I have noticed something very, very strange  going on with  liberals' attitudes toward blue collar workers for a long time, and I am desperately worried about it.

 Conservatives have never  been known for their concern for the working man, but liberals were always the champions of labor. Something new started with TV anchors becoming hostile to American cars. A study would show like a 5% lesser quality in domestic cars as compared to foreign cars. The TV anchors would play it up like it was the end of the world. After decades of seeing this repeated over and over on different media outlets,  Americans now just assume that domestic cars are terrible, and they don't even realize that they have been programmed to feel that way for years. So began the unraveling of the great blue collar unions that virtually created the American middle class.

 By the way, why would you shout to the world that another country's MAJOR ESSENTIAL INDUSTRY  is better than yours? It isn't patriotic. During WWII people were forbidden to trade with the Nazis  --   well this is kind of an economic war;  it's getting more and more competitive, and even dangerous out there. I don't imply that FOREIGN PEOPLE are to blame. But  economically, they will naturally look out for their own countries first, that is just the way things are. I blame our failed trade policies for the current financial disaster.

American auto quality slipped in the past, but the quality has been pretty comparable now for a long time. But the opinion makers never acknowledged that there was that large improvement, they never stopped trying to destroy what was left of the reputation of the American car industry. What the liberal media, normally protective of labor, said, mattered --  a lot.  An auto is one of the biggest purchases that consumers ever make. The domestic industry is still mostly American owned and supplied. The foreign makers, even the ones that build their cars in the U.S., still keep the best engineering and design jobs,  a lot of the supplier jobs, and most importantly, the PROFIT STREAMS, to themselves. With every foreign car sold, with every foreign plant built here,  more and more billions of American dollars pour out of the country to foreign shores.  Even if studies show that foreign cars are slightly better, it isn't worth wrecking our whole country over it! Because that is kind of what we're doing, as other countries take over the profits from more and more of other American industries too.We are also giving away our critical technology edge by letting others do all of our manufacturing.

As a result, the Chinese  now own us. We are in debt up to our hair tops, buy everything from them, and then borrow more money from them to pay them for the stuff that we just bought. But many Americans still do not understand our predicament.

Why would you berate and destroy an industry that not long ago  was the largest employer in the U.S. ? That treated its workers extremely well in every way? If you support good pay for the average worker, than you have to support the industries that pay well. If you care about the average American worker, than you have to support the industries that care about him. And unions pulled the wages of even nonunion workers way up, tremendously benefiting all U.S. workers.

I guess the thing that upsets me the most about this is that I don't think that elite opinion makers and many liberals really do care about the average American blue collar worker any more.  

 These former defenders of the working man don't seek manufacturing jobs anymore, and none of their relatives and neighbors do. So blue collar workers just don't seem to be a priority for them any more. They assume that because they are college educated white-collar workers, that they know more about the auto industry than the workers and managers who actually work in the industry do. But the unions learned what they know from the blood of generations of American workers.

Yet now some of the descendents of those murdered union members are destroying unions by not buying their products. 

 I can't understand this. Is it  because there are now so many affluent two-income  households, and that  union blue collar workers  have somehow subconsciously become a threat to them?  Because they can't afford to both work unless they have plenty of dirt cheap service labor around--  nannies,  gardeners,  restaurant workers,  day care workers? And lots of dirt cheap products made in China to make it worth it to pursue two time-consuming professional careers?

 But if so, isn't that old-fashioned exploitation -- the old class system? Since these professionals still pull down large salaries and good benefits themselves. Our beloved President Obama, and some liberals, still seem to care about the drowning working classes, but they now seem to be in the minority. One result of this shift in attitudes is that marginal employment king Wal-Mart is now our biggest employer, instead of GM!

