Millennials allow themselves to be used by corporate pimps on Instagram and other platforms for filthy lucre but fail to see how they, too, have sold themselves to the company store. By allowing the fox into the hen house, they have signed their own death warrant and that of a nation.
oliticians and pundits on both the right and the left don’t just want to take away your American way of life, they want to enforce their deepest beliefs on the meaning of life on us all, which is their worship of filthy lucre. And both groups want to take advantage of those economically and socially beneath them in profound and similar ways that are held together at the center by their greed, envy and avarice.
Republicans believe that the highest calling for Americans is to throw themselves on their sword and allow the country to be overwhelmed with cheap, low-skilled labor to feed corporate profit machines. They couldn’t care less about how this affects middle America because a middle America doesn’t serve them. The cry for ever cheaper labor isn’t a necessary ingredient for companies to make a profit. However, it is a necessity for companies to make obscene profits, something American corporations have grown fat on over the last 60 years, as have their hedge fund managers and bankers. Flag waving Americans who demand a higher wage are just a wart on an otherwise perfect complexion of profits and exploitation.
A May 2019 Harvard-Harris Poll found that the number one issue among Republican voters was building a wall on the United States and Mexican border to stop illegal immigration. The poll only highlights the great divide between the desire of the elite Republican big-business executives in Congress over the average conservative Trump voter who wants higher wages for Americans and American first jobs. Trump’s call for a Mexican tariff got them all scrambling to the microphones to tell us less smarter Americans just how much of a mistake that would be.
Despite the will of the American public, blue blood Republicans continue to push for increased immigration, citing the number of jobs that need to be filled and the aging of the baby boom generation. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has also thrown its considerable lobbying weight behind congressional influencers, repeating the mantra of corporate executives that more immigration is needed. However, it is incumbent upon those of us who remember to tell others that this is the same U.S. Chamber of Commerce that was a major proponent of the passage of GATT and NAFTA in the 1980s that first sold all of our jobs to China, Mexico and India.
The lie is that a flood of cheap, unskilled labor is needed to fill American jobs. And it is a lie. Manufacturing in the United States today must be filled by higher skilled trade labor, not workers who cannot speak English, understand CAD or program machines on the production floor. Manufacturing industries that are once again turning on the lights and firing up engines, are not the same old plants your grandfather worked at. Today’s manufacturers need highly skilled STEM workers, which you can read more about in Blue Collar Jobs Are Roaring Back to Life. Robotics and drones are already being rolled out to eliminate unskilled labor such as packing and shipping. Human labor not required.
A report released this year by the Manufacturing Institute in partnership with Deloitte estimates 2.4 million manufacturing jobs will need to be filled in the next decade. The most difficult jobs to fill are not unskilled jobs but skilled jobs—digital positions and advanced production workers. Because of technological advancements in industry, many of these positions require different training than traditional manufacturing did. In fact, the Institute says the inability to find skilled workers will be the number one business challenge for manufacturers. The research also found that for production workers, it’s not just the need for STEM degrees but rather the ability to program machines on the plant floor, or those soft and necessary thinking skills not so easily defined. Employers need workers with extended computer skills that enable core production workers to program a CNC (computer numeric control) machine for a new job or interact with CAD/CAM and other engineering or manufacturing software.
A fundamental change in the education system that takes students off of the expensive and dead-end college track and puts them onto the hard skills labor track is what the next generation will need, not filling our nation with welfare recipients who don’t speak our language or have the ability to program and run computer-operated big machines. Cognitive skills, not dirty fingernails, will be required.
Progressive politicians and pundits are no different than Republican elites who serve in the executive office and chase the corporate dollar. Jon Bounder, in an article in Breitbart, reported that top executives of more than 180 companies have just signed a letter that says abortion is essential in order for people to be successful in their businesses. “When everyone is empowered to succeed, our companies, our communities and our economy are better for it,” the executives say in the letter posted on a newly launched website titled “Don’t Ban Equality.” The letter goes on to say that “Restricting access to comprehensive reproductive care, including abortion, threatens the health, independence and economic stability of our employees and customers.” A full list of the companies who signed the letter can be found here.
So in order for business to thrive, these corporate executives believe that if a woman in the workplace becomes pregnant, she should abort the baby in order to keep working and, as a consequence, not require businesses to grant maternity leave or upset the human capital chain. You can’t make this up, and the fact that big corporate names are behind this hateful ideology is incomprehensible except when we remind ourselves that corporations are not the friend of anyone but shareholders. And progressives who publicly eschew the corporate pocketbook are more in bed with corporations than the average Trump voter. In fact, they are sleeping with the enemy.
