"Diner-Gate"

Nobody’s Opinion: Pick up any book about “Your Career Choice” printed since 1990, and you will read that the whole world is now experiencing a wonderful metamorphoses of change. And change is good. And no where is change more exciting then in the new American “service” economy.

Tell that to the single mom waitress who got “stiffed” by receiving no tip, after serving breakfast to one of the richest women in the world, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Leave it to the social engineering brains of Harvard who write these books to describe this new phenomenon of the loss of America’s great manufacturing base to the new and better “service” jobs as exciting, instead of what it really is; a service road to poverty.

There is one thing that most “service” people will tell you. They literally depend on tips. Sometimes a run of poor “tips” can make the difference in whether or not they eat a decent meal that week.

One thing that I have learned from my own “service” career…the richer the person you are serving, the smaller the tip they would leave. You could write that fact in stone and print it on the Capitol steps.

Why do you think that all the expensive restaurants mandate the 15% gratuity to the waiter on the check? Because their prices are so expensive the waiters get shafted?

I doubt it. You have to have money just to walk into the door. No, it’s the expectation of “service” by those who have come about their money by inheritance.

The “class” system here in America is almost as discriminatory as the Hindu Caste in India. Because of the fact that some people rise up to the class above themselves, we don’t think of America as having class divisions. But as it has been reported, the top 1% makes more than all the rest of the bottom classes put together.

And unfortunately, some at the top believe in the old Aristotle saying “some are marked out for subjection and some for command.” Anyone who has seen “Gandhi” and the famous scene where his wife refuses to clean the toilets can understand that this “I am better than you” attitude is hard to get rid of.

Here’s what I discovered when I worked the “service” job of musician. At local dives, people with hardly any money at all would tip you---sometimes so much as compared to their merger salaries you wanted to give it back.

But, whenever I played piano in a grand hotel lobby, I might as well have been a potted plant. You could be surrounded by rich people, and the most you would get is “Here’s the key to my room honey...” and then they would throw a dollar in your tip jar.

Why? Because the rich feel entitled to service. They figure you must be stupid to have to do what you do for a living, therefore, you are going to remain poor no matter what.

Let the government help you, and that’s Hillary’s message.

Now, it’s not that people who work hard and make it rich are the problem, it’s the entrenched philosophy of some of them.

In his book “The Worldly Philosophers,” a study in economic thinking, Robert L. Heilbroner said, “The new philosophy (of capitalism) brought with it a new social problem; how to keep the poor poor. It was generally admitted that unless the poor were poor, they could not be counted upon to do an honest day’s toil without asking for exorbitant wages. The political arithmeticians looked on the cheap agricultural and industrial labor of England and gravely nodded approval.”

Much as our rich elite politicians of both parties look on the illegal migrations of today. They are necessary for the continuation of capitalism and democracy, as if they are both one and the same thing.

They are not, and China is proof.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what political system is in control. When the rich elites at the top never go to jail, or pay taxes, we expect it. After all, it’s pretty much always been that way in history.

But when a very rich woman running for President “stiffs’ the woman she swears she cares about in every single speech, with “servicing women,” now being her main voter base…

The tiny incident of 'Diner-Gate' in the end, might just be enough to lose her the election.

I’m hopeful---waitresses usually, unlike politicians, have excellent memories.