In order to make fire or to put fire out you need the fire triangle: oxygen, fuel and heat. Take one away and the fire goes out. For the capitalists’ consumer system to thrive like fire it needs: money, demand and product, if you take one of these away and capitalism dies. Let’s look at what happens when 400 individuals accumulates more than $2 trillion and keeps it in their pockets year after year.
This is the start of inequality, which causes poverty. The USA now is at the highest level of inequality in our history. We sit between Venezuela and Uruguay. We are even higher than every major European or East Asian nation in our inequality, which causes poverty through economic mismanagement. The corporations don’t spend their money; they just sit on it, which drains money from the economy and the “fire” goes out.
With no corporations spending there will be no jobs, which means no workers spending, which means no demand for products (the fire is snuffed out). With fewer jobs and with the existence of all those people without jobs, it creates what Karl Marx called a reserve army of unemployed. Unemployment fuels poverty by decimating wages. Desperate people bid down the price of labor simply to survive, which means the fire still goes out .
It is a misconception that business is the job creator, and will deploy corporate profits to take risks to reinvest to expand and ultimately to employ more people. Businesses see labor simply as a cost. Businesses try to reduce that cost as much as possible in order to boost profits as much as can be and at any expense. Businesses are not in the business of creating jobs; businesses are in the business of maximizing profits. Businesses hire labor only when they can make a profit from the workers.
If a business could eliminate its labor force entirely, it would, which would put out the fire forever. This is what we—the wage slaves— are up against. We must force the wages up, which will put more money in the hands of the people who will actually spend it. This will then entice the people who are sitting on the cash to want to make more by investing to cover the needs of the spenders and soon we will have a good fire again.
To make it work, we, the 99 percent, will have to do it. It is time for the spring offensive. We need to use the good weather to get to the high ground (as described in the Art of War). The goal is for $15 to $24 an hour; and a decline in unemployment of about 2-4 percent—would equal a wage slave’s dream.
In 2012 more than a quarter of all political contributions came from just 30,000 people who represented the 1 percent of the 1 percent, 90 percent who spent the most won. Today, we are an experiment in either a democracy, which started in 1787 or an oligarchy, which is winning. The nonunion people, like Trump and Musk, have most all the tools in their pockets to destroy our unions. They have money, they have the courts, they have law enforcement, they have the media, and 50 percent of workers that don’t know this don’t know the history of the working class people. This is the perfect storm to lose all the gains workers have made whether they’re union or not, even our Social Security and Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act. So, now we will have to go way back to the late 1920s and ‘30s and dig up the old labor party books. One book, written in 1964, has the information, The Rebel Voices, an IWW Anthology by Joyce L. Kornbluh, educator, activist, and advocate. The history of our labor...
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