The relatively recent phenomena to weaponize corporations to promote progressive causes, including deplatforming conservatives from banking systems, is highly organized and runs much deeper than even progressives realize. You can learn more on how the left is weaponizing corporations here. The left is excellent at forming grassroots organizations and non-governmental organizations by knitting together disparate legal entities and raiding corporate and nonprofit talent to steamroll ideas they find offensive and market their own agendas for them. By using corporate board room executives to do their heavy lifting, global brand names, recognizable and sometimes trusted by consumers, not only gets their message out to a wider audience, but helps to create the illusion that their far left causes are more mainstream than they actually are. But many millennials, who are staunchly anti-corporate, haven’t understood this and are being used in a corporate marriage made in hell.
Both sides of the filthy lucre coin are being exploited for corporate gain over individual freedom, liberty and happiness. A corporation won’t care about the woman who foregoes motherhood and the chance for a family when she becomes too old to work or no longer has the right skills to do the job any more than Republican shareholders and billionaires care what happens to workers who become hurt on the job or who can no longer keep up with production demands. Those at the top have always considered people of average skills and means, which happens to be most of us, disposable commodities and will always push for policies that support their greed for more profit.
The other lie we are repeatedly told by corporate elites is that we must replace the dying baby boom generation with third-world labor. In my article, Immigration Isn’t the Answer to Low Birth Rates, I report on how global think tanks that help craft public policy perpetually press the theory that western nations need more migration to prop up sagging birth rates. Problem is, it just isn’t true. In the United States, for example, more than $100 billion per year is spent to support illegal aliens and their children on welfare programs and subsidies. This huge sum of money could be redirected to young, working-class couples so they can actually afford to have children, which I covered in Why Millennials Aren’t Procreating.
MIT economist Peter Temin and author of the book, The Vanishing Middle Class, says the United States has regressed to a developing nation status, but he isn’t blaming it on a low birth rate—at least not directly. Rather, Temin says 80 percent of Americans are burdened with debt and concerned about their job security.
Temin recently applied a model created by Nobel Prize winner Arthur Lewis that was designed to understand developing nations, to measure the United States. He found that, “much of the low-wage sector had little influence over public policy, the high-income sector was keeping wages down to provide cheap labor and that social control was used to prevent subsistence workers from challenging existing policies and social mobility was low.”
The rich have historically benefited by importing cheap labor. It’s also the main reason the Koch brothers support open borders or, failing that, want increased work visas at the expense of low and middle-class Americans. Rich Republicans and Democrats alike are addicted to providing cheap labor for corporate interests they are beholden to or hold investments in. As a consequence, U.S. immigration policies do not support working, middle-class families or reflect the type of nation most Americans want to live in but they do appeal to the altruistic nature of millennial voters who want a better world for all.
Turning around the low birth rate in the United States could be remedied, however, by simply redirecting federal dollars currently being spent to support illegal aliens and bad public policy that perpetuates single motherhood to help low and middle-class families. Programs such as Head Start, which was created to prepare minority children for education and has been proven to be a massive failure in achieving its long-term educational goals, could be revised to include married, working-poor Americans rather than the current low-income threshold used now to participate, which almost always excludes two-parent, working households.
Adjusting the low-income threshold, which is set by the federal government, to include two-parent working households would go a long way in increasing the birth rate for young families that cannot afford the high cost of daycare. Head Start is already directly subsidizing preschools and daycare somewhere in excess of $10 billion per year. Also, exempting working parent households from income tax for a period of years would also boost sagging birth rates.
Your mother or father, along with great poets and philosophers, were not wrong when they told you the world is a cruel place. Too bad for this generation, they don’t recognize that they really are not as special as they have been told since childhood. Millennials allow themselves to be used by corporate pimps on Instagram and other platforms for filthy lucre but fail to see how they, too, have sold themselves to the company store. Sadder? The home goods store actually named The Company Store. I am sure the irony of this is missed by most millennials. By allowing the fox into the hen house, they have signed their own death warrant and that of a nation. There is a reason big business should be cut into pieces when monopolies become too powerful or wield too much influence over the lives of others. There was once a generation that understood this: that in the heart of men, lurks sin, greed and avarice, even good men and women.
If robber barons are allowed to thrive and have their own way, there is no one left to curb their human appetite for power, pleasure and control. Conservatives have always fundamentally understood this, which is why we don’t seek to set the institution on fire, but to infuse it with integrity and power to cut down the tares of men and women who will always grow among the wheat. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the left’s desire to create a more fair and equitable world, but we must, nay cannot, forget that humankind is fallible and will always seek its own ends over others. It’s time for the left to grow up and for the right to wake up. #Reignwell