Dr. Doom

The convergence of today's Washington Post story on BMW's hiring practices with the book I'm currently reading, Robert Reich's Locked In The Cabinet, and an interview with Fareed Zakaria last night, has me feeling pretty blue this rainy Wednesday morning. The Post story describes how the demand for jobs in the US has folks, many of whom had once had salaried positions, lining up to earn $15 an hour at a BMW plant in South Carolina. This is half of what German BMW workers earn, making the US a low cost provider of labor to the automaker. What our corporations did in moving jobs overseas to low wage countries is now happening to us.

Robert Reich's memoir of his time as Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration is eerily reminiscent of the issues we face today. As Labor Secretary from 1993-96, Reich pushed the administration to invest in education and training as one way of dealing with the increasing income disparity between the top 5% and the bottom 40% of wage earners. With NAFTA, outsourcing and globalization put those bottom 40% of earners in jeapordy of having no jobs at all, never mind minimum wage jobs. Reich's goals were frustrated by the takeover of Congress by the Gingrich forces in 1994 and Clinton's subsequent placing of deficit reduction as a higher priority than workforce investment. Fifteen years later the problem is, if anything, even worse. It's interesting to read Reich's frustration at being called a "socialist" for putting the interests of people ahead of the interests of corporations.

Finally, Zakaria made a comment last night that really resonated... that we may have finally found the genetic flaw in democracy, that it is incapable of putting long term interests ahead of immediate gratification. Certainly we have heard this since 1980, that we can have our cake and eat it too! Deficits and spending don't matter when it's corporations getting the breaks, but they do matter when Democrats are in control. The cycle seems to be swinging ever more quickly however, as our Attention Deficit society demands quick solutions to systemic problems, which can only be solved through means that society will not accept or have the patience to see through to completion. Is this what Rome was like at the end? Yup, it's a gloomy Wednesday morning all right!