By George Wilson, contributing columnist
“You better start swimming, or you’ll sink like a stone. Because the times they are a-changing.” — Bob Dylan.
We all know about the decline of newspapers, big box stores, long-distance telephone service, bookstores, traditional stockbrokers, record companies, travel agents, pay phones, and movie rental stores. Some declines haven’t been good and even detrimental to the country such as the consolidation of media companies. The reduction in the number of journalists and editors at newspapers has caused news coverage to suffer. Is this the reason for the decline in the trust for the media? Now we have the advent of “fake news” flooding the internet.
Another “dinosaur” is about to be massively disrupted by the Internet. I’m talking about the $2.2 trillion entertainment industry. And more specifically, about the cable and satellite providers that some people fork over to more than $2,000 of their hard-earned money year-after-year. And in the process, we’re seeing more ads and less real programming than ever. We won’t even mention the bad customer service. According to the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, three of the top five “Most Hated Companies in America” are cable providers.
Politicians, like Trump, have used demagoguery to explain our loss of manufacturing jobs to other countries. However automation is estimated to account for 87 percent of lost manufacturing jobs. That’s not exactly sending jobs to China or Mexico. About 65,000 jobs were off-shored to foreign countries in 2014 and 2015, each. But this loss was offset by U.S. manufacturers returning jobs to this country and foreign firms building here to get closer to their market.
Some economists have postulated that the higher the wage the greater the productivity, as more automation takes place to cut labor costs. They have used this argument to justify not paying a higher minimum wage. But where does this leave the worker struggling to pay his bills and raise a family?
Finally someone needs to also tell coal miners the truth. There are only 75,000 coal miners left and the number continues to decline. But clean energy works, and just in California alone, accounts for 550,000 workers.
It does no good to lead people on with false promises and slogans. We need to come up with real solutions that address change.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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