Welcome to TPS!

First posts are always a little lame, so I'm going to copy-paste an article I wrote that seems to have made its way around the progressive blogosphere recently.

They No Longer Need Us. Now What?

I mean, that's the heart of the problem, right? Corporate America doesn't want or need working class Americans anymore. They can get their labor overseas now, cheaper and with fewer complications (like unions, or healthcare, or occupational safety rules, or minimum wages, or child labor laws...) Oh sure, they still need a few of us around for the menial tasks of running their little isolated continental kingdom here in North America, and they need a few peasant boys willing to play soldier for them so those pesky Chinese don't get any bright ideas about expanding their empire, but that's about the extent of it.

They still need the American middle class as a consumer base (at least for now...they're cultivating replacements in Asia as fast as they can.) But working people? Blue-collar people? What good are they anymore? What factories we have left after outsourcing are run by machines and computers now, and the number of actual humans required for those jobs gets smaller and smaller every year. Technology and uber-cheap foreign slave labor have diminished the need for working-class American jobs to a mere fraction of what we used to have. There's no recovering from that. Even if we wanted to, that cake has already been baked and there's no taking it back. We will never have the glory of unionized, labor-powerful America again. It's too complicated and expensive to change it now, and there's no real motivation for it--we LIKE technology, we LIKE super-low prices, we LIKE the conveniences and gadgets that make up most off our modern lives, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. I'm not anti-technology, but I *am* pro-truth, and the truth is this: the American working class is terminal, and will be dead within a generation.

What's left for us in a world like that? Low-income people who come from factory-worker stock can't just "retrain" and do something else. There's nothing for them. Even jobs that used to be solidly middle-class (like tech and IT jobs) are becoming scarcer and scarcer. We can't ALL be upper-level management. We can't ALL be doctors, lawyers, teachers, and career military officers. We cannot ALL go to college because we can't ALL afford it, and besides, the middle class has a vested socioeconomic interest in making sure that very few low-income people DO go to college. The more people who have those degrees, the more competition there will be for middle-class jobs, and the less those degrees are ultimately worth--for everyone. Many of you are already suffering under long, stressful job searches. Imagine how much worse it would be if your competition doubled...or tripled...or quadrupled.

What jobs are left for the millions of low-income young people in America to aspire to? What hope is there now for them? Flipping burgers at McDonald's? Checking groceries? Serving coffee at Starbucks? Even THOSE jobs seem to go to people with college degrees these days. There's a man with a Master's Degree in Psychology and a man with Master's in Social Work who both drive taxi cabs here in my city. My domestic partner lost out on a job as a housekeeper at our local hospital to someone with a degree in Political Science.

What's left for these people except for welfare and despair? And even the welfare is no longer guaranteed. The 1996 reforms removed welfare as an "entitlement" program, and replaced it with a cruel bureaucratic nightmare with insanely strict rules, a program that hardly ANYONE qualifies for anymore. Food Stamps is still safe...for now. Rest assured, they're coming for that too, eventually.

I am 30 years old, from a low-income working class family, and I'm in college. What future could I ever hope to have, especially considering that I'm an English and Creative Writing major? I'm a poet in a world that doesn't value art that can't be hoarded in someone's mansion and/or sold at auction at Sotheby's. Because I'm very smart and very, very good at what I do, I'll probably end up making $14,000 a year with no benefits as an adjunct professor, or perhaps slightly more as a high school English teacher, and that's if I'm lucky. My brother and sister, both impoverished and both lacking even a high school diploma, have no chance at all of a decent life. They'll struggle in hunger and fear until they die, and they'll look back at THESE days as the "good times" when they could still get a little help via Food Stamps and Medicaid.

Corporate America does not value working people anymore, period. To them, our lives are worthless...a drain on their resources, a source of annoyance due to the pittance of taxes they pay in order to support the few social programs we have left. Nobody values American workers anymore. There is no patriotism in the ranks of the wealthy, no sense of noble duty to the country that helped them become rich...there is nothing but greed and more greed. If we are not useful to them, then we have no value, period.

We should be in the streets screaming about this. T.S. Eliot once said, "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang, but a whimper" As much as I admire Eliot, I cannot accept that it must be that way. I know that my life has no value to the Powers That Be. I know that I am a peon, a prole, a peasant, a nothing to them. My voice is small and I have no power, save for whatever small amount of persuasion my words might possess. But I will NOT go down quietly. I will not accept my fate with silence and hopeless despair, and nobody else should either. The ONLY thing that the Powers fear is an empowered and angry citizenry, because if we rise up and scream NO MORE! together, we WILL be heard.

Let me leave you with another bit of poetry, that "useless" art that nobody can tuck away into a vault as an investment:



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Welcome to TPS. Time to figure out where to go from here.

Am I really first?! Maika'i (awesome) !

Sen. Mark, formerly known as KamaAina (Progressive-CA) ready to be sworn in (or sworn at, as the case may be ).