Pacific Views

The 'latin-americanization' of the US.

No, we're don't mean the influx of immigrants from Latin America. We're talking about Oricinus's argument that the brand of corporate conservatism examplified by Dubya's Republicans is reducing the standard of living of US workers to that of those in Latin America.

I'm not sure how many people writing in the blogosphere -- or working in journalism, or especially among the pundit class -- have a clear sense of ... what it is like to be trapped working for a Wal-Mart or a Con-Agra or any of the thousands of faceless bad bosses whose main purpose in life seems to be finding ways to worsen everyday life for their workers: refusing raises, shortening hours, slashing benefits, pitting employees against each other, allowing work conditions to steadily deteriorate. Eventually they may taste it, of course (anyone who works for a midsized or small-town chain newspaper already has), but for now it is mostly an abstraction, and thus not something as important as, say, John Kerry's haircut.

I have, however -- when I was younger, and before I graduated from college. It is nearly impossible to describe: the claustrophobia, the oppressiveness, the complete mindfuck that is life when one is caught up in this machinery. All I can say is that I worked desperately to escape it, and swore I would try never to forget the masses of people out there caught up in it.

I used to like to joke: "A recession is the Republican way of shortening the lift lines at the ski hill." But things are much more serious than that now. Much more....

It simply boggles my mind that, over the past generation, progressives have allowed working-class people to increasingly identify with conservative Republicans. The GOP has mainly achieved this through a combination of demagoguery and jingoism, appealing to people's baser instincts, particularly the desperate selfishness that in fact is forcibly part of life in the sinking classes. In the process, they have convinced working people to slit their own throats -- and ultimately everyone else's too.

More: In a similar vein, AlterNet's Stephen Pizzo looks at the relationship between Dubya's economic policies and 'the great leveling of wages across international boundaries.'