The Minimum Wage

Doing what I do I am privy to industry messages inside the business community.  This one comes from the National Restaurant Association, not the gun enthusiasts.

Survey says...

NRA poll: Wage increase not the best way to reduce poverty A federal minimum wage increase ranks a distant third, behind post-secondary education and job training opportunities, as a factor that stands to significantly reduce poverty in the United States, according to the results of a recent National Restaurant Association poll. Three of four respondents said ensuring that more young people complete high school and have an opportunity to acquire some form of post-secondary education would have a very significant impact (49%) or fairly significant impact (20%) on reducing poverty in the U.S. The poll, conducted in late January by ORC International on behalf of the NRA, asked 1,003 adults for their opinion on whether three factors—increasing the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, ensuring that more young people finish high school and have an opportunity to acquire post-secondary education, and providing more opportunities for job training for the unemployed and under-employed—would have a significant, fairly significant, or somewhat of an impact on reducing poverty. Read more. Tell Congress that increasing the federal minimum wage will reduce jobs, not poverty.

My drop in a bucket comments:  Off course the NRA wants to oppose any increase in the minimum wage.  The giant corporations that run the spew of fast food and homogenized dining experiences at every interstate exit use the federal minimum wage as the forced maximum they have to unfortunately relinquish for the disposable humans that wash dishes, tote plates, heat chicken, and flow consumer cattle through table tops with touch screens.  The minimum wage is a restrictive check and balance that exists because without it disposable humans will accept a nickel a day over nothing in times of economic desperation.

This poll starts with a false economic premise.  It juxtaposes the idea that the waiter, line cook, or clean up artist is some current student or drop out and that higher education would resolve the toil.  It does not address the reality that humans require a spectrum of low, moderate, and high wage compensation variables for our macroeconomic equation to balance.  Right now it does not balance.  The major reason it does not is because the top end hoards the preponderance through dividends, high-end management compensation, and an escalation of commitment compensation routine where those getting paid millions begin to over-associate their contribution to the business’s profit.  (I.e.  I paid out this bonus to me, we’re making money.  If I left the profit would go away.  I am an indispensable human. )

To do this the minimum wagers in third world and in the United States become blank-faced replaceable bodies to churn the factory whether it be a restaurant or Wal-Mart.  This is why the minimum wage is so crucial.  The minimum wage is the reluctant share given for a unit of cog-labor in America.  The country’s political lobbying groups will repress this wage as long as possible. 

This is why we see statistics about job loss and how the money the increased minimum wage “costs” would be better spent elsewhere.   Some humans have an intelligence quotient or a desire where minimum wage is all they can or will do in this life.  The minimum wage means if a firm could pay you less it would.  Applying a theoretical college degree to this population is a false solution to a full economic spectrum reality. 

Most min-wage workers are adults, parents, family providers and the percentage is growing, not declining.  The economy is us as a nation, not the stock market.  When compensation is diverted from the firm owners to the bottom rung, even in such tiny amounts as the minimum wage, that money gets circulated in our economy at a much higher rate than as a stock dividend.  That helps the federal treasury and creates consumer spending, which is the number one driver of a healthy economy.  Increased minimum wage workers have a better shot at home ownership, automobile ownership, lowering financing charges and other fundamental variables that can assist in elevating humans into the middle class. 

The idea that firms will cut people because the minimum wage increases requires the precursor question: what are the profits of that company?  What do the 10K's say?  Where do those profits go to?

Look at the stock market, look at the lines of industries opposing the minimum wage and you will begin to understand why increasing the minimum wage to a reasonable amount around $10 an hour is vital, healthy and a major step in our economic recovery.

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?

Introduction The Meme: Why We Do What We Do: The Ten Internal Commandments and the Humans are not Animals Meme: a Treatise

The Meme: Why We Do What We Do:

The Ten Internal Commandments and the Humans are not Animals Meme: a Treatise

The following is a treatise to reevaluate the biblical Decalogue and the meme at its root.  (A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.)  Each Old Testament commandment is stated in truncated veiled catechetical format followed by a more specific scriptural account.  These traditional legalities will be juxtaposed with a single word capturing the essence of what the original commandment pertains. 

