move nearly two thousand miles from family and friends to get a job at one point. Then it has made our lives little more than a struggle to keep the utilities on and food in the house. It doesn't do much for a persons self esteem to hear the lies about poor people being constantly played before a world wide audience as though repetition made them true your whole life.
The despair and hopelessness of living is to much for some to bear and we often take out the rage on our own families. Children grow up in poverty and go on to have children of their own grow up with no more to hope for than a benefits card from the state. They work themselves to death under the table in back breaking jobs that pay next to nothing. They live for two months a year if they have real jobs on the income tax refunds that most of them pay any price to recieve as quickly as possible. In many cases to pay off the high intrest short term loans they had to get to pay for heat in the winter.
I lived in that world and worked in that world until I got lucky and got a job in a factory of death working with explosives and depleted uranium that will ultimately kill me, for all of that, I was lucky, I had a union job that paid a decent wage for this area. Sure I had to do things that I found morally offensive and against every principal I'd ever held. Everyone does in many ways.
What is the effect then of that long term poverty, rejection, stress, and despair? Lives lived with nothing to hope for beyond survival. A world where in all of my life only two presidents even bothered to show up, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and they didn't stay long. A world where we can watch people on television compplain about their struggle to keep the homes that we will never be able to afford wearing clothes we can't imagine buying and driving cars we would give anything to have. All the while we are ignored and insulted by them all, Democrats, Republicans, the media, it doesn't matter. No one will hear us, no one gives a good god damn about us, and nothing here will ever change.
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THAT shot home...
No one gives a good god damn at all.
I see it daily. In my face and others.
And it stings beyond belief.
“I wish I did know the answer - it would involve mandating decent pay/ benefits somehow, I think”
Contrary to popular liberal belief, Republicans also wish we knew the answer to unemployment, food stamp dependency and poverty. Sadly, there is no “answer”. The best we can hope for is that our elected officials create an environment where people can obtain a job, stop collecting food stamps and at least join the middle class. However, the surest way to assure society obtains none of these goals is through Government mandates. Perhaps the best way to make my point is to leave you with this famous quote from Milton Friedman; “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”.
Since you like Friedman's quote so much, then why is it that it is so frequently employed to justify the abandonment of the working class and not those like Romney who are getting plenty of "free lunch"? A 15% tax rate is a rich mans free lunch.
Let's remove a tax cut that does no more demonstrated good for the country than to increase the deficit. Let's have labels reflect the place where"American" goods are really produced equal billing with the company that is selling it.
You want to break it down to liberal and conservative and that is simply not going to cut it with me anymore. The only thing that is different between the two corporate parties is who gets the money
Where? There are no jobs. Not their problem.
There are far more areas of the nation like the one you describe here than anyone knows. Nobody drags television cameras to Dowell, Illinois unless one of its residents goes bezerk and kills a classroom full of children or something equally heinous.
There will be those who will urge you to cheer up, Bob, to not be so pessimistic, to believe there is always hope. Then someone like Johnny Fever writes "The best we can hope for is that our elected officials create an environment where people can obtain a job, stop collecting food stamps and at least join the middle class." The government they would like to pare down to nothing? Join what middle class? The one they just destroyed?
The right is big on canned speeches and mantras, short on answers to questions about how the poor, who don't have a prayer of joining the middle class, are to be dealt with in a Conservative Republican environment. Should they just die? Is that part of the capitalistic model? Survival of the fittest, screw the unfit? Should we just drive the elderly out on the ice and leave them there to freeze to death?
What did Milton Friedman have to say about those issues?
Lezlie
This is the boat you hear about. You know the one I'm talking about:
The one up shit creek without a paddle?
--r--
You've illustrated the big picture very poignantly, Bob.
R♥
With so much low-hanging fruit it’s hard to focus on just one of your statements, but I like to keep my comments brief and to the point so let’s focus on “The simplest method of assuring that people are in a position to grow their income is to pay them more”.
Assume you own a sandwich shop and the market rate for labor is $10 an hour. Why would you pay more than $10? To the extent you decided to pay $25 an hour…that would make for one expensive sandwich. It wouldn’t take long for your customers to choose to buy their sandwiches elsewhere or make their own sandwich. In a short amount of time, rather than employing a bunch of low wage workers $10 an hour you would be paying nobody $0 an hour.
To be sure, the Government could mandate all sandwich shops pay their employees $25 an hour. And for some very wealthy sandwich eaters, that wouldn’t change their buying habits, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out, there would be far fewer sandwich shops under such a mandate. It also doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that if we mandated that all rocket scientists make $25 an hour, the price of rockets would remain unchanged.
L in the Southeast:
I won’t be holding my breath on someone answering the question on how the poor join the middle class. Within every society, under every form of Government, in every time period and in every geographic location there have always been poor people. Thankfully, there is plenty of demand for sandwiches and scientists.
The prospects are bleak all over, but there is hope, dare I say change is possible? If only.
Thanks for a heartfelt post that hits the nail on the head, Bob. Keep writing!
I am no better than you and neither is Warren Buffett, if anyone says different they're lying. He and I are lucky to have stayed out of poverty. It was only luck, and some got luckier than I did with easy starts to their lives or unexpected demand for what they were selling. Equality means anyone can be starving if laws allow it. A millionaire can wind up living under a bridge and isn't entitled to more than anyone else.
I read Obama was asking for fairness for the middle class. I'm wondering, is there a way for that to happen without one set of laws and programs for the middle class and another for the poor?
As Bill Moyers said this past week, "The system isn't broken. It's fixed."
"Circumstances don't make a man, they reveal him."
Many of us honestly do the best we can with what we have to work with, while others purportedly in our *class* are the group from which stereotypes are born. Thank you for drawing attention to the realities that exist as exposure may draw strength to continue forth despite the invisibility to those who have the power to actually effect change ~ if only they wanted to.
~R~
I’m sorry if my tone is insulting but I’m not much of a sugar-coater and I continue to read what I can only describe as illogical make-believe. Once again, I don’t have to read much before I come across more low-hanging fruit “When the labor Market is subject to having it's price determined by the buyer it creates an unfair situation.”
Who is the buyer? The employer? Are you suggesting the employee determine how much he or she is to be paid? Who is being treated unfairly? Last I heard it’s a free country, if you don’t like the employment terms, you can quit.
Regarding y0ur theories on investment, if I want to open a sandwich shop it will require a capital investment. To the extent I agree to pay my employees something higher than the market rate, there is a good chance I won’t be competitive, and lose my investment. This is simple stuff, no degree in rocket science required.
Jeanette:
Where have I blamed anyone for anything? Bobbot is the one laying blame on investment, Mitt Romney, the rich, etc.
Everything you say is irrelevent while you go by the handle of Johnny Fever yet have a picture of Andy Travis as your avitar.
Most people replicate their family of origin's mistakes, if not their entire makeup. So it is difficult psychologically for a poor person to transcend one's family and become middle class. He'll soon be seen as Uppity and too good for his people. We are social animals, and leaving the pack takes an intrepid being.
So I leave you with this Johnny Fever, to move up one needs to streamline, (i.e. have no or very few children, and delay having children for as long as possible). Look at the wonderful example of how China is reaping that equation today.
You nailed this, Bob. I'm so sorry it had to be at your own expense. Oh, and you didn't even mention the years you gave serving our country. I salute you and pray for you.
Amen and God damn!!!!
RATED!
They then turn around and whine when we organize unions to do exactly that or lobby the government to pass laws to set a limit on what business is allowed to get away with. So of course all they do is open up the marketplace to the lowest form of cheats, scoundrels, grifters and pampered trust fund babies to wreck the economy for the rest of us. Seriously, try being a decent fair-minded capitalist when you have to compete with the likes of Mitt Romney.
The Ayn Rand-Ron Paul followers' disrespect for hard work is monumental. They worship capitalists who organize companies to make a fortune and them piss on working people who organize unions just so they can make a living.
Funny how they hate it when working class people try to compete effectively in the so-called "free market"...
--i.f. stone
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
--supreme court justice louis brandeis
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
--upton sinclair
"One withstands the invasion of armies; one does not withstand the invasion of ideas."
--victor hugo
"The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid dens of crime that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern. "
--cs lewis
gamechanger-- occupying republicans
You are a really good writer. And a very thoughtful, intelligent person. Wish our society rewarded that more than whatever Mitt Romney's got going for him.
Those days, and that firm, as well as that economic mobility, are gone. Shortly after my dad retired, the plant picked up and moved somewhere the wages and union activism were lower. The jobs haven't been replaced. Someone in the position I was in during the 1970s would be slinging lattes at Starbucks or selling knick-knacks at the mall, for far, far less pay and weaker, if not nonexistent, benefits. Thus the middle class shrinks and the gap between rich and poor grows.
Great post, well-deserved EP.
P.S. The owners have no more right to set the price of labor than the customer has the right to determine price. When we accept that one side not only decides what things cost but deliberately under values the labor needed to provide a service or manufacture a good, that is the inherent unfairness of which I spoke. Any other opinion is just supporting de facto slavery.
it's all true. we sell out because there's no choice. we have to work. who can afford to have beliefs, principles, when there's a salary at stake?
no one really gives a damn about the poor. sure, there are a few, but honestly,the people who struggle in this country, in the world, are a silent cry and always have been and always will be. it's too painful to hear. to hear it means to do something and show me the people who are willing to sacrifice a shopping trip to feed a hungry family? we invest in these assholes, these millionaire assholes on television while they invest in nothing.
your words said it all: No one will hear us, no one gives a good god damn about us, and nothing here will ever change.