Bill Mahler Chat

Bill Maher (of HBO “Real Time” fame) did a speech this week, and chatted over the need of Amazon to go into the heartland and produce jobs in redstate America.

The logic?  Bill will suggest that companies need to have a vision that involves “spatial geographic inequality.”

Yes, he makes the chat about the existence of clever and affluent people living in urbanized cities (blue regions) and that the redstate populations aren't connecting to the clever and affluent people.

For probably thirty years, this division in the Democratic Party has been going on.  You can pull up voting maps, with counties displayed, and by the mid-1990s....the Democratic Party had 'air' leaking out of their voting trends, and each county that the Democrats won.....the Republicans won two other counties. 

The idea that Amazon or any of the other top 500 companies will be picking rural America to base their operations?  Zero-percent chance.  Oh, there might a couple of companies that accidentally discover Huntsville, Alabama.....or Dayton, Ohio.  But the majority of companies will say that putting the Amazon second headquarters in an area like Kingsport, TN or Vicksburg, MS....simply isn't going to happen.  Amazon will pull out their top ten priorities, and to be honest....there's likely to only be thirty cities in the nation that provide what they want. 

For Bill's vision to work, you'd have to assume that this trend will never reverse, and I'm not sure that's true.  Eventually, black urban areas are going to finally ask what exactly did the Democratic Party deliver upon, and how well did the promised effort effectively work?  The answer may be a problem to explain. 

Also, you come to this false dividing line....the clever and affluent people having a better life or better circumstances?  I suspect that a quarter of the blue-urbanized people are disgruntled.....questioning their better lifestyle and wondering about the value of their blue political landscape.  The fact that the blue state people of California and Illinois are on a trend to leave, and depart the state?  That might be worth discussing as well.

It is a thing to ponder, but this idea of convincing redstate people to go through some life experience and become bluestate people?  It's hard to imagine this easily happening.