This treatise attempts to interconnect the Ten Commandments, which is used as the apex example of a system of social and cultural constructs implemented by humans to shield humans from the reality that humans are no different than animals.  This is done in order to install a social hierarchy so that humans could live in consistent coordinated coexistent societies (rather than as singular vagabonds killing, stealing, and deceiving each other when convenient) for the long-term benefit of the species.  The meme on the most rudimentary level is born from a complex-being’s fear of death. 

The treatise intends to point out the myriad of human decision making trees that serve to protect this “Humans-are-not-Animals” meme (the Meme), identify the detriments and benefits to society created by the Meme, and consider the potential ramifications on the mental evolution of humans if this meme was reduced to lower thresholds by exploring religious, economic, political, and psychological aspects.

This piece is intended to extract the pith of psychological manipulation in each numerated Commandment in the long-standing addendum to people influenced by the bible as an extension of the Pentateuch and reexamine the benefits and detriments of the content, phrasing, and consequences upon our planet.  The single-worded headers are intended to convey a neo-Decalogue of internal commandments generating not out of what one is commanded by an external authority, but by what one understands inherently by being a complex life-form and therefore abides and carries out rationally, logically, and willingly under a comprehensive autonomous station of volition.  A better understanding of these core psychological concepts and how each relates to wielding our volition represents a path to usurp human-hunger for the Humans-are-not-Animals meme.

The commandments will be shown for why they are connected to the central Humans-are-not-Animals meme.  The treatise will show how the Meme is so successful as it attempts to keep humans out of chaos and disobey the laws of the universe by reducing entropy.  This treatise attempts to show that it is this violation of natural entropy that shows why the Meme cannot ultimately be sustained.  This may lead to humans accelerating human extinction if the Meme is not recognized for what it is if humans do not elect an alternative dominant meme that can serve as a substitute to communicate human interconnection.

The treatise often presents humans in roles manipulating and being manipulated.  This manipulation is most often subconscious through vast historical infrastructures of self-identity and social standing imprinted by humanity upon ourselves.  There is no monster, only ideas which we either choose to believe or not. 

The treatise delves into the most dangerous ideas man has ever conjured, the ideas which hold society from chaos and mobilize the masses.  We are inherently cognizant on a species-level that humans must organize in a hierarchy.  We cannot all be ant queens.  We will all die.

However discussing these realities is perilous.  We are a living super-organism.  We need exploitation in a sufficient measure so that we are not every man or woman scavenging alone in a wasteland or living day to day under a carnivore/herbivore arrangement of kill or be killed.  We see this in herds of buffalo and prides of lions.  So in we must understand this interplay within our species to not look first to jealousy, hated, anger, greed, or maniacal individuals. 

We must look inward to what and who we are as a collective and as individuals wielding volition knowing that it is in each of our individual best interests to participate in a system of balance for mutual survival and love if we can muster.  This is where we uncover the genesis and value of the Meme.

How do we as a cooperative society convince the bottom rungs to participate in a system designed to exploit the Poor if the complexities of the human mind recognize what is actually taking place?  The most common answers have been religion, patriotism, racism, and fundamentalism.  (The capitalized word Poor will be used in this treatise as a term to indicate the lowest classes of society in terms of financial wealth and social-power.)

Many may cry foul.  The ideas are like a shockwave piercing the shell of superego burrowing into ego and rattling who we are, why we do what we do, who is to “blame”, and scratching the mane of our animal-like id craving genetic replication.  If unveiled, if absent the disguised contortion, then chaos may ensue.  We may become enraged in rebellion at how we are tricksters and tricked. 

We see glimpses in Arab Springs, Katrina rooftops , Darfur pickup-trucks, Kandahar caves, Occupy Wall Street encampments, Mogadishu Saturdays, Filipino typhoons, Birmingham fire hoses, Juarez murders, Kenneth Lay, Bangladesh sewerage treatment, the Catholic church’s deposit for an island off the coast of Grenada, L.A. Riots, Monsanto seed patents, Tiananmen tanks, and nightly newscast screen crawls. 

The self-initiated beguilement is the glue holding civility from splintering in a shamble of raw fear.  Nothing is really stopping craven wanton greed, destruction, and anarchy.  Nothing can stop death.  Humanity has always been only held by volition. 

