A lot of our problems can be traced to one source: out-of-control capitalism. Too many big corporations are driven by profit at the expense of everything else. They do everything they can to keep wages low and avoid paying benefits to their employees. Keeping their bank accounts fat and their shareholders happy are all that matter – and everything and everyone else be damned. Little do they know that this is biting them in their backsides. When the fat cats keep minimum wage at rock bottom, more and more of the working class must rely on public assistance such as food stamps and Obamacare – as in more taxes that everybody has to pay. Also, depressed wages mean less buying power for the Middle Class and the poor, less cash at large to stimulate the economy. Too many CEOs have been hypnotized by the bean counters, and have lost sight of the true purpose of capitalism, namely, to make everybody prosper – not just the one percent. The business morals of Henry Ford, who made sure that his employees were paid as high a wage as feasible, have been forgotten amid the clatter of adding machines.
The pay of CEOs has skyrocketed over the last 25 years, while wages for the rank and file workers have creeped up slowly. Congress has increased its own pay many times, yet raised the minimum wage only three times. Our current minimum wage is not a living wage – and has not increased in over 11 years. Most people earning this are not teenagers who live at home under the care of an adult guardian or two, but heads of households who fret over whether they will be able to keep up with utility bills and rent. Many must rely on SNAP and food banks in order to eat and keep their children fed. Sadly, a lot of people who advocate less government also think that wages should be left to businesses. The fact that so many businesses do all they can to keep wages low and avoid springing for benefits shows that you can have decent wages, or minimal governmental interference in commerce, but not both. Private charity could not even begin to take up the slack, any more than one could fit all the passengers on a crammed-full articulated city bus into a Smart car.
To add insult to injury, while Congress slashes food stamps and refuses to extend unemployment benefits, they still provide huge subsidies to corporations that are making record profits. One-quarter of all corporations do not pay any income tax, thus shifting the burden to individuals and small businesses, which are less and less able to take on such a burden. Wage earners thus get the double whammy, not only having to subsist on less, but also having to shoulder more of the tax burden to pay for corporate welfare. Corporations do not need government assistance when they are in the black.
Our government allocates more to “defense” than any other nation – in fact, we spend a third again more than the next nine nations combined. Our military budget is more than eight times that of China, the second biggest spender. We have military presence in dozens of countries, not for the sake of peacekeeping or maintaining freedom, but for the interests of the defense contractors. Then, when the men and women who served this nation come home, they find poorly run services for veterans, and must wait months or even more than a year for the physical and psychological therapy they need. Far, far too many succumb to suicidal urges. Thousands of veterans are homeless, while the CEOs of defense contractors loll in their mansions.
Dwight Eisenhower warned of the fearful “iron triangle” that is the military-industrial complex. This monster has taken control of the country and made our government its obliging stooge.
6 Responses to “SOUND OFF! 10/9/21 The Next Gandhi? Part 3: Dictatorship of Dollars”
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Henry Ford was no saint – and I don’t say that to disparage him, but to support my belief that it should not require a Dan Price to see the advantages of paying workers a living wage.
Robert Reich, and Beau of the Fifth Column, speak differently, but boyth stress, and both wish that media would stress and employers would grasp, that our present labor shortage is not because people don’t want to work – it’s because people no longer want to work for starvation wages. Although entirely spontaneous and in no way coordinated, it rather resembles a general strike. It is a simple matter of supply and demand – if you can’t get people to work for you at the pay you are offering, increase it (and for current employees also.) Add benefits (and for current employees also.) When you have to turn qualified people away, you are paying enough (for now.) Do not drop below that level, and increase it as appripriate.
I might also bring up the old adage that there are three characteristics a product or a service can have, and you can have at most two of the three. Choose wisely. If it is good and cheap, it won’t be fast. If it is cheap and fast, it won’t be good. If it is good and fast, it won’t be cheap. Employees are also like that. And if they come really cheap, they may beome neither good nor fast. And then … you have nothing.
Ah, but here I am, preaching to the choir again. Thank you, Freya , for pushing my buttons. I needed to get that off my chest.
The “Good – Fast – Cheap … Pick Two” produces a modified Venn diagram:
The current income inequality pay structure is simply not a viable formula for a nation.
https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2020/
Thanks for another excellent Sound Off. I couldn’t agree more, but I’m also beyond thinking we can change things around in time. Not with a COVID epidemic and Climate Change to battle at the same time.
We’re back to the same strategy leaders have used when facing a catastrophe they couldn’t handle: spend even more money on defence against the “other” and go to war. We can rest assured that this will be the last one.
Thanks Freya. With the 2008 crash, restaurants were requiring college degrees to wait tables.
Also, Covid has illuminated the need for affordable day care and the need for paid time off for health reasons, including care giving for family members with health needs. For most of this century, if parents couldn’t work different schedules to cover child care needs themselves one of them stayed home due to scarcity or unaffordable child care costs (child care plus transportation, clothing, etc. usually costs more than a minimum wage job without health insurance, etc.). Have lost count how often I’ve heard one of a couple say they only work for the health insurance.
Since I can now send posts to Mitch, I sent him all three of the “next Gamdhi” columns at once. His comment:
Freya’s Triptych spells it out very nicely. And Eisenhower was right. We are the biggest empire that has existed. ever, and much of what we do is to try to maintain our hegemony. We may already be at the place where, in the past, such an empire begins to collapse, and we may be doing so, in slow motion, as we continue to create enemies around the planet.
M.