A plutocrat is someone who is very rich and supports the Have Littles known to most of the rich as the workers or wage slaves. One rich plutocrat’s is Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist, who is supporting among other things the $15 an hour minimum wage to take effect immediately. Hanauer is not a fan of slow walking the wage hike. He understands good wages will build the middle class and grow the economy.
The other side thinks growth produces a thriving middle class. According to Hanauer this is not true. It is wrong and backward. A thriving middle class is the source of growth in a technological, capitalist economy. Investing in the middle class is the most pro-business thing one can do.
For this ideology, Hanauer has been called “America’s premier self-loathing plutocrat,” a description he relishes.
Hanauer argues dramatically raising workers’ minimum wage to $15 an hour will not lead to fewer jobs as his opponents claim, it will lead to more jobs because workers who have more money will create demand for more products and services thereby creating a positive feedback loop of prosperity. Hanauer calls this middle out economics.
The $15 an hour minimum wage hike is not the silver bullet to solve all our inequality woes, but it will solve most. With this new stronger middle class of voters, we can then start electing people who supports the right to have a union, free education, single-payer healthcare, and good pensions, even Social Security increases, and with good, well-paying jobs, workers can increase our tax base while getting off of government assistance programs.
More tax paying workers will put more in government coffers and that, coupled with new corporations and Wall Street paying their fair share, we can start rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. Maybe 2016 will be our fresh start.
The survival of American democracy requires the existence of a flourishing union work force. In a survey, 68 percent of Americans approve of labor unions. So, as an old sheet metal organizer, I say we need to go all out in organizing while the soldering iron is hot, to use a sheet metal workers tool. We should organize all workers no matter where or what kind of work they do. All workers have the right to belong to a union and all should support each other. If you, in your work place, do not know how to form a union, then do what Napoleon’s military adopted adage, ‘Jump into the battle and then figure it out.’ One of the best ways to organize is worker to worker and plan it out over a meal or coffee and talk to other union workers to see what would work best for you and also what unions are winning at this time. Just go for it. When things are in disarray, like the shit show in Washington, D.C., they might not even know what you are doing until it is too late for them to push back aga...
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