Where are they hiding? (not under a bag of money)
The Blue Collar people;
the workers and their families, the people whose lives used to be centered around the school and the church, the union hall, the ball fields and the drive-ins. The blue collar people are the ones who hoped to work in the shop or the factory or in a building trade until they could send their kids to school and retire with a paid-off mortgage
My dad was an electrician. His friends were the police, on the fire department, or with the plumbers or carpenters local. There was a blue collar class in 1975 when I was starting to fix houses. They were there in 1981 when I was learning to be a carpenter. They were still around in '89 when I became a designer/builder and spent two weeks' pay for a Motorola bag phone.
Then things changed. Freidman Economics would give us everything. Suddenly greed was good. Everyone in the cities wanted a whole lot more for a whole lot less and the whole world saw it. Factories moved away, first by the hundreds then by the thousands. In my business, people from Poland and Romania and Mexico began to get much of the construction work because they worked for so much less. A contractor could have them do a job over twice and still be ahead for what he was paying. If it was right the first time, the contractor hit the jackpot.
People would talk all the time about how much they got for just a song. The banks and the building business went wild. Prices went off the charts. The waves of mostly unskilled but relentlessly willing imported labor kept rolling in, working for less and then less again just for a chance to stay in this promised land. Who could blame them?
The older guys started to leave the trades in disgust. The unions continued to fall apart. I don't really know what happened to the ones who worked the factories, but they are gone. They disappeared into the police force or the fire department if they were young enough and lucky. The rest just faded out.
Ross Perot warned us about the sucking sound of companies and jobs and taxes leaving the country. The jobs left fast, but people higher up got more and more and more.
In the late 90's the rich got cute and started to run a game on the rest of us, especially on the newer Americans. Ten years later the game fell apart. The ones on top that saw it coming and had grabbed everything they could hide by then. The foreclosures started and the country (us, not the higher ups) was broke. The Blue Collar wannabees, imported by the millions to make more money rich guys, the ones that were hoping to make a good life here in the promised land, were the first ones let go. You can see the few who are left standing around Home Depots all over the country every morning of every day of the year.
The ones that just came over and the ones that were already here have lost the lives and futures they dreamed of for their families. They have disappeared-even if they are still around somewhere- and they are not coming back to the emerging new corporate-owned America.
Now I suspect the class of people that we in this country called 'Blue Collar' will have to be recreated from scratch. A new Blue Collar class. We will get no help from from those who got rich in the last 50 years. We will have to figure it out for ourselves.
If we don't, our country will soon be just a very few professional rich guys with about 350 millions servants with no hope for anything.
And you can bet they will try to take all our freedom and turn it into cash, just like they took all the jobs and all the money.
But there is something they will have to do first.
And you can bet they will try to take all our freedom and turn it into cash, just like they took all the jobs and all the money.
But there is something they will have to do first.
Right now, the professional rich guys are systematically taking away our institutions which, taken together, are called 'Civil Society'. It sounds fancy and academic, but civil society is, for us, our schools and churches and clubs, local sports and theaters, small companies, shops, local governments and local unions. These are the places we meet and organize ourselves and talk to each other about what is really happening out there and to us, and what will probably happen to our children.
And what we can do about it if we act together.
And what we can do about it if we act together.
The rich guys don't want us to have dangerous places like this. It is dangerous for them if we talk too much, figure out what they are doing, and decide to rebuild our own middle class. They could lose some of their money, or maybe even have to go back to work and make something or build something. We blue collars could be very dangerous if we suddenly decide to take back our power and rebuild our country.
I think I might have a pretty good idea how to get started, how to take back the power.
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