Working Life

There is little doubt that if Martin Luther King Jr. was alive today–and he would be 85 years old–he would be at the forefront of decrying the class warfare that has reached levels that even he could not have imagined during his short lifetime. He once said that what we “are saying that something is wrong … with capitalism…. There must be better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism. Call it what you may, call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.”

And he would have woken up to this startling fact: the richest 1% of people throughout the globe control 48% of the planet’s wealth, leaving the other 52% for the other 99% of humanity.

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Not that this should be entirely shocking but this should end the debate about how is getting fleeced and who carries the burden in society. And it’s useful to have this handy to dispatch to the usual class warfare deniers.

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The steady robbery of peoples’ hard work has taken place over the past five decades, with the pace accelerating over the past twenty years. What this robbery does is basically squeeze people so hard that their lives become a shaky, volatile daily existence. Proof of the class warfare isn’t hard to find.

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Tick, tick, tick, tick…every minute that goes by is another minute workers are being robbed–in particular, those people forced to work for the slave-like minimum wage. And if you looked back just five years, there’s a price tag to that robbery: over $300 billion.

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The campaign for a $10.10 federal minimum wage, championed by the president, Democrats in Congress and a whole raft of “liberal/progressive” organizations, is a very bad idea.

To be clear, I’m not arguing it’s too ambitious. The opposite: what we need is a campaign, now, today, for a minimum wage of $20-an-hour. Anything less is a failure to confront poverty in America and a bankrupt economic system.

$10.10-an-hour will not allow people to make a fair living, or challenge the basic, “We-make-profits-thanks-to-poverty” system that underpins today’s real world economy.

Anything short of $20-a-hour is a capitulation to the most narrow politics, particularly on the part of so-called “liberals/progressives” who are, unintentionally, locking into place deep poverty in America and ratifying the basic principle of the so-called “free market”.

And $20-an-hour actually relates to real life after you look at a very complicated idea: simple math.

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Just so we’re clear, and this bears repeating even if it is obvious, the richest people in the country are going to, once again, be the gift of more welfare-for-the-rich under the tax proposals of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan–while, just by the numbers, lower income people will get hit with a tax increase. Don’t you love this system?

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You take for granted that the malevolent Koch Brother billionaires and FOX will go all out to keep robbing workers. That’s just what they do. But, a much more pernicious danger undercutting workers is the inaccurate way in which the traditional “liberal” media and a whole raft of politicians describe what has happened to wages. It’s typically referred to as “wage stagnation”. That is false: it’s wage robbery.

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C’mon, seriously, has it gotten to the point of such desperation to pass middle-class crushing, poverty-enhancing trade deals that drive inequality that the White House treats its allies, members of Congress and activists as if they are idiots? That’s a rhetorical question.

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Excuse me while we interrupt the hocus-pocus exercise of throwing a meager bone to a few workers on the minimum wage (a proposal, by the way, that is pathetic at $10.10 an hour) to point out: the few cents you think you are putting into a person’s left pocket by hiking a smidgen the minimum wage you are, then, yanking out of that person’s right pocket a whole lot more by promoting the horrendous Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and its malignant so-called “free trade” predecessors.

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Not a new idea but worth spotlighting on MLK Day that class warfare is forging ahead. Oxfam, in anticipation of the gathering of the Masters of the Universe at Davos, tells us this nugget: the richest 85 people have the same wealth as 3.5 billion people, half the population of the world.

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