The line where a
firm (owner) is responsible for the encompassing security of those laboring in
its employ for the dominant measure of human waking hours during a seven day
interval is gray and precarious. Since
the 1950’s the living wage of the bottom rung of American workers has lost
purchasing power. The spheres of
responsibility for labor’s retirement, healthcare, and basic ability to ensure
that one is marginally in a better economic position at the end of the week
than the beginning have been shifted incrementally from the private to the
public sector through macroeconomic political policies.
Neoliberal mantras
of trickle down firm profits have iced into a boiler plate adoption from owners
of, “Eh, we would rather keep the difference.”
The minimum wage means, “If we could pay you less we would.” If an increased minimum wage decreased jobs,
this would imply that profitable firms currently hire excess workers to make
their profit.
I.e. I pay you
$7.25 an hour now. I wish I could pay
you $4 or a penny if you are desperate enough.
The government might be increasing that rate to $10. Slavery is technically outlawed, but
renamed. So I have a choice, raise my
prices at the risk of lowing sales or give back part of my profit to
labor. Is the firm still profitable? How much so?
How elastic? What is the Dow
Jones?
The firm is not in
a capsule. Lower wage workers spend the
preponderance of their compensation and churn the stagnant waters of the
economy replenishing firm revenue.
Billionaires keep excess funds in offshore accounts to avoid initiating
domestic taxation. Dollars get
trapped. Public debt incurs.
Medicaid, social
security, welfare, disability, and food stamps act as growing ant hills to
frame as mounds of class warfare. The
upper-class pits the middle-class against the under-class. Corporate profits exclude the full labor
expenses from the gray and then ridicule labor for seeking taxpayer assistance
as indolent leeches while corporate tax credits and shelters devoured by
industry are standard.
We are a
super-organism interconnected teetering to drown over a temperamental ocean. Some group has to be in charge. Imagine a floating island. Economic wealth is like a column supporting
the land to the sea floor. When the
foundation consolidates into absolute density and infinitesimal circumference,
the pad is left to tip those on the edges as the center huddles tighter. Extinction is misunderstanding how our
species cannot survive without a realistic spectrum of distributed resources to
balance our continuance. A slope to the
allocation in some form of pyramid is required, but what gradient to the
incline is suicide?
When ten percent
of a country’s population hold over seventy percent of its wealth and the top one
percent hold half of that we approach collapse.
The debt associated with education impedes liberty. Advances in computers cannibalize the
employment of the lower intelligence quotient humans and exponentially
increasing the productive power of a single brain.
Boomers approach
expanding-Medicare-budget retirement and death.
Birth rates amongst the middle have plummeted and perverse incentive
welfare policies have made infants into livestock. The correlated desperation has left pastures
of labor abundant and deflationary pressure on wages. This has boomed the stores of Wall Street to
unprecedented global returns.
Fixed games of the
American housing, energy, and medical systems have redirected public resources
to banks, oil barons, and pharmaceutical firms at the detriment of the marginal
equation for labor to make ends meet or advance at the end of a forty hour
contribution to their employer. Taxes
attempt to funnel profits collected back to the programs necessary to
compensate for human necessity to fight influenza, climate change, stomach
enzymes, and senility.
During the process
the costs of basic credit card transactions, commuting, and pill capsules
extract marginal tithes to private gate keepers. Portions of these funds feed lobbyists to
entwine candidates into gang memberships to retain or recycle political
position. Votes are legally purchased
behind the veil of flawed ideologies masquerading behind rhetoric masking
inconvenient nude mathematics.
The Earth is
warming. Carbon emissions matter. A single-payer health care system is better
economically and medically for the public, but not for firms. Taxpayers insulate financial institutions
from the very risk at the fulcrum for their purposed economic value. Economic mobility is largely an illusion
designed for citizens to vote against their self-interest to entertain the
fantasy of what one might be. The idea
that our country’s policies diminish labor as essential shareholders is not
accident.
America operates
under a one-party system. The national
conversation is narrowing in on the true issues. Firm-owners understand the column is creating
unsustainability. Something must be
done. One hand in the presidency
acknowledges pieces of the issue knowing the other hand will thwart a true
correction.
