So glad I'm not a politician: A RANT

Well, they are at it again. This morning on Meet The Press the Newt sang the praises of Mitt Romney only a few short months after he profiled him as "the devil incarnate" and unfit to run the country. There is no better time than during a presidential campaign to chant "An honest politician is an oxymoron."


I don't care whether it is on the Democratic or Republican side. They are all willows in the wind when it comes to backing up former claims or accusations if it is detrimental to the party. Meanwhile us folks out here in Regular Citizen Land are bombarded with veerrry expensive ad campaigns, robo calls and lots of plain, unmitigated BS.


Where are the statements like, "I don't have the sole power, but if elected President I will strive to do the following things with Congress. Here is my plan." Then lay out actual steps that make sense. Not empty aspirations or policies that have been put through the wringer so many times they are tattered and the colors have faded. How about some real world stuff? Things that can ACTUALLY be done? Real solutions agreed to by both sides.


And all of that money being spent by not only official campaigns but Super Pacs. The Super Pacs will spend so much with no hard restrictions about vetting information or how skewed or nasty it can become. Sort of like the buying of public office. Millions struggle to survive while billions are spent on hogwash and hurling dirt. Did you ever stop to think that a portion of those billions is taxpayer money? Dollars scraped out to try to elect someone who will have the ability to live up to their broad promises.

I for one am sick of it. I don't know a lot about Bain Capital and probably should do some research. What I do know is what can happen when a conglomerate acquires a company, raids its assets and then throws the employees and independent contractors to the wind. That happened to me several years ago.


I had a great job with a commercial lighting manufacturer. Then it was bought by a conglomerate. Overnight I was transitioned to straight commission/independent contractor status, but that seemed okay. They said they would pay me a guaranteed base against commissions so I could survive and stay on. However, now I was paying my own expenses including travel for business and insurance, etc. 


For the next several months it went on that way. I was exceeding my draw so it seemed okay until with no prior notice the letter went out that the 27-year-old, $25 Million a year company was closing due to bankruptcy. They had been drained. The assets and goodwill were sold to a major company and every independent rep and many more were screwed. I lost more than $10,000 in commissions due me plus the charges for expenses on my credit cards. In case you don't know it, independent contractors are at the end of the line when it comes to bankruptcy settlements. They rarely recover anything and I was no exception.


Let's look at reality. We've spent trillions on wars during the years since 911, our infrastructure is crumbling in many places and rebuilding it definitely would result in jobs, many wealthy investors have made big bucks while the unsavvy, small investors have lost their shirts, the internet has streamlined many areas where independent businesses formerly thrived and those businesses have crashed along with their employees, automation has stolen more jobs that will never come back and that's just part of the big picture.


We can't blame one person, one party or one targeted "villain". This is big and it takes recognition of the multilayered situations that have created this toxic environment. If parties work together, there's a good chance we can pull out of it, although it will be slow work. It didn't happen overnight. If the cat fights and finger-pointing continue, well, folks, then it's anyone's ballgame! 

There is more to it than meets the eye!

It is a definite given that our country is in a slump. Unemployment is high and in a totally normal reaction we search for the cause and solution.

Well, there are some obvious givens and politicians on both sides add their spin so they can justify pointing the finger at the other side. That's also normal--nothing more than business as usual. Let's face it, we've been through two wars, corporate bailouts of a proportion that no one would ever have imagined, both sides of congress at odds with each other resulting in a stalemate, i.e., absolutely nothing gets done quickly or without lots of yelling, accusations and logjams. We have elections on the horizon so it appears the main agenda is to make sure the other guy doesn't get elected.

Somewhere along the line I thought Congress was supposed to support the good of the people, but that seems to be nothing more than a pipe dream. Fat cats are getting fatter, the "thin cats" are on forced diets and the normal sized ones--what used to be the backbone of America--are present in smaller and smaller numbers every day.

So, with all of that said, here's what hit me like a sledge hammer on Sunday. Sure, we have sent so many of our technical and manufacturing jobs to emerging or thriving nations while ours wallows in unemployment, but there is another factor no other president had to contend with to the degree it is present today. No other generation was faced with this. Think Industrial Revolution, then hype it so many times you'll lose count. The name of the other culprit is AUTOMATION.

On Sunday we drove to The Grove shopping mall and took our ticket from the machine. A real person used to be in the booth. We checked out automatically, too. Many times when we go to the movies we get our ticket online to speed things up and make sure we have a seat. High school kids used to depend upon jobs in the movies to earn expenses. Not now. Most of it is automated.

We went to the grocery store where the scan lines were busy. Less checker's jobs. We made it a point not to use the scan, but waited for the person who was hanging onto their job. Then we filled up at the gas station and inserted a credit card. How many remember the days when gas stations actually had attendants who checked your oil and washed your windshield?

The list just goes on and on. Try to make a list of all the jobs that have been lost that will never come back. Sure we still need people to do the new customer service functions, programming, and all the other things attendant to commerce, but most of them are no longer in the U.S. Once you count the jobs that are now done electronically and multiply that by the number of stores or services across the entire country that replaced real people, it becomes scary. When you only look at one automatic checkstand, for example, it doesn't seem like that much, but what about putting that into the context of over 200,000 supermarkets in the United States. The picture looks a lot different. The big question, of course, is how do we retrain people for jobs that we can then keep in our own country?

Everything we see daily in the news is of great concern, but it is only part of the problem.