Washblog

It is true that back to the time when Reagan disempowered the air traffic controllers, workers have been victims of a well organized government and corporate  managed slippage  toward impotence in the name of unfettered and deregulated capitalism.

The principal priority for the corporate and credit kind of capitalism that has led us to economic ruin has included a strict insistence and maneuver toward cheap labor. When cheap labor  capitalism is perceived as the one true patriotic core foundation of America's prosperity, we have been fools.

Arguments in this regard have always held that when the economy is healthy and a company fails,  it is pricing competition shackled by all the costs of doing business that constitutes the prime cause of failure.

The simplest means of holding down costs of production is holding down wages and benefits which puts the least amount of stress on the more critical factors of competitive capitalism.

If economic competition becomes too strong for a company to prosper in a market dominated by suppressed earnings and purchasing power, would not the economy have been better off with less item-by-item profit and more sales based on greater  spending power of higher wages and benefits?

Suppressed wage advