Monday, January 10, 2005

The Job Famine

Some two hundred thousand jobs have fled the Commonwealth of Massachusetts since the beginning of the current recession. Faced with the challenge, The Romney Admin’s response has been clear and compassionate; cut unemployment benefits and funding for job-retraining.
Yup, that will entice those lost jobs back from Thailand and Bangalore. Decaf’s logic seems to be, if we turn Massachusetts into a wintry sort of Third World Country with real Third World Wages, we will become immensely and unbeatably competitive.
More and more, Humble Elias sees Governor Romney as a hired outside Receiver or a sort of Absentee Landlord bound and determined to bust up the state and sell off the bits for whatever he can get. What little economic security we have is to be abolished in the relentless race to underbid Pakistan. Then in due course, Mitt will adjourn to Epsom Circle New Hampshire to overawe the peasantry with tales of how he “saved” Massachusetts.
The job situation in the Commonwealth is a public scandal in every way. Crack open the Boston Sunday Globe’s vaulted supersized Help Wanted section, nothing but endless pages of jobs hustling aluminum siding over the phone. When was the last time anyone opened a factory in this state? The answer, damn near forever!
The current round of laissez-faire utopianism is quickly creating a new continental underclass, an urban peasantry naught phone bank jockeys and customer service reps. Bereft of class consciousness, unprotected,atomized, and unheralded, but yet they are still succulent prey for a new class of economic raptors.

And an underclass my friends is a very bad thing for a living republic to have.

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