The disempowerment of the workers worldwide and the USA is driving the wage inequality wider each day, which puts the capitalists’ consumer-driven economy into a death spiral. This spiral began in the mid-1980s when executives and directors tossed aside their old patriotic inhabitations against laying off workers, cutting wages, closing U.S. plants, moving production overseas to dirt-cheap labor, and taking on debt.
Most of this was driven by locally owned companies becoming stockholder corporations where the bottom line was all that mattered, no matter the cost. Their only concern is the shareholders; but this way of doing business is proving counterproductive. There is no way to grow. There is no wages or jobs. No spending. No economy. It’s essentially like committing business suicide.
This type of death spiral was also supported by the business roundtable in the 1990. They changed their statement of corporations’ mission from making goods available at a fair price to generating economic returns to its owners.
In the past, workers were able to raise their wages through widespread collective bargaining or full-employment economy with an unemployment rate was at 5 to 4 percent, neither option is available today or likely to be any time soon.
So what to do? Niccolo Machiavelli wrote in “The Prince,” that there are two methods of fighting. One is with laws, and the other is force. The first one is proper to man, but the second is proper to beasts. Because the first one often does not suffice (think recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings) one has no recourse to the second.
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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