Our Real Economic Problem

I watched "60 Minutes" the other night and there was a very sad visit to a town in Iowa. They talked with numerous people who had lost their jobs and to many small-business people who were forced to fire workers and who may have to shut down their businesses.

The sad thing about this whole mess is that it really has little to do with the bad economy as such and a lot to do with the fact that the Maytag factory, which employed 2500 people, shut down and moved their operation to Mexico. Of course small businesses cannot make it! You cannot lose 2500 local incomes in a small town and stay in business.

What this made me realize is that all of the harping about more jobs during the election campaigns will have no results whatsoever unless the government is willing, in some way, to stop large manufacturing enterprises from leaving the country. The government cannot create jobs no matter what politicians we throw into office. And small businesses are not dying because of the failure of banks to loan money. The basic dire fact in this country today is that the large corporations that can escape high-priced American labor are doing just that. And what that means is that the American labor force is slowly being reduced to the level of a Third-World labor force. And the Middle Class is sliding down that slope with them.

Essentially, this has nothing to do with the recession but it does have a lot to do with the fact that we will not soon emerge from the recession. The jobs just aren't there and they are not going to be there.

Guess what. The Republicans are not going to do anything about this because they are "in bed" with the entrepreneurs who have invented this globalization scheme. And the Democrats are not going to do anything about it because they are completely gutless. But if nothing is done, the middle- and working-classes of America will soon find themselves at mere-survival wages as opposed to the golden age of America's "high standard of living." That means they will not be able to buy cars or purchase houses or go to fancy restaurants. So that also means that all those "service industries" we've been so proud of will also vanish. It's not going to be a pretty picture.