Reply #65: What planet do you live on? [View All]

New York? California?
In the past two years I have lived in Ohio and two Southern states. I have seen entire towns destroyed when the one major factory in town was shut down. Real wages for the average worker have dropped. I have met many families where someone had a good union job but now they're on welfare and wal-mart. I've been to the small towns where half the people are on welfare after the factory moved to Mexico, there are many of them. Yes, millions are unemployed. The promise of new job growth due to NAFTA and the WTO was a lie because the new jobs were lower paying with fewer benefits. They were McDonalds and Wal-Mart jobs, not good paying union jobs with benefits. Now the problem is reaching the upper-middle class where computer programmers are seeing their jobs sent to India.

That is the reality. The fact that you are unaware of that reality is probably representative of the urban DLC leaders who are clueless about what is going on in the midwest and south and are thus clueless about how to win elections in those areas.

Yes, there are enough towns in Ohio that have been hurt or destroyed by NAFTA and the WTO to change the outcome of the election. I have been to those towns. Yes, there are millions of people who remember what it was like when they had a job good enough to support a family on.

As I said, talking about changing the tax code once in a while is not a serious discussion of the issue. Kerry rarely brought it up and didn't propose anything that would have changed what is happening. You may think this is an abstract issue, but it isn't to millions of Americans who are not having their most important issue addressed by either major party candidate.

And before you use Clinton as an example remember that in '92 he promised not to sign NAFTA until changes were made to protect labor and environmental. Yes he backed out of his promise and signed it without changes. Maybe Clinton selling out the most organized constituency in the party had something to do with Democratic losses in '94. Of course you won't read that analysis in the corporate media because it is owned by the same companies that own the DLC.