Expounding on the State of the Union 1/28/14 (for a coworker)

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?