So, here we are again: Labor day weekend. The holiday that supposedly celebrates the working stiffs in this great land and unofficially (or officially, im looking at you, Michigan) marks the end of summer. This has typically been the time when I become a sounding board for the virtues of labor unions (I am a proud union member, IAFF Local 92!), but I think it is time for a bit of a bigger picture approach. You see, there really is a problem with this country, and we are all pissed about it, but I think we really have the wrong people in the crosshairs. Occupy Wall Street was dead on, but in many ways the Tea Party movement was too. There is an elite echelon in this country, and they do not give crap #1 about you and I (with rare exceptions like Gates or Buffett, but I digress). We talk about being hardcore Democrats and staunch Republicans. About Super Liberal/Progressive or Ultra Conservative, or anywhere in the middle. These things are all complete and utter bullshit. We ARE people. We have needs and those needs are near universal. We have desires that are similarly universal. I have way more in common with the Republican next door than I do with the Democrat on Capitol Hill. I hold way more in common with a megachurch attending fundamentalist that is making it on two jobs than I do with absolutely anyone with a 9 figure salary, regardless of what sign they put in their yard. There is such thing as class warfare, but it is only being waged one direction. The ultra rich have managed to garner political favor through $ome $uspicious $y$tem of $upport that those of us with less ¢ant ¢ompare to. The game is rigged and not getting better. Congress now passes laws that disproportionately benefit the wealthiest at such a rate that scholars now rate us as an oligarchy. The minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, which can buy you MAYBE two gallons of gas, on a good day. In 1960, it was $1.25, which could buy you five gallons of gas then. There are almost no protections for most working men and women against a misbehaving corporation (BP being a good poster child, as well as pretty much the bulk of the financial sector and everyone else that is too big to fail), whether that corporation is stealing their life savings quasi legally or poisoning their water and killing their fish or just using an insane amount of buying power to drive every small business into the ground. Farmers have no protection against monsanto (and neither do bees, for that matter), Fishermen against BP, or even upstart companies like Tesla against entrenched car companies and their business models (see Teslas struggles in NJ). Aside from the laws, the wages have gotten completely out of hand. Productivity is up over 150% since 1980, while median wages have moved around 25%. The Dow Jones was sitting in the mid 700s in 1980, now up to over 17000! Since then, CEOs went from making around 50x that of their average worker to making more than 300 times that of their average worker (331 times, according to epi.org/publication/webfeatures_snapshots_20060621/ ). Lets put that in perspective. Your CEO wants to take a few precious minutes out of his day to rock out to Stairway to Heaven because he is a Zeppelin Fan and he is stressed. Sounds reasonable. How much did he earn doing this? Enough that you would have to work 44 hours to make as much. He calls in sick for a day, you would be hard at work for 15 months plus to make as much as he did on his couch, watching The Price is Right. On top of that, their tax rate is less than 20% when all is said and done. Finally, we have only an illusion of class mobility left. For every rags to ritches story we hear about, there is dramatically more entrenched poverty. more than 40 percent of people born in this country will never progress out of poverty, compared to 19% from our neighbors to the north. On the top end, the wealthiest 1% START with an inheritance of $2.17 million, by average, or over 50 YEARS of work by the average American. Little bit of a head start? Combine that with the scholastic and networking benefits you have by having a 1% daddy, and there is nothing but a rigged game. There is a joke told at union halls across the country: A CEO, a union member, and a tea partier are at a table with 12 cookies on a plate in the middle. The CEO takes 11, then tells the Tea Party guy, hes trying to steal your cookie! The joke, while jaded and politically one sided, has a point. We are NOT the enemies of our fellow working stiffs, red or blue, right or left, R or D. We all need to start to demand that the inaction in DC stops and they start taking care of us again, not just doing petty bickering. Talking, compromising, legislating and DAMMIT CARING! In Gangs of New York they say, You can always hire one half of the poor to kill the other half. Now, they just believe they can convince one half of us to distract the other half of the reality of just who is holding the cookies.
Posted on: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 22:26:57 +0000
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