Froma Harrop to the proles: shut up and accept your lot working class pukes!

The Pain Dealer ran Harrop’s column today

I can’t find a bio on Froma but this is from her own webpage:

Starting at Reuters Ltd., Harrop quickly moved from clerk to financial writer. She later became a business editor at the New York Times News Service. Harrop has written for such diverse publications as The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar and Institutional Investor. Her columns appear in several book anthologies.

Having a little experience in journalism, I feel reasonably confident when I say that its fairly rare for someone to move quickly from clerk to financial writer without some behind the scenes connections.

Be that as it may, she’s listed as a ‘liberal’ in the Creators’ Syndicate stable. But the system has many paid shills on both sides of our Punch and Judy political system and when someone writes articles such as these, pardon me for being cynical.

Harrop certainly knows what her masters want to read:

May I suggest a “time out” on bashing free trade with our Canadian and Mexican neighbors? Life would be awfully easy if NAFTA were the problem. All you’d have to do is pull out.

Sounds easy, eh? But Froma dear, you know the same people who put is in this NAFTA mess would be the same people who would have to pull us out. And you know why they won’t do that, don’t you? But you won’t write about that, will you?

The evidence points to NAFTA being mostly good for the countries involved. And if American factory workers want to see where their jobs have gone, they’d do better to look east than south. Labor may be cheaper in Mexico, but it’s cheaper still in Asia. Chinese workers make about a quarter of what their Mexican counterparts earn.

Good for whom? Not the American workers or are you willing to write that with a straight face, Froma? And does it really matter where those jobs went? It matters not to the people in my extended families and friends who used to make America’s steel. They’re just as screwed because their jobs went to Asia instead of Mexico.

And they went there because it was all part of the plutocrats plan to destroy the American Middle Class - the last impediment to creating a worldwide slave labor camp where all manufacturing jobs would be reduced to pittance wages solely for the benefit of international investors NOT for the millions of Americans who can’t live a Middle Class existence on those wages.

But who gives a shit about those people, eh Freda? You have a pretty nice job at the Providence Journal, don’t you? You got yours, right?

NAFTA knockers who fear sounding anti-Mexican often argue that free trade has been bad for Mexico, as well. They offer vivid examples, such as the peasant farmers protesting the end of tariffs on U.S. corn. Corn production is easily mechanized and relies on abundant water. That gives U.S. farmers a competitive advantage.

But NAFTA has opened the enormous U.S. market to Mexican avocado growers — who now call their fruit “green gold.” For avocados and other produce that requires picking by hand and therefore much farm labor, Mexicans have an advantage. In fact, Mexican farm exports to the United States and Canada have tripled since 1994.

Earth to Freda: we don’t care about Mexican workers. Let their own government create jobs for them. Perhaps you’d like to spend a week in Youngstown near where I live and sit down and have a face to face coffee with the flesh and blood victims of the economic theories you seem to be defending.

That might make you uncomfortable, though. Better to hang out in the Projo newsroom with the rest of your white collar buddies.

Revisiting NAFTA won’t fix what hurts the Ohio River Valley. A better approach would be universal health coverage that protects laid-off workers from total economic meltdown. A more vigorous program for job retraining would also help. And yes, Democrats are right to denounce tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas.

Thanks for throwing us a bone from Providence. I need to ask you though: how are we going to pay for this universal health coverage if the tax base of people who used to work a union wage keeps shrinking?

I’d love to ask Hillary Clinton the same thing. All she wants to do (and Obama too) is pour more money into the gaping maw of the health insurance industry. Canadian style single payer would be the best system for everyone. But that would be SOCIALISM!!! And only large American companies get socialism, not ordinary people. So Froma won’t advocate for it because she might not have a job the day after writing a column like that.

And you know, I’ve been hearing this job retraining song and dance bullshit for 20+ years now. Guess what - it doesn’t work. You know why? Employers have a choice between hiring college educated trust fund babies like Froma and ‘retrained’ (retreaded) former line workers. Guess which ones they go for every time?

Of course there’s plenty of jobs at McDonalds. Just keep telling people who used to make America’s steel and raise entire families on those jobs that there’s no loss of dignity in working burger jobs.

Just keep telling them that. And keep pumping out the Prozac.

None of this needed to happen. This government could have set directed economic policy that would have protected American manufacturing jobs and therefore kept our manufacturing base intact. You know what happens when you lose that base? I’ll give you a clue: without imports from Asia, the US military can’t shoot, communicate or move.

But the money boyz on Wall Street didn’t give a damn about that or those millions now desperately hoping to hit the lottery so they might live out the rest of their lives with a little dignity.

The sight of closed American factories — those broken windows and weed-covered parking lots — sickens the soul. The inescapable reality, though, is that the jobs that were going were going, if not to the Caribbean and Latin America, then to Asia. Wouldn’t it be in America’s interests to help our neighbors get the work?

Can I say this as delicately as possible? Fuck you Froma. Again, come to Youngstown and the Mon Valley or Pittsburgh. Your ’soul’ really cant be adequately sickened from your well lit newsroom in Providence. You really need to come down and look in the eyes of these people who have callouses on their hands you and your kind will never know and you need to explain to them why a lifetime of work in building this country didn’t amount to a pile of shit when all was said and done.

Fuck the neighbors. These are MY people.

Well my daddy worked the furnaces
Kept ‘em hotter than hell
I come home from ‘Nam worked my way to scarfer
A job that’d suit the devil as well
Taconite coke and limestone
Fed my children and make my pay
Them smokestacks reachin’ like the arms of God
Into a beautiful sky of soot and clay

Here in Youngstown
Here in Youngstown
Sweet Jenny I’m sinkin’ down
Here darlin’ in Youngstown

Well my daddy come on the Ohio works
When he come home from World War Two
Now the yard’s just scrap and rubble
He said “Them big boys did what Hitler couldn’t do.”
These mills they built the tanks and bombs
That won this country’s wars
We sent our sons to Korea and Vietnam
Now we’re wondering what they were dyin’ for

Here in Youngstown
Here in Youngstown
My sweet Jenny I’m sinkin’ down
Here darlin’ in Youngstown

From the Monongahela valley
To the Mesabi iron range
To the coal mines of Appalachia
The story’s always the same
Seven hundred tons of metal a day
Now sir you tell me the world’s changed
Once I made you rich enough
Rich enough to forget my name

– Bruce Springsteen