  Many white collar people think that  these autoworkers are just dinosaurs, and that we just have to retrain them, and they will end up thanking us for it. Well these workers have already been through the retraining thing. They were all going to go into computer work and be better off.  NOT!!  Because the auto industry was just the BEGINNING  of this! The same myths that destroyed car jobs are now destroying all American jobs. The computer jobs were quickly shipped off to other countries. And foreign visa workers that are willing to work for less are being brought in to take  many of the computer jobs that remain here. First we made computers here, but now those computers are being made with virtual slave workers elsewhere, and shipped here, just like the foreign cars are.  Any product made with slave labor,  ( and with no regulations of any kind) will be so much cheaper than American-made goods, that people will buy it every time. So slave labor will end up making everything, and the cheaper the slaves the more "competitive " they will be. Almost any job in the U.S. (including green jobs)  could now be given to a smart foreigner who would be willing to do it for less. 

 Does that mean that we should just hand them all the keys to our country and call it free trade?

 Yet the opinion makers continue this naive, nuts obsession with the free trade gospel that never existed. It never existed because other countries maintain artificially weak currencies, because they find ways of keeping American products out of their markets, because they heavily subsidize their own industries, because they dump products in the U.S. below cost just to steal market share, and because they pay American companies to set up shop in their country. Why do we never hear the opinion makers obsess over all these ways that the other countries have always cheated on the free trade rules? Yet we still hear them constantly demean America's essential industries. Something does not compute.

Another thing that terrifies me about this thing is that it is scapegoating. Ugly, depressing scapegoating. Everyone who mentions the American auto industry has to get a kick in! An insult is obligatory.  Anyone who wants to feel superior is suddenly a manufacturing expert,   can compare themselves, and see themselves as better.

At some point, even liberals,  the champions of the working man, veered off, deciding that they should hate the Big 3 because their cars weren't as environmentally friendly as the foreign makers. Well I don't quite see that.  Americans have had practically free gas compared to the rest of the world for decades, by their own choice. Foreigners had to buy smaller cars because they made gas a luxury item in their countries. Plus there seems to be some elite hypocracy here. A single urban person can get by with a very small car much more easily than a working class family with six kids who live on very bad roads out in the country. A wealthy couple who both commute  to work every day in fuel-efficient cars, but live a very expensive life-style, may actually consume more in the way of natural resources than the conservative idiots with the six kids that they look down on. And  you'd never know it, but the foreign makers also build a lot of trucks and SUVs, --  the crime just goes unnoticed and unpunished.

 Besides, now that all that American manufacturing has been moved to China, we are really worse off environmentally, because China has little environmental regulation! So a lot of the environmental benefits of the small cars have been cancelled out. Global warming is huge --  but we all must sacrifice, not just blue collar workers.  And in all ways, not just in the pet cause of driving foreign cars.

And can't these liberals see that they have joined a most unholy alliance  with the most reactionary elements in America? Their big pals are out to destroy the evil, socialist unions, to cripple average workers. Do liberals think that this anti-American-car campaign wasn't planned? The huge blue collar unions, that used to sway elections, and play on the same level as the powers that be, had become a real threat. Instead of attacking the unions directly, which would no longer fly with many people, the unions' enemies attacked the reputation of the products that the unions built. Same result. 

 The whole  miraculous power of unions is in all  workers sticking together. That's why people crossing picket lines are called scabs. If one worker undermines the union, it destroys the whole union. Likewise, the nonunion Toyota  South has undermined the union automaker North. And auto wages are now headed way down in this country. Union workers died to win fair wages for Americans, and in one generation, Southern nonunion autoworkers have started dragging them way  back down.

If our manufacturing industries completely collapse, is the growing list of countries that seem to hate us going to somehow take care of us when we need something? 

Unless people have the wealth to escape to some better place forever, everyone will be affected by the  continued economic collapse of this country. The union industry people have been screaming a warning from the gates of Hell for decades now, but no one cares.

 But with every recession, less and less workers still feel that they are somehow immune to the destruction of the American workplace. And more and more workers are finding out that this monster that we have created values them not the slightest bit more than autoworkers.It values no one but the very few left with their hands on the big money levers.

Liberals must once more guard what is left of our country's blue collar unions. So that those unions can guard what is left of our country.