Thus we don’t get
single-payer. We get a flawed substitute
designed to misrepresent what universal healthcare might be. Better give an inch then a hundred miles. We do not get financial reform. No one gets arrested. We get bailouts and pennies-on-the-billion
fines. We do not get renewable
energy. We get fracking over OPEC.
Occasionally there
is an Enron, Arthur Andersen, or Lehman Brothers, but the majority of BP,
Goldman Sacks, and Ernst and Young carry forward. The players comprehend if it is not this
ticker symbol willing to cannibalize long-term best interest of country, the
firm, or humanity for the short-term bonus, stock-incentive, or reward then
another will quickly take its place. The
only thwarting control is mutual industry assurance for penalty for any player
instigating the long-term detriment communicated by public regulation. The tickers cannot help themselves. This is why minimum wages, the S.E.C., the
D.O.L., the E.P.A., and the I.R.S. are scoffed as the problem by capitalists at
every turn.
We do not get true
immigration reform, the end of the drug war, or national digital web-based
educational assets etc. We get
neoliberal trade agreements, Marlboro marijuana, and two-hundred year old
racism called a state’s rights issue asking educators to create lesson plans
and jump through hoops rather than being given the tools to address the reality
of the American classroom. The results
of all the other issues consolidate into behavioral and educational challenges
presented by a seven a year old hijacking forty percent of a teacher’s time in
a classroom of thirty-three.
This political
sleight of hand beguiles the populace with the illusion of satisfaction
misdirecting the idea that we are not our government and responsible for all of
this mess and capable of changing it. A
threshold of satisfaction under a cloud of desperation is key to prevent
riots. Anarchy disrupts profit
pipelines. Labor is required. The alarm clock must be answered with the
razor’s edge of the mortgage, medical premium, gas tank, and pantry
contents. If content, the productivity
in the grind slows. The lemon is left
with too much juice before the rind is tossed to the landfill.
Commerce is the
cooperation of adults willing to wake and do what is best for the whole rather
than individual in exchange for an allocation of resources to sustain the
individual. When that allocation is
unavailable, idleness leads to impoverishment as our elusive exchanges for traveling,
health, learning, shelter, nourishment, genetic reproduction, security, and
distraction become isolated. There are
too few firms with a threshold of resources to provide a network for such
services that humans isolate in deserts brewing for uprising. Revolutions cycle from France, to the
Ukraine, to Tunisia, to Boston.
The state of our
union is weak. Leadership is scarce,
narrowly whispering in a center-right government in the larynxes of people like
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Few
dare acknowledge the mathematics as the intractable bottle neck of political
intransigence leaves us ever so close to the end of an empire. We get a standing ovation where every face is
afraid to be the first to cease clapping for a Frankenstein soldier propped up
by his father next to the first lady. To
be spotted not clamoring adulation for a marketing campaign is to urinate on
patriotism, religion, and the basic human sacrifice of one’s volition. To do so is to be labeled a rebel student of
facts and mathematics. To do so is to
call the emperor naked.
For one knows we
do not really praise the soldier. The
representatives and citizenry will recall his face like a bill board, but the
soldier is not a man, but a flag drenched in the dividends of Boeing,
Halliburton, and ExxonMobil created by war contracts. His publically-funded medical care is a spin
on the glossed-over backlog of amputations and psychotic episodes huddling
under frozen overpasses as artic winds blow through Atlanta. Hurricane Sandy and Sandy hook elementary
become talking-points for the basic lie of where human volition begins and
ends. The dichotomy is that there is so
little we can do about one man choosing to gun down a kindergarten classroom
and there is everything we can do about the average temperature of our
oceans. The universe says hello in such
ways.
To one we go to
war for over a decade to silence men in caves.
We smash them like hydra heads praying that the mushroom spores are not
poisonous. The other we have to string
out every dollar in the hydrocarbon reserves in our planet, before deciphering
how to monetize sunbeams and wind.
Europe is oil light. The United
States and Canada are hydrocarbon rich.
Therefore Germany has fields of solar panels and we have gas pipelines
in response to Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran.
For whatever
progress might be made in this state of the union it is calculated, muted, and
spun to veil behind the idea of a uniform patched together from so many road
side bombs. Who is planting them? Why?
