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Winning the White Working Class

By David Moberg

Tom Lewandowski, a former General Electric factory worker, heads the central labor union council in this northeastern Indiana city of a quarter million people. Once an industrial powerhouse, Fort Wayne is still a manufacturing center despite decades of plant closings that have often been due to jobs being moved overseas. Although socialists were powerful in local politics here before World… return to article

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    Our current economic situation has developed over a period of decades and administrations. None of the candidates is adequately addressing our situation and may or may not truly be aware of just how dire it is.

    Neither is this a “White Working Class” issue. White, Black, Blue Collar or White Collar — we are gradually being shunted into the Uncounted and Unrepresented former Middle Class American.

    We may have Bill O’Reilly “sticking up for us” and Lou Dobbs fighting “The War on the Middle Class,” but both political parties are listening to Wall Street not Main Street — all else is just noise.

    Obama has listed the problems and Clinton and McCain have echoed a few, but their website solutions are not even close to offering a workable strategy. They have no way of empathizing — What do horsemen know of tired feet?

    First manufacturing economy jobs and now service economy jobs are going to the lowest global worker. some are exported to where the labor is cheapest others are being filled by cheaper imported workers.

    NAFTA was just the beginning of the end for our middle class.

    United States Posted by whattheheck on May 14, 2008 at 10:01 AM

    Whoever the next President is he will have to inflict a lot of pain on Americans of every income class because the bush administrations are guilty of gross neglect of all its governmental responsibilities.  Its time for America to pay up in order to get up to speed with the rest of the world.  Its should be obvious to all now that 9/11 and the wars were/are diversions, while bush picked our pockets.  Plus, while we looked the other way the world left us behind, Americans are like tourist lost in a unfamiliar world, vulnerable and broke.  Bitter, confused?  Yeah.  But scared more than anything else.

    United States Posted by theloneous on May 14, 2008 at 10:23 AM

    Hi Theloneous,

    We’ll get the pain due to the ballouts and protection of the mortgage crooks by the Fed, the Treasury Dept. and Congress. The huge increases are being passed on to us as the dollar is made to fall and the price of everything goes up.

    I paid $3.95 a gallon for gas, but since I’m not working I’m not going anywhere. The people who are getting it stuck to them are those who must commute farther in order to get work and the cab drivers who can’t raise their prices, but must buy gas or earn nothing.

    Food costs are going higher and in some countries are in short supply. We can thank every administration since the mid 1970s.  According to Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s Sec. of Labor, a 35-year-old man now earns 12% less than one the same age in 1975 due to the falling value of the dollar.

    My 42-year-old son does the same job I did back then and is even worse off than average. I made the same annual pay in 1975 that he makes now and fed a family of four. He is single and can hardly make it due to inflation, increased income taxes, Social Security tax and health care costs. His 1996 car needed work yesterday and it cost nearly $1400 — water pump brakes and ordinary maintenance.

    Whoever the president is cannot fix things without the congress getting off the butts and doing something about our major problems in this country.

    United States Posted by whattheheck on May 14, 2008 at 2:25 PM

    Hi whattheheck,

    The next President, if he’s able to resolve any of the numerous ailments afflicting this country, will be demonized by the very people he’s helping.  In real life there is no “spoon full of sugar to help the medicine go down”, and congress needs to get behind well thought out long term solutions instead of the band-aid approach, the former being the awful, bad tasting medicine that’s needed.

    You said, “My 42-year-old son does the same job I did back then and is even worse off than average. I made the same annual pay in 1975 that he makes now and fed a family of four.” I know I marvel now at how my dad supported a wife and six kids on a letter carriers salary, it would be damn near impossible for him to do that these days.

    United States Posted by theloneous on May 15, 2008 at 10:47 AM

    I think one reason your dad and I were able to do it was there was less spinning of the government financial numbers. The dollar was worth a lot more then. I was self-employed and was paying my income taxes and Social Security (Self-employment Tax) quarterly. Now they pretend things are just fine — except for food and energy costs. I wonder how many of those in government have ever tried doing without either one.

    Until the last few years that I worked I had to pay both the employee share of the Social Security tax and about half of the employer share. Later I only paid half of the total, but every year it took a huge jump. So even in those years when politicians bragged about a “tax cut” I could see immediately I was ALWAYS paying more than the year before. The pretend cuts were their way of trying to put sugar on the bad news
    .
    Even if some people believed things were not getting worse we have now come to the point where almost everyone knows we are being lied to and we may eventually be able to force congress and the White House to take responsibility for our country. (We can hope so at least.)

    My kids are the first generation in my family who are worse off than the previous one. My dad’s family were coal miners and he had to quit school to care for the family when my grandfather had a stroke and couldn’t work the last six years of his life.

    My parents waited to get married until my dad’s younger brothers and sisters (a family of 9) were old enough to care for themselves, so I was their only kid and had it pretty good after the WW2 started and there was plenty of work.
    .
    My kids had it better still and one is a college graduate, but I feel sorry for people with young children today. Even those with an education are having a tougher time and I see no end in sight yet.

    United States Posted by whattheheck on May 15, 2008 at 11:40 AM
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