I was born the son of a
working man and I shall die the son of a working man. I can't help it. It
is not only in my genes but seared deep into my soul.
My father was an immigrant
and my mothers people were here since the early seventeenth century. Throughout
my life I have straddled the great American class divide with a foot in both
American stories that have made up our history.
I grew up in a typical
American factory small town of the past. This was a place where the rich, the
poor, the working poor and the middle class lived cheek to jowl with one
another. We went to school together, worshiped together and essentially grew up
together. Our lives however different because of wealth and position, were not
foreign or alien to one another. Any resentment we might have had regarding
those with more would be settled academically or on the sports field where we
were all equal. The only members of the Jewish faith in my small town were my
neighbors. My scoutmaster was a black man, his son was the first person I ever
wrestled competitively and my Aunt integrated our First Baptist Church when the
Black Baptist Church burnt down.
My parents taught my
brothers and I that we were neither better nor worse than any one else and that
in America our future would be what we determined and not what anyone else
determined it to be. I
didn't know it at the time but I was a very lucky fellow to have had the
upbringing I had.
When I was 20, I went off
to New York City to finish my education and find my destiny. The NYC of the
early sixties was still the old New York of tribes, enclaves and neighborhoods
which had epitomised the city for years like a long running Broadway play. This
was the New York that reinvented itself every 20 years in order to accommodate
the latest group of refugees from the rest of the world and yet retained the
basic values that served as the glue to keep everything from flying apart. The
artists also came here to paint, compose, write, act, sing, perform and change
the culture with the passionate verve that only the talented driven by the
addiction to create can understand. The edge of the envelope was NYC and it was
glorious.
I did not know when I first arrived here 50 years ago that I was witnessing the death of one NY and the birth of another. Today the NY where I first learned to love Jewish, Italian, Chinese, Puerto Rican and Soul food (plus every other kind known to man) , Jazz, Opera, great art and literature, theatre, film, Major League Baseball, politics and the 24/7/365 beat of city life in rhythm to the hip and the cool is gone, replaced with the scream of a city on speed that is less diverse class wise and race wise than it was when I first came.
The egalitarianism is
largely gone...the Public School system where I briefly taught is in
decrepitude laid low by a union at war with the children it is supposed to teach
and their parents. Tax payers are fleeing because housing and everything else
has become unaffordable to the majority. The newcomers must live by necessity
in the so called "Outer Boroughs" because they earn at a fraction of what those
who left made.
This last Sunday the Daily
News in a two page opinion piece by Richard Florida, Director of the Martin
Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto entitled "Rich Man, Poor Man,
ANGRY MAN" chronicled the new NYC which is threatened with losing its
last greatest asset ...being the safest big city in the world due to politicians
who are "progressive" racial arsonists and who over time have spent us into
perdition.
The city has become what
Mayoral Candidate Bill deBlasio calls "A Tale of Two Cities" with those who can
make it in finance, law, media, advertising, publishing, entertainment and info
tech are doing well and virtually everyone else is relegated to areas such as
food prep,health care support and personal care which account for " almost half
of all new jobs added in the tri-state region since 2009". In most of the five
boroughs including parts of Manhattan, 75% "toil in service jobs with salaries
averaging $25,000 or less". The high paying jobs are concentrated in Manhattan
with "80% in lower Manhattan and ajacent parts of Brooklyn". " "25% of all adult
workers in Brooklyn and 20% of those in the Bronx have jobs that pay less than
$10 an hour".
Welfare here with all its
major programs added up is at present worth $38,004 for a single mother of
two. This is after tax income and it makes working or even striving to
work unattractive to someone who consciously knows that they will be financially
less well off with a job than on the dole. They are like a rabbit caught in a
trap baited with food and the other "stuff" that Government now gives away.
Manufacturing and
maritime/dock work now is barely visible, and even small business, the engine of
any economic growth, is under continuous assault by a rapacious government bent
on sucking every last penny out of them until they too disappear into a mist
called the good old days.
All of this is occurring
while NYC is experiencing a boom that has attracted 360,000 new jobs since the
recession and "high tech start ups " worth $2 billion. The worst part of this
new NYC is that the so called "rich" are concentrating in certain areas and the
so called "non rich" live every where else.
No longer are the
neighborhoods or the civic culture integrating the economic classes. We are
becoming ghettoized according to our economic station in life... our zip codes
are becoming the predictors of our futures as class stratification, hardens and
ossifies. "Upstairs, Downstairs" has come to America.
