Yankee, Go Home!
Gotdam Carpetbaggers...
Man, it's like 1982 all over again...
There's a flood of cars with out-of-state plates roaming around Houston recently. With most of the Rust Belt & the Northeast's economy in shambles, the pore & starvin' head south looking for work, just like in the Reagan era. Fortunately, there's a big desert that's filtering out most of the Californians heading this way. Most of them stop in Phoenix or Denver, and the few that get through usually stop in Austin, where they immediately contribute to the 'Keep Austin Weird' campaign.
Unlike the Yankee exodus of the early 80's, though, there is no Housing or Oil Boom going on in Houston. We're not doing too badly, but there's not a lot of surplus cash hanging around. The threat of Cap & Trade has the petrochemical industry pulling in their tentacles and weighing their options, and The One's national health care plan has the insurance and medical industry worried.
You can still get manual labor done fairly cheaply, which doesn't bode well for any unskilled workers heading south. All over town there's a surplus ofillegal aliens undocumented workers waiting on streetcorners for a shot at roofing houses or mowing lawns for sub-minimum wages.
You can still get a job in food service. Most of the teenagers that used to take the entry-level fast food jobs now mostly hang out in malls, listening to iPods and trading STD's. Unlike the construction and landscaping jobs, the fast-food corporations still check for green cards and SSN's before they let you put on the smock and paper hat and slop out the grub.
I think we need to work out a trade. For every Yankee that crosses the Red River and stays more than a week, we get to ship an unemployed Katrina evacuee up to Jersey City or Detroit.
Man, it's like 1982 all over again...
There's a flood of cars with out-of-state plates roaming around Houston recently. With most of the Rust Belt & the Northeast's economy in shambles, the pore & starvin' head south looking for work, just like in the Reagan era. Fortunately, there's a big desert that's filtering out most of the Californians heading this way. Most of them stop in Phoenix or Denver, and the few that get through usually stop in Austin, where they immediately contribute to the 'Keep Austin Weird' campaign.
Unlike the Yankee exodus of the early 80's, though, there is no Housing or Oil Boom going on in Houston. We're not doing too badly, but there's not a lot of surplus cash hanging around. The threat of Cap & Trade has the petrochemical industry pulling in their tentacles and weighing their options, and The One's national health care plan has the insurance and medical industry worried.
You can still get manual labor done fairly cheaply, which doesn't bode well for any unskilled workers heading south. All over town there's a surplus of
You can still get a job in food service. Most of the teenagers that used to take the entry-level fast food jobs now mostly hang out in malls, listening to iPods and trading STD's. Unlike the construction and landscaping jobs, the fast-food corporations still check for green cards and SSN's before they let you put on the smock and paper hat and slop out the grub.
I think we need to work out a trade. For every Yankee that crosses the Red River and stays more than a week, we get to ship an unemployed Katrina evacuee up to Jersey City or Detroit.
posted by El Capitan | 4:08 PM
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