The middle class. It used to be something you could expect to be a part of with a high school education. Maybe you’d gone to a trade school, or had an apprenticeship. You might even live in a small town. And you could get decent work, put your kids through college, or at least help them out.
Today, those kids are struggling to stay in the middle class even if they’ve been to college. Low-income families often despair of the class mobility available to previous generations. And as further opportunities have opened to minorities, it’s become harder and harder to get ahead. This has made it difficult to economically redress the fact that at the end of the Civil Rights era, the country was already starting out with disproportionate numbers of minorities living in poverty.
Add in the sort of greedy, feudalistic rightwing economics we’ve been putting up with since Reagan, and people are falling behind or just staying behind with a regularity masked by the occasional bubble in one sector or another. We’re fast becoming a nation of serfs with falling life expectancies.
Environmental skeptics play into our tenuous grasp on whatever lifestyle we manage. They tell us that fixing global warming will make us all poor, and that it will hurt those people who are even poorer than we are. They’ll tell us that zeroing out our carbon emissions would be an economic catastrophe of dire proportions. But that’s just as much of a lie as when those same people were telling us that global warming wasn’t happening.
Yet a carbon neutral economy is a job engine, first and foremost. Not like the dotcom bubble, where only a slice of the population with a certain level of education got better opportunities, either. The level of change we would need to see to cancel out our emissions and live cleanly would bring back the era of middle class jobs for people with high school and trade school educations.
To fix our infrastructure, to change over, we’re going to need a lot of things made and built that can’t be outsourced. We’ll have construction work doing building retrofitting, building distributed generation power facilities, or building mass transit and rail projects. When those mass transit and rail projects are finished, we’ll need people to run and repair them. We’ll have manufacturing jobs, building the solar panels, wind turbines, wave turbines, and biomass co-firing machinery necessary to tackle our energy problems a piece at a time. Our electric power delivery infrastructure will have to be completely overhauled so that it’s more efficient. Our recycling industry could be expanded universally, instead of existing as a piecemeal patchwork. We’d be buying more local food, with more of our food dollar going directly to the farmer, and so there could be more farm sector work that paid a decent wage.
We could have all this, and an environment that was slowly returning to health. Inner cities whose air stopped stunting children’s lungs and giving them asthma. Farming communities whose residents didn’t face higher rates of miscarriage, developmental disorders and degenerative disorders due to the poisons that they’re forced to spray on their fields. A transportation system whose main hallmark wasn’t hours of miserable gridlock.
Sound good? Why do you think our politicians won’t demand it for us?
Why not? Apparently it is not in their individual self-interest to do so.
Short term gain, is apparently worth the long term pain for these publicly elected “representatives of the people”. I know, it doesn’t make any sense to me either.
Is that a trick question? (I read Jerome’s diary earlier today, it was an eye-opener…)
Because the Powers That Be (the ones with the money to fund elections and pay for lobbyists and media coverage to get their message out) realize that regardless of the long-term, wide-spread benefits, changing the way business is done does NOT guarantee them the short-term, ever-increasing profit margins they have come to expect as their rightful due. And they are very risk-adverse, when they’ve got a sure thing going already — unless they have no choice.
Short-term greed, as Jerome described, is short term thinking, because it is easier to stick with the status quo (since they are plainly benefiting from it), and play upon people’s suspicion of “radical” change in their way of life to keep things just as they are.
Not that they don’t ever learn from mistakes or think ahead. I hear it’s almost impossible to get affordable storm damage insurance in Florida and the Gulf Coast nowadays.
But that radical change would bring great benefits. Even the big companies that get the government and military contracts would benefit, if it was presented properly. I mean, does Lockheed really care if they are building jet fighters or high-speed bullet trains?
Look how much technological advancement and invention came out of the space race, invention that proved to have multiple uses. There’s already a lot of inventing and creative thinking going on, but with full support, it would provide a huge boost to the economy and job market.
It’s amazing how quickly business and industry can adjust when the option to not change is taken away from them. They can be remarkably adaptable, in fact. I have no worries that the private, for-profit sector will find a way to continue to run their businesses and make money, even if they have to make major changes in how they do so.
If we had universal health care and a reasonable safety net (and the bankruptcy laws were rewritten to protect entrepreneurs and home-business ventures, or government support of such businesses were stronger), then it would open up a lot more opportunities for small business. If we looked at sustainability and keeping things local when feasible. Alternate transportation options, like high-speed rail, local mass-transit, and bicycles. Cars that get MUCH better gas mileage than 35mpg.
One line I remember from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth — the reason the oil companies, etc., aren’t eager to change the way they do things, or diversify sources of energy, is because there’s all this oil they haven’t had a chance to sell yet. All that profit they haven’t had time to make. Can’t change their course ’till they get to sell and profit from every last drop. Regardless of what happens in the meantime… or what it’s doing to the planet.
The bottom line is to change the priorities — to look at the long-term benefits to the community, not the potential for profits. Doing things right still brings in profits — they’re just spread out over a longer time frame, and are distributed more widely.
I really find it hard to wrap my head around why your average conservative would leave all this money on the table by pooh-poohing the possibilities that carbon-neutral economy has to offer.
There’s really no downside, especially if you get Detroit involved in the R&D effort as well as making petroleum-free cars.
But then maybe Janet is right above; there isn’t enough short-term gain to be had.
During the glory days of the middle class around 1960, nearly 40% of jobs in the private sector were held by union members. link
Today it is the union members on the government payroll that are struggling to protect “the American way of life” and being demonized by the wealthy parasites we have put in control. Check out Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility
Thanks to television, we have moved away from the idea of honor and dignity in a working-class life. Everybody wants to be a member of the ‘elite.’
I do believe that labor unions can lead us back to the future. We the people have been effectively divided and conquered.