Governors Rick
Scotts
"Let's Keep
Working,"
reminds me of a
movie we watched last night?
The world's greatest
silent film,1927 film METROPOLIS
Metropolis (1927
film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(1927_film)
Only I fear, this
ending will not fair all that well for we the people living in Scotts
under-world!
Rick Scott’s
Job-Growth Puffery Masks Florida’s Low-Wage Future
Definition of
PUFFERY: exaggerated commendation especially for promotional purposes!
Definition of
SHARECROPPER: a tenant farmer especially in the southern United States who is
provided with credit for seed, tools, living quarters, and food, who works the
land, and who receives an agreed share of the value of the crop minus charges!
Saluting all
sharecroppers in the Scott economy.
By Daniel Tilson
When is a “good” job growth report bad news?
Daniel Tilson has a
Boca Raton-based communications firm called Full Cup Media, specializing in
online video and written content for non-profits, political candidates and
organizations, and small businesses.
When it’s about
Florida, and serves both to burnish Gov. Rick Scott’s ginned-up “job creator”
status, and further the creation of a new socioeconomic order in the state.
The job growth
report released this month by ADP Research Institute places Florida second
nationally with almost 32,000 new private-sector jobs created in June. On the
face of it, that seems like good news. That’s certainly how Gov. Rick Scott and
other conservative Republicans running the state will spin it.
But strip away the
face value of such statistics, and you’ll find the same trend that
characterizes the entire Republican economic “recovery” of recent years. You’ll
find about two of three of those new jobs is a low-paying service-sector one.
This mirrors years of Florida job growth in predominantly low-pay, no-benefits,
dead-end jobs. It also reflects years of Team Scott focusing on tourism, travel
and leisure industries as drivers of post-recession economic growth.
Working middle-class
Floridians know how stagnant wages and incomes have been for years now. We know
how much harder economic advancement and upward mobility is to achieve. We know
how little bargaining power we have left as workers in a state where private-sector
union organizing is blocked by an awful “Right to Work” law.
context floridaYet
we keep hearing these reports of new job creation, economic growth, and
recovery.
So where’s the
disconnect, why aren’t we feeling all that recovery love too?
Well, rather than
creating quality jobs by training and retraining workers; rather than creating
quality jobs by rebuilding Florida’s crumbling infrastructure; rather than
creating quality jobs by aggressively transitioning to clean energy sources;
rather than creating quality jobs by using already allotted federal funding to
modernize our rail and transportation systems; and rather than creating quality
jobs by using already allotted federal funding to expand health care and insure
up to a million mostly working, low-income Floridians … Gov. Scott and
Republican allies have instead created a glut of grimly “going-nowhere-fast”
jobs — and a huge burden for the middle class.
If you’re one of the
millions stuck in such bad jobs, chances are you still have to rely on public
assistance to care for your family. And if you’re a more fortunate middle-class
taxpayer, chances are you’re helping cover the cost of all that newly necessitated
public assistance. It’s not right, but it’s the way Florida’s powers-that-be
want it.
Instead of
successful socioeconomic balancing mechanisms we’ve used before in Florida,
such as the estate and intangibles taxes (aimed only at the wealthy), and
instead of ending the corporate welfare system for big business campaign
contributors, Gov. Scott and allies have by now established a pattern of
balancing budgets on the strained and breaking backs of Florida’s middle- and
low-income families.
They’ve known all
too well all along that over-reliance on creating bad jobs would successfully
puff up their job and economic growth numbers, give them positive PR talking
points — and grow a huge, working poor underclass that the middle class could
be forced to subsidize, and be encouraged to resent.
And that leaves
precious little time or energy left to question, much less fight the
powers-that-be.
Hmmm.