Posted on 04/29/2015 1:12:23 PM PDT by Citizen Zed
Pro tip: If you're a civic leader, and riots are sweeping your city, close your social networking apps. Put your smartphone down. It is probably not the best time to take to Facebook or Twitter and start offering a mini-manifesto about the downsides of U.S. trade policy.
Case in point: John Angelos, chief operating officer of the Baltimore Orioles. On Monday night, as Baltimore was besieged by rioters, Angelos let loose a 323-word, 2020-character tweetstorm. After his team's game with the Chicago White Sox was canceled, Angelos decried the violence and looting, said due process must be respected, and then started channeling Elizabeth Warren:
That said, my greater source of personal concern, outrage and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night's property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle class and working class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others, plunged tens of millions of good, hard-working Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American's civil rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state. [John Angelos]
Angelos is a progressive Democrat, like his father, Peter, the Orioles' long-time majority owner who made his millions suing big business. And here, perhaps predictably, Angelos the younger is offering a too-simple story of economic injustice perpetrated by Corporate America and its lackeys in Washington. If not for unfair trade deals and the job offshoring they promote, he seems to suggest, America's immediate postwar era of good-paying, lifetime factory jobs would have never ended. This is a bit of economic nostalgia that even President Obama engages in from to time. As Obama said in a 2012 speech, "In the decades after World War II there was a general consensus that the market couldn't solve all of our problems on its own. …This consensus, this shared vision led to the strongest economic growth and the largest middle class that the world has ever known. It led to a shared prosperity."
That golden age could not last indefinitely, of course. Eventually the other advanced industrial economies recovered and began competing with American companies and workers. They were later joined by a rising Asia — first Japan and then South Korea, China, and India. American cities built around manufacturing — be it cars in Detroit or steel in Baltimore and Pittsburgh — suffered greatly. And as global competition increased, machines got better, allowing companies to generate more output with fewer workers. Manufacturing output as a share of GDP has actually been pretty stable since 1960, even as manufacturing employment has fallen by more than half.
I'm sure you're up to the challenge though. Go for it!
How about culture?
Or lack thereof.
Lack of jobs (and the breeding for cash that replaced them) certainly plays a role, but in the end I attribute them to the fact that Black America, which had so much false hope for the Kenyan Muslim, has watched him govern for six years and their lives have only gotten noticeably worse. Now they know they will ALWAYS be the bottom rung in our society without major behavioral changes, and they can’t accept that.
Those idiots spouting about how “He gonna pay my rent, buy my gas, blah blah blah” realize that he has governed as a white communist, and that while sexual deviants and illegal aliens have certainly benefited from his reign blacks haven’t seen one red cent...
A good gripe -- whether or not it has anything to do with the demise of Eddie Gray.
Freddie Gray, as in "Freddie's Dead."
(Great Curtis Mayfield tune.)
Culture, yes. A culture cultivated and perpetuated by liberals. Once that would never have taken root if it weren’t for liberal welfare policies.
Ah, yes. From “Superfly”
You’re right too.
It’s not so much of a culture as it is an anti-culture - a foil for Western civilization.
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