Let's celebrate mediocrity!
It's Non-Farm Payroll day and we're expecting to see the obligatory 250,000 jobs added to the labor force, which seems nice – until you realize that's only 3M per year in a population that grew 3M last year and we are STILL missing, 6 years after the collapse, 5% of the Jobs (7.5M) that we used to have.
What's changed to bring unemployment down from 10% to 5%, despite the flatlining total employment, is the stunning decline in people who are bothering to work in the first place. A matching 7.5M people have simply dropped out of the labor force since 2008 – giving us the illusion of low unemployment without having to actually hire more people.
That's why wages have been able to flatline for 6 years as well, despite 6 years of inflation that has eroded the buying power of those few people who do still work in this country.
Less jobs, less workers and the people who are working are making less (adjusted for inflation) than they have made since the 1930s – how exactly are we supposed to be turning this economy around?
Well, from the Top 1% point of view, we can buy our labor (not to be confused with slavery – where we had to feed, clothe and shelter and train our workers) cheaper than ever. This has led to skyrocketing Corporate Profits – especially if you keep in mind that the profits reflected on this chart are only what they report (not counting what they hide overseas or depreciation or other accounting tricks) net of the losses of other corporations and they are still up 150% in the past 5 years while Labor has taken a 10% hit.
Imagine extrapolating this chart and what it means to your children and grandchildren if you do nothing to change things now. If you are in the Top 1%, of course, not only do you NOT want this chart to change but some of you will do whatever it takes to make sure this trend continues. If, on the other hand, you are one of those lazy people in the bottom 99%, the words of Thomas Jefferson (sort of) begin to sound like a very dire warning:
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered."
Actually homelessness is the least of our grand-children's problems – this is the road to slavery, pure and simple.
Our Founding Fathers were well-versed in philosophy and they certainly expected future generations to continue to understand concepts like a "social contract," in which individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms to submit to the authority of the ruler or magistrate (or to the decision of a majority), in exchange for protection of their remaining rights.
In fact, it was Thomas Locke himself who described natural rights as "inalienable" and those primary rights were very specifically laid out in our own Declaration of Independence as featuring the rights to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." In the past decade, since the Bush regime shredded the Constitution in 2001, we've seen numerous examples of our Government denying Life and Liberty while the private sector has certainly done its damndest to deny the Happiness.
As noted by Charles Bukowski, what kind of Happiness can there be when every day is a struggle to survive? When health care is a privilege only for those who can afford it, when your job isn't enough to keep a roof over your head, let alone retire - and when you are one unpaid, sick week in bed away from bankruptcy?
We, as a country, are not paying our workers enough money and the really sick thing is that we then complain when more and more people end up being poor. WE (the top 1%) have 8 times more overseas workers (40M) in the past 30 years than US workers (net 5M) and then we pay our Congressmen to cut food stamps, welfare and unemployment compensation for those Fox calls "too lazy" to get a non-existent job.
What kind of sick bastards are we?
Really folks, I'm not kidding – are we doing this on purpose? Do we actually get out of bed and try to think of new ways to screw the bottom 99% in this country? Do we purposely make it prohibitively expensive for their children to get a good enough education to compete with our kids? Do we purposely price them out of good neighborhoods? Do we purposely pay them so little (minimum wage is $253.75 for a 35-hour week) that two full-time jobs aren't enough to pay the bills?
No, we just let it happen – and that's just as bad.
The good news is that, at this point, it takes very little for the top 1% to drastically improve the lives of the bottom 80%. Globally, things are so ridiculously unequal that the top 1% alone have as much income as the bottom 56%. That means, that if we simply put a 20% tax on incomes over $2M (where the top 1% begins), we could redistribute that money and increase the earnings of the bottom $3.5Bn people on this planet by 20%. The rich would hardly miss it and the poor would have their lives drastically changed.
Even more effective would be if we consider that the top 20% make 81.2% of the World's Income and, sadly the bottom 60% have just 10.4%. That means that taxing the top 20% just 10.4% more could DOUBLE the salaries of the bottom 4.2Bn. What is wrong with us that we can't accomplish this?
Not only can't we accomplish something as simple as redistributing something that is clearly unfairly distributed in the first place but we can't even agree, in our own top 20% (for the most part) country, to let our own people make a decent living.
40 hours worked for $292.52 – how is this not slavery? That's $41.78 per day take-home to pay rent, utilities, transportation, clothes and food for the family, school supplies, college funds, health insurance, furniture, vacations and, of course, retirement savings. After all, what kind of irresponsible animals don't save money for their retirement, right?
That's our attitude because that's what we are taught by schools that have been stripped of a social curriculum, by churches that no longer teach morality and by a Media that is controlled by the same top 1% that refuses to give up 20% of their money to enrich the rest of humanity. It's WRONG – you KNOW it's wrong and it's the time of year when you really need to consider doing something about it.
And, by something, I don't mean giving a few bucks to the homeless or putting a little extra in the collection plate on Sunday. Giving the Salvation Army Santa a Dollar when you leave the grocery store isn't going to fix things for the 4.2Bn working poor on this planet – WE NEED TO CHANGE THINGS – and all I need you to do, for now, is begin to have this conversation.
Nothing will ever change unless we begin to talk about changing things. Well, nothing will change peacefully, anyway.
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