6 July 2010 So long, It’s been good to know you

6 July 2010 So long, It’s been good to know you


The period of time between 1940 and 1973 was probably the best period in this nation’s history to be looking for work. American industrial might had just won a dual-front world war and the factories were retooled to civilian consumer goods with little delay. Infrastructure growth was seen by Truman and Eisenhower as necessary for national security. Science and scientists were providing new tools and toys for our society with each passing day. Anyone who wanted to work, for the most part, could find work. Much of that work paid a livable wage or salary.

With the election of Reagan and the implementation of trickle-down economics the picture changed. Factories closed and jobs were exported overseas as leveraged and hostile buyouts drove merger after merger; each merged corporation promising ever-increasing dividends. Executive salaries rocketed, profits were declared with every pink slip handed our to an hourly or salaried employee. The pattern was established and out-sourcing and off-shoring of job after job allowed profits of an unholy nature for the professional executives at the top of the corporate heap. Deregulation of industries fed the flames.

Now, we’ve no industrial base, no jobs for workers, and no money for the out of work workers to buy the products shipped in from the off-shore factories. When there’s no one left to buy the things we don’t make, but used to; the CEO’s begin to take notice and demand a bail-out. Even after they’ve been bailed out, they still demand tax cuts for the promise of new jobs.

Unfortunately, even today, the out of work workers and the once middle class still let the GOP lie to them. Listen up! Nothing trickles downward in this economic system. Reagan was senile. He believed the BS he read from his 3x5 cards.

Now the next insult is being hurled. The GOP and TP mob mouthpieces are claiming that the huge number of unemployed want benefits because they are lazy and can make more money drawing unemployment benefits than working a full-time job.



No one I know of would rather rely on unemployment benefits and lose their job-related insurance benefits so that they can spend their days doing nothing.

I was injured in a motor vehicle accident in 1998. It took nearly two years of surgeries, PT, and legal hassles to stabilize my spine. I was left with chronic severe pain requiring medication, loss of fine motor control and strength in one arm, inability to drive, sit or stand for more than 15 minutes at a stretch, loss of range of motion in my arm and neck. I was unable to continue in a job field I had been in for 30+ years.

Since this was a workers' comp injury, some attempt was made by the carrier to return me to employed status despite their chosen physician's decision that I could not return to work. I sat down with an attorney and filled out the interview forms. They could not find any employment within reasonable distance that would even begin to approach what I had been making. They kept pushing minimum wage jobs outside my field of expertise, with no benefits and no full-time status. In every case I was over-qualified, and too old to hire. I refused all these as I had not been cleared to return to work. To accept even one job would have allowed them to deny any further benefits and would have left me worse off than before. Fortunately my attorney fed me the right information.

For someone who has worked since age 14, being unemployed and unemployable is devastating. I found myself with no income beyond limited workers' comp payments, requiring medication that cost more/month than I received in benefits, and past that age when experience is too expensive to justify hiring someone.

Such situations are happening to millions of people today. The industrial jobs base no longer exists; full-time employment is undesirable for corporations so no one gets medical benefits. People who have worked all their lives find that all the equity they have in a long-term home is worthless, that they cannot afford to move to another job, can't afford the cost of infrequent interviews, and have to worry about every expense from food to car repairs to medical problems as a major crisis.

There are no jobs. Even if corporate America were handed another Bush tax cut for the very wealthy any jobs that might be created will be off-shore.

Men and women hoping for unemployment benefits to be extended -by people who don't have to worry about missing meals or mortgage payments - aren't lazy. They want to work full-time. They want to provide security for their families, save their homes, feel like they matter once more. Collecting unemployment is demoralizing. But I'd rather face that than watch someone I love starve, waiting for jobs that don't exist, that I am too old to hired to fill, that I can't afford to move for or to, if they might exist.

The GOP is lying to America. No amount of tax cuts for the wealthy will restore our industrial base. Bush gave them those cuts and the jobs still went offshore in synchronicity with the salaries of executives spiraling up, the cost of living spinning ever upward, and the GOP's PR machine screaming for still bigger tax cuts.

Obama’s trying but with GOP opposition layered up against every effort I don’t know that his administration can do much. Creating a new CCC like structure might help. Massive infrastructure projects might help. But getting any thing past cowardly Democrats and the GOP attempt to fail every Obama project, it may never come to be.

Like those Americans who rode U.S. 66 westward during the Dust Bowl days, I think the good days are behind us. American jobs, like American topsoil from the Great Plains, have drifted away and are never coming back. So long, America. It’s been good to know you!