I was just reading a magazine named “UNTE”. It is a collection of articles from other publications. The theme this month is ‘putting America back to “work”. Very interesting. What piqued my interest was how much better other countries are doing with strong unions. The average worker in Germany, an example given, is far better off financially than American workers are now.
The peak time for the middle class in America was the 1950’s when our unions were the strongest. There was a true middle class worker then. A class of people who could work a 40 hour week and buy a house, support a family and save money for retirement.
I know for a fact that in 1968 my hubby and I bought a house. His hourly wage was $6.25 an hour. The house was a mid priced house at $20,000. Nowadays people are expected to work for $10 an hour and the houses cost $200,000 or more for a regular house. In fact the last time I checked, about 30 years ago, the price on the same house we had bought at $20,000 it was $125,000.
Taking car production away from the Detroit union production workers has not helped the car companies. There are fewer people who can afford a new car now. And the government has to bail out the car companies. The money the government uses to do that comes partially from US tax payers and partially from the increasing government debt.
When people earn less money they have less to spend on goods that could be manufactured in this country. Goods made cheaply and poorly in other countries are sold here at high prices and the retail companies, like Wal-Mart, are making a bigger profit. And to put the finishing touch on the lopsided cake, retail clerks are some of the worst treated workers in this country. They are expected to work short hours so they don’t get any kind of health insurance and do it for poor pay.
What can we do to fix this? Right now I don’t have any idea. If anyone has an idea leave a comment. In the mean time I will use any resources I can think of to try and find something that we of the former middle class can do to fix things.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Monday, February 14, 2011
Too Many People
The other day I read a bit of news that is scary to me. Every second there are 12 babies born and every second there are 8 deaths.That means we are continuing to fill the earth. The earth is a finite thing. It will only support a certain number of creatures.
So today I looked it up on the web and learned that as of noon on February 14 there are 6,899,943,795 people on the earth. That is a lot of mouths to feed. If we all ate nothing but fish from the oceans we could be starving to death. Many kinds of fish are in danger of becoming extinct. But since we eat other things the strain is spread out to other things as well.
And even if you are a vegetarian you need space to grow your food. Therefore there would be less land available for toad and snail and bears and hawks. Don't forget they need to eat too. The disappearance of habitat is the reason many of the wild creatures are having a hard time staying alive.
The reason the spotted owl was having a hard time was not because it was hunted and killed but the fact that the area of forest it inhabited was being cut down to make houses for mankind. A simple fact. And the more children we have the more houses we will need to build, not to mention the farm land to raise the food on.
I think the rulers in China were right when they decided that each family should have only one child. It lessened the strain on the countryside a great deal. Just think if there were two or three times as many people trying to live on the produce from the farms there now. It would be hard to do.
In order to bring back the herds of animals and huge flocks of birds and the richness of an ocean full of fish we need to slow our people growth. I actually wonder when we are going to have another "Black Plague" to depopulate the earth. About one third of the people in Europe died at that time.
Just imagine how quickly the rivers would recover and run clean if one third of the waste we put in the water was not there. And one third of the pollution we pump in the air everyday was not happening the skies would be blue again all over the world.
Can we fix it without a Plague?
So today I looked it up on the web and learned that as of noon on February 14 there are 6,899,943,795 people on the earth. That is a lot of mouths to feed. If we all ate nothing but fish from the oceans we could be starving to death. Many kinds of fish are in danger of becoming extinct. But since we eat other things the strain is spread out to other things as well.
And even if you are a vegetarian you need space to grow your food. Therefore there would be less land available for toad and snail and bears and hawks. Don't forget they need to eat too. The disappearance of habitat is the reason many of the wild creatures are having a hard time staying alive.
The reason the spotted owl was having a hard time was not because it was hunted and killed but the fact that the area of forest it inhabited was being cut down to make houses for mankind. A simple fact. And the more children we have the more houses we will need to build, not to mention the farm land to raise the food on.
I think the rulers in China were right when they decided that each family should have only one child. It lessened the strain on the countryside a great deal. Just think if there were two or three times as many people trying to live on the produce from the farms there now. It would be hard to do.
In order to bring back the herds of animals and huge flocks of birds and the richness of an ocean full of fish we need to slow our people growth. I actually wonder when we are going to have another "Black Plague" to depopulate the earth. About one third of the people in Europe died at that time.
Just imagine how quickly the rivers would recover and run clean if one third of the waste we put in the water was not there. And one third of the pollution we pump in the air everyday was not happening the skies would be blue again all over the world.
Can we fix it without a Plague?
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Adding another layer to my life. I am always thinking of something and some times it is different than the guy next door. But here I can say what I want and you can use it as a place to start your own thoughts. We all have the right to think what we want.
Right now I am thinking about how much life has changed since I got out of high school over 50 years ago. Computers? Cell Phone? The World Wide Web? Digital Cameras? And that is just the tip of the iceburg.
Add to that Interstate Hiways, Jet Planes and speed limits on the roads of as much as 70 miles an hour. Do you realize that now you can travel futher in an hour than the pioneers could travel in a week? The road to Oregon was a long hard road. I imagne what I will add to the world will not be as drastic. But still as humans keep changing our perceptions of the world I will undoubtable change mine and possibly yours.
So this is my change. Sharing my thoughts with the world. Hope you enjoy my travels in my mind and my moving home.
Right now I am thinking about how much life has changed since I got out of high school over 50 years ago. Computers? Cell Phone? The World Wide Web? Digital Cameras? And that is just the tip of the iceburg.
Add to that Interstate Hiways, Jet Planes and speed limits on the roads of as much as 70 miles an hour. Do you realize that now you can travel futher in an hour than the pioneers could travel in a week? The road to Oregon was a long hard road. I imagne what I will add to the world will not be as drastic. But still as humans keep changing our perceptions of the world I will undoubtable change mine and possibly yours.
So this is my change. Sharing my thoughts with the world. Hope you enjoy my travels in my mind and my moving home.
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