A Crisis Of Confidence
With America getting deeper into the folly of the political fracas taking place on every level from the Presidency down to open House seats, our leaders on both sides of the aisle have dropped the ball once again on what is truly the biggest issue on every voting aged American’s mind. That would be the issue of jobs, or the lack thereof.
Even though President Obama has crowed about rosy jobs figures, he fails to mention that most of the jobs created were low wage, service sector jobs, which have very little impact on aiding the ever growing plight faced by the vastly disappearing American middle class. In fact, the President’s pledge of 1 million jobs in the manufacturing sector during his second term has crashed and burned with a resounding thud.
We can point fingers all we want to about stalemates in Congress and the maneuverings of the lobbyists on the Hill but we, the voting public, have to shoulder just as much of the blame. We’ve laid at the altar of D.C. and Wall Street, enticed by their slick promise of fast money in glossy 401K plans, while at the same time letting them pillage and parcel our own jobs out of the country with a villainous brand of managerial capitalism never before seen in this country, let alone the world.
We’ve sat by in pure apathy while having our own politicians sell us out, promising us that Free Trade is a great thing for all of us. Being spoon fed the narrative even more by the barons of The Street, we watched millions of family sustaining jobs disappear from our towns and cities, while close to 65,000 factories were shuttered in the last decade alone.
With the country suffering from an almost permanent malaise, these barons of destructive purposes have feasted at our tables and not even left us the scraps. What they have left us with is abject poverty in many parts of the country, rivalling only the wretched times of the Great Depression. When our politicians wax poetically about social issues, they never seem to realize sustainable income and jobs is the biggest social issue affecting all other social issues.
View the increased rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, spousal abuse, suicide, crime, firearm and ammunition sales, homelessness, murder and other social ills taking place in any town that has faced the shutdown of major manufacturing. The numbers are staggering. The crisis of confidence about our politicians’ ability to accomplish anything is staggering -- very much deserved.
There must be a revival of the confidence we once had about our ability as a country to do things the right way for the American people. If we do not alter our course, could a crisis of conscience not be far behind?
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