In Pennsylvania, the state has lost more than 100,000 steel industry jobs since the 1980s, and seen another 200,000 manufacturing jobs go to overseas factories since 2000.

Here in the Rio Grande Valley, Brownsville specifically, considerable job growth in the sectors of public education, federal law enforcement, retailing and construction has only put a dent in the endemic poverty of a border region.

So who’s bitter, angry, and what should or could the goverment do about it?

The political distraction of the week came recently when a prominent left-leaning website, the Huffington Post, reported that Barack Obama said many people in the Rust Belt feel “bitter,” and “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” when economic fortunes in their communities and their lives turn sour.

Hillary Clinton became an instant born-again defender of all things God and guns when she and her campaign heard about Obama’s supposed gaffe. Hillary and her well-known spouse have earnings topping $100 million this decade, but that hardly stopped Clinton from morphing into blue collar Sally in saying Obama was out of touch with small town America. Hillary even downed some whisky and beer at an Indiana bar to prove her point.

Obama surely made, by his own admission, a clumsy explaination in trying to describe how Republicans have historically used religion, guns, and now immigration as wedge issues and tools of fear to sway working class Americans from voting for Democrats. We get that, but it was a no-win proposition for Obama to psychoanalyze blue-collar Pennsylvania, a place full of Archie Bunker Democrats who are going to have a hard time voting for a black guy for president.

I haven’t spent much time in the Rust Belt to know how angry or bitter Americans there are about a global economy and improving technologies and automation that have resulted in the loss of traditional manufacturing jobs. We’ve had our share of economic downturns as well, including a hollowing out of Brownsville’s economy throughout the  1980s when Mexico’s economy went to hell and took the city’s economic prosperity with it. And even after all of these years, it’s easy to recall the pain after the devastating Christmas Day freeze of 1983, which flattened this region’s economy and pushed unemployment above 20 percent.

I do believe there’s a basic difference in how our two parts of America view economic difficulties. The Rust Belt has a sense of entitlement about good jobs since they once had them, and enjoyed them for many a generation as $20-an-hour jobs at GM and Ford car plants were passed down as a birthright. In South Texas, we don’t have any such feelings of entitlement about jobs. We just hope there’s better ones in the years ahead because we’ve seen how little we used to have.

I saw some of that Rust Belt anger - and bitterness - about job losses in the late 1980s when Trico Technologies moved much of its manufacturing operations from Buffalo, N.Y., to Brownsville and Matamoros. The United Auto Workers sent a contingent, more like a mob, to this area to denounce the move and spout a series of ugly racial and ethnic stereotypes about the border. To hear them tell it back then, we all wear sombreros and take siestas under a palm tree at lunchtime. I guess that fell under the department of “antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”

We should pause here to thank Clinton and Obama for fighting that menacing free trade pact with Colombia, what with that nation’s economy making up 1/43 of our NAFTA-ravaged economy. Since they’re both mining for votes in the Rust Belt these days, the two Democratic presidential candidates are playing to the usual exaggerations and distortions about trade agreements. It’s Obama’s key wedge issue, (and one of Clinton’s as well), in trying to persuade the Archie Bunkers in Scranton that he can look out for their interests, too. 

Hey, it’s tough all over. Here in Brownsville, Tx., the poorest city of its size in America as defined by the Census Bureau, we can tell our own stories of woe and contrasts - job growth vs. enduring poverty, rising incomes vs. 42 percent of the local population living below this nation’s federally defined poverty level.

“Yes, there is an emerging middle class,” said Antonio Zavaletta, vice president for external affair at the University of Texas at Brownsville, in an interview with The Herald.  “(But) we’ve got so many people and we’ve grown so fast that the problems just multiply. As a community, we don’t break out.”

But we’re not bitter,  just resilient.

Joaquin C. Tijerina, Official Chisme Blogger.

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