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Promoted from the diaries by streiff. Promotion does not imply endorsement.
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As much as I want to ignore Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (S-NY 14^th District)¹ her idiocy makes it impossible:

Ocasio-Cortez in Bronx speech: New Yorkers deserve ‘dignified jobs’

By Tal Axelrod | Saturday, February 16, 2019 | 03:30 PM EST

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a progressive firebrand and vocal supporter of labor, said New Yorkers deserve “dignified jobs” in the aftermath of a scrapped deal to build a second Amazon headquarters in Queens.

“We need to create dignified jobs in New York City,” Ocasio-Cortez said at a ceremonial inauguration ceremony Saturday in the Bronx. “We don’t have to settle for scraps in the greatest city in the world.”

The comments come days after Amazon decided to abandon plans to build a second headquarters in the Long Island City neighborhood in Queens, which Ocasio-Cortez staunchly opposed.

The move was met with fierce backlash from local and national activists who said the move would not create jobs for people already living in the area and would make the community unaffordable for low-income residents. They also excoriated the city for offering a $3 billion tax incentive to the tech behemoth.

The New York Democrat celebrated when Amazon announced it would not go through with the move, praising local organizers’ efforts.

There’s more at the original.

What, I have to ask, is a “dignified job”? Wouldn’t 25,000 jobs, at an estimated average of $150,000 a year, have been “dignified”? In 2017, persons employed full-time 25 years of age and older, with a professional degree had a mediam individual income of $117,679, while those with a doctoral degree earned $101,307. Amazon would have been paying an average of 50% more than the median individual income of people with their doctorates!

Full time employees who had finished high school, but not gone on to college, earned $38,102. I guess that Miss Ocasio-Cortez, who is now being paid $174,000 per year as a United States Representative, doesn’t care about some of them getting better jobs.

It was the June of 1985, and I was standing in a ditch at the Yorktown Naval Weapons Station. My job was using a shovel to square the bottom and sides of a footing after the backhoe operator had dug it. The dirt was a heavy clay, which held its shape well, and the backhoe operator was a good one, so despite this being a very labor intensive job, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, though early summer on the Peninsula in Virginia can be pretty hot. It wasn’t a job I particularly liked, and it certainly wasn’t the job I had anticipated when I went to college, but it was honest work and it paid the rent and put food on the table.

I am retired now, but in my career I have shoveled debris out from under conveyor belts, repaired cement augers in the middle of a critical concrete pour, cleaned out dust collectors, unclogged toilets, greased heavy equipment, poured concrete, plowed snow, dug out settling ponds, worked on silos a hundred feet in the air, physically dug out a cement bin — on a Sunday, no less, because the plant had to be ready to run on Monday — changed tires on commercial trucks, and done it all in the boiling heat of a Southern summer and cold of a northeast Pennsylvania winter.

This wasn’t all when I was in my twenties; I was doing a lot of that stuff the week before I retired.

There were many days I came home and had to take my boots off out on the porch, because there was no way I could walk inside the house while wearing them. I have come home with clothes so filthy that they had to be washed off with a hose before I could put them in the washing machine, to prevent dirt and sand and cement from ruining the washer. There were days in which I started around three in the morning and didn’t get off until eleven at night.

Of course, there were many jobs in the construction field that I didn’t do. Though I once put a new roof on my mother’s house, I never did that professionally, I was never the guy working on installing roofs, or cleaning out septic tanks, or doing landscaping.

My wife? She’s a registered nurse, and if that perhaps sounds like a “dignified” job to the lovely Miss Ocasio-Cortez, it means that she has cleaned up incontinent patients who have eliminated their wastes in the bed, cleaned up vomit, and been taking care of patients who were dirty and stunk, who were afflicted with open wounds and bed sores, and other stuff I don’t even want to imagine.

My attitude is that every legal job is dignified, that working for a living, putting food on the table and paying your bills, is noble and praiseworthy. The man who drives the “honey” truck, going to construction sites and cleaning out human waste from porta-potties, is doing a dirty, stinking, nasty, necessary job, one I’m glad I never had to do myself, but it’s a clear sight more dignified than sitting at home on welfare and food stamps. I salute the man who has to do that job, and respect the dignity that he has.

But, for Miss Ocasio-Cortez, his job ain’t worth what he cleans out of those construction toilets.

Miss Ocasio-Cortez’s statement is the kind of thing that really angers me. The people at Amazon are hard-working people, doing their best to support themselves and their families. A “progressive” like the quack from Queens, a “multiculturalist” who respects everybody regardless of their race (other than white), creed (other than Christian), sex (other than heterosexual males), etc, etc, etc, ought to have respect for what they have to do to earn a living. A former bartender, she ought to have respect for the people who work in restaurants, washing dishes, cleaning bathrooms and peeling onions, but no, apparently not.

Would it be wrong of me to say that Miss Ocasio-Cortez is a piece of what the guy who cleans out porta-potties has to remove?
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Cross-posted on The First Street Journal.
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¹ – Might as well tell the truth; Miss Ocasio-Cortez is registered as a Democrat and is part of the Democratic Socialists of America, but I might as well list her as a socialist.