There was a time, in the oh-so-distant past, that if you worked in construction or engineering and you lost your job, and there was no private-sector demand for your services, the government gave you a job constructing and engineering things. If you were a farmer and the price of your crops crashed, you could sign up for government relief. If you were a writer or an actor and you couldn't find work, there were government projects you could enlist in. Young people just out of high school who couldn't find work could gain employment in government conservation initiatives. In short, government put people to work when the private sector failed them. But that was then, and this is now, and what we get from our government now are public-private partnerships and promise zones and technology hubs and all these privatization schemes that cost us money and which rarely ever deliver. Worst of all, I think, is the call to re-train the long-term unemployed for the jobs of the 21st Century, which is really a call to acquiesce to the permanence of a Wal-Mart economy that pays crap wages.
How to fix? I suppose the practical answer is to redouble our efforts to wrestle control of Team Democrat away from the neoliberal corporatists who have trashed the party's legacy, but at this point, I'm not really sure if that's even possible anymore. I hate to sound so pessimistic, but when you hear the leader of our liberal political party calling for corporate tax cuts and partnering with Verizon and Apple to deliver services that government should be providing for free, you know the game is up, and we've lost. I never thought that a politician like Barack Obama would be the person who drove me to embrace the Greens, but I don't think I want to be supporting people who claim to care about income inequality and climate change but who are actively pursuing policies that will make these problems worse. So until further notice, I'm outta Team Democrat.
---Baron V
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