The American Worker - Preface

Preface

The world - at least the one on tv - seems a match strike away from self-immolation. As we step into the next two years of political coal walking, objectives will prove useful lest we barrel over one another on the way to our "Publish Post" hysteria buttons, and leave it at that. Others rightly rush to the guard lines of civil, reproductive, and 1st Amendment rights. I want to talk about the American worker.

Bernie Sanders recognized that economic prosperity as experienced by the American middle class is not primarily economic or financial in its essence. "Prosperity" for this slice of America reflects the national character and our regard for human well-being, because cold metrics about employment, health insurance, and wage growth actually describe the portals of homelessness, intractable illness, cyclical poverty, and more esoteric identities like our tolerance for corruption and dynasty in business and government. Senator Sanders made a return to data as the anchor of the working class self-defense.  It was not the heart of his campaign, but it may have been the steel.

In this series of four missives I want to recognize that economics is by and large mind-numbing, but it also reveals the need for a sort of working-class reconciliation. A quick review of the state of the American working class - through some important data - will demonstrate that huge and diverse swaths of America, who have been driven away from one another by some of the most scalding and manipulative political scripts in our history, are mirroring one another in their scrape and claw to hang on to livelihood.  I will work to focus on the promise of certain truths which could unify the working class as opposed to the yaw of the rabbit hole, but necessarily will traverse some gloomy discussion of why we are here and what could make it worse.

The challenge will be to relay something factually reliable and well-cited, delivered at least a few beats before boredom fells you, and respective of the truth that I am no economist. So here, if you'll have it good reader, is a brief glance at the American Worker in 2017.