If You're Management, Don't Call Yourself a Lefty

There is this conceit among the management class (particularly members of that class who style themselves as left-of-center) that if we just send former workers in the devastated production sector to college so they can become "knowledge workers" or something, then that will make up for destroying the industries that provided them a decent living. Former President Clinton used to harp on this a lot when he was president.

The blunt truth is, that plan isn't going to work, at least not in a place possessing the scale and complexity of the United States. The Swiss can be the world's bankers; The Arabs can be the world's oil company; the United States, if it is going to be a prosperous place, needs to be a place where the main engine of prosperity is taking raw materials, making something valuable out of them, and then selling those valuable things at a profit.

We can't be a first-tier economy by selling each other life insurance and software; we need to make things. Physical, need-machine-tools-to-make-them things - cars, boats, clothing, machine tools, electronics. The Democrats used to know this, and acted accordingly; now they are the members of the management class who want to send line workers to college so they can become computer programmers. My Democratic Party has become a sold-out, pathetic shell of its former glory. It's made itself absolutely ridiculous. It's become ineffective and delusional. Call the rest home and make the arrangements already: they're done.

That's More Like It

It ain't over til it's over, as Yogi Berra would say, but it looks like the chances are now very good for Health Care Reform, real health care reform, to pass Congress and be signed by the President. Personally, I would have preferred single payer or a hybrid along the lines of what the Germans do, but it has a robust "Public Option" and is a huge, HUGE step forward. My congratulations to President Obama and the Congressional Democrats for an unassailable triumph.

I will be so bold as to predict that this is the beginning of the end for the radical right faction of the Republican Party.