NYC is also
reflecting this dynamic as it spreads through out the rest of the country as
documented in "Coming Apart: The State of White America,
1960-2010" by Charles Murray. Niall Ferguson in his review of the book
described it as such "Murray meticulously chronicles and measures the
emergence of two wholly distinct classes: a new upper class, first identified in
The Bell Curve as "the cognitive elite," and a new "lower class," which
he is too polite to give a name. And he vividly localizes his argument by
imagining two emblematic communities: Belmont, where everyone has at least one
college degree, and Fishtown, where no one has any."
All of this is grist for
the mill of class warfare as practiced with elan by this President and his
acolytes. By keeping the economy from growing while real worth declines, we are
now in a perfect storm of "haves and have nots" where class and race resentment
will drive people to the party of government which will continue to delude them
with demagoguery, bread and circuses and not real, tangible opportunity. None
of this is by accident.
All of this is by
design. It is "Hobbsian" in origin, but where the state will guarantee that
while life may be nasty and
brutish in comparison with the educated elites, it will not be
short unless of course you become too expensive or too old to save if you
become ill.
The record of this
Progressive President is dismal at best and intentionally destructive at
worst..to wit:
"Four of five
U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty, or reliance on Government
for at least part of their lives...
Median household
income was 8.1 percent lower than in 2007...
More than half of
the 46 million Americans living in poverty in 2011 were black
or Hispanic...
From 2009 to 2011, the
mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution
rose by an estimated 28 percent while those in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4
percent...
There were 46.2
million Americans living in poverty in the United States in 2011, the largest
number of persons counted as poor in the 53 years of poverty
measurements...further, 6.6 percent of the population, or 20.4
million people, lived in deep poverty, defined as living 50 percent below the
poverty line...
19 million whites
fell below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four, accounting for 41
percent of the nation’s poor, nearly twice the number of poor
African-Americans.
76 percent of white
adults by the time they turn 60 will face economic insecurity, as defined by a
year or more of periodic joblessness, reliance on government aid such as food
stamps, or income below 150 percent of the poverty
line...
Those who have dropped
out of the labor force increased from an annual total of
462,000 in 2008 to 909,000 in 2012.
The number of
workers “not in the labor force” has
increased to 88.3 million in
2012,..
Seven out of
eight jobs, created under President Obama have
been part-time jobs.
Under
Obama, 1,882,000 part-time jobs have been created, compared to
only 270,000 full-time jobs created between January 2009 and July
2013.
The U.S.
home-ownership rate is back to where it was 18 years ago in
1995, at 65 percent in the second quarter of 2013...
Student debt
totaled $994 billion as of June 30, up from $440 billion in 2008,
On Jan. 19,
2009, the price of regular retail gasoline in the U.S.
averaged $1.847 a gallon... on Aug. 12, 2013, the price of
regular retail gas averaged $3.561 a gallon.
Obama’s continued series
of annual federal budget deficits in the range of $1 trillion has increased the
national debt more than 50 percent since he has been office, from a total of
$11.9 trillion in fiscal 2009 to a current estimated total of $18.2 trillion in
fiscal 2014."*
*SOURCES
Jerome Corsi, AP Report, US Census Bureau, Kennedy School of Government. at
Harvard, PEW Research Center, Food Research and Action Center, Food and
Nutrition Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, US Bureau of Labor
Statistics, house Ways and Means Committee, Federal Reserve Bank, Energy
Information Agency,
These have become the real
results of the real agenda of today's Democratic Party which is a "Faustian
bargain" between power brokers and special interests who evangelize the
outwardly "noble" sentiments of the "Progressive religion" while exempting
themselves from its rules and consequences. In the end these architects of the
end of equality in America really only represent themselves as they attempt to
control our lives and our destinies. We have been divided...we have not divided
ourselves!
I was born the son of a
working man and I shall die the son of a working man. I will not die however
separated from my fellow man as a "ward" of an infantilism driven "nanny state"
disguised as a benevolent guardian of everything it thinks I require in my
pursuit of my happiness.
Our closing music for
today is "Fanfare for the Common Man" which use to be an anthem for the
Progressives of the Henry Wallace era. As a common man I am appropriating it in
the name of all common men and women because the progressives do not, have not
or will not ever speak for us...To paraphrase Patrick Henry "if this be politically incorrect
treason...then make the most of it."
ERLANSSON
THIS COMMENTARY CAN BE
HEARD IN AN ABRIDGED FORM ON THE VERNUCCIO/ALLISON REPORT ON WVOX 1460
AM/http://www.wvox.com ON SATURDAY AUGUST 24, 2013
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