This unassailable fact is the crux of the Meme and the conflict between religion and science; or is it a thought rather than fact?  Is there a god?  If there is, is this god a safeguard?  How do we define god?  This is why humans are so passionate on the subject of god and by consequence religion.  The concept of god is foundational to the Meme.

We hunger for the comfort god represents against this inherent risk to being a living organism.  Our cerebral cortexes crave this electrical-power-surge protector as we plug into the human-living system.  Less complex animal brains do not require such assurances operating on instinctual acceptance of this reality.  Less-complex animals are ready to eat or be eaten.  Death is the omnipresence.  Animals do not costume the idea.  The Meme informs us we are more complex and this vulnerability is inapplicable because of god and our unique-being status.

Humans bury this debate deeply within our id making taboos of cannibalism and improper burial.  We have invented religion to pile layers over this risk in our superego so that we do not obsess in a deluge of fret over what is possible at any moment as a rat happens upon a snake.

So in tasting this peril, a portion of mankind manufactured the original Ten Commandments and to a degree all religion and various superstitions as a safeguard to distance ourselves from these unsettling innate cogs to life.  To point out superstition’s absurdities is to jeopardize that fragile skeleton and bank on trust and love rather than deception and fear. 

We grow to notice things that are in many ways once seen unable to be unnoticed moving forward.  We grow to see life as a choice and an acknowledgement of love or fear in ourselves and others.  We conquer death as the Meme attempts to do, not through the Meme’s false eternities, but by relishing the volition to love in our gene-vehicles operable life.

When we see into the workings of the Humans-are-not-Animals meme, we see how the Meme often influences us to choose fear and views love as human weakness to assuage our hunger for genetic survival.  We segregate, classify, and partition life into subcategories until we distance ourselves far enough from the initial love or fear decision that we are blind to why humanity operates the way it does. 

The Meme’s greatest benefit to human-evolution is that the Meme freed the human-mind from expending the preponderance of our conscious and subconscious thought on eat or be eaten and hour to hour survival as well as temporarily explaining scientific phenomenon.  This unlocked the computing-power of our collective cerebral cortexes.  The Meme communicates the illusion of an enforceable social contract.  This is the catalyst of our complex-brains domination of other Earth-species through mental evolution.

The Meme has been crucial, if not indispensable.  However, like most mechanisms of evolution, we must reevaluate our present needs, like a dinosaur into a bird, and shed the excess hindrances to provide a fresh allotment of freedoms to set our minds further along the spectrum-grindstone of the universe.  We are to do what all life is called, evolve or suffer extinction. 

To continue this evolution we can imagine that life can be deposited in one of two baskets on a scale to add weight to the imbalance.  Currently the Meme has the preponderance.  Thus the Meme dominates.  This treatise will act as a guide on how the authors see events, points of view, reactions in the arenas of human life to either be pro-Meme or anti-Meme.

This treatise urges humans to develop awareness to group stimuli and human behavior according to pro-Meme or anti-Meme.  One may find the world of human behavior suddenly more thoroughly explained.  Thoughts, bizarre logics, paradoxical behavior and reactions will appear connected through a formerly-hidden variable to complex-human life’s equation, which was previously unspecified, but is now glaring in how simple, yet magnanimous the Humans-are-not-Animals meme is. 

Conversely once one sees the folly electing the Meme’s perpetuation, one can inform others to see the Emperor’s nudity and openly speak in a mature discourse on the alternative replacement evolving meme.  One will see that it is not a naked overlord in the parade, but the entire crowd naked looking not at invisible fabric, but at a nonexistent emperor.  There are only us and our thoughts. 

The ten internal commandments are a suggestion to frame the groundwork for a replacement evolving meme and offered as reflective touchstones for individuals to contemplate inherent morality and an individual notion of what many might call god.  These are not meant to be an encompassing, complete, or restricted list, merely hubs for thought to grow.  

Let us continue.

Love, Fear, Faith, Hypocrisy, Death, Empathy, Avarice, Knowledge, Energy, Prejudice

Each original Commandment is stated under the following two formats:

[Traditional Catechetical Catholic Formula]

{Exodus 20: 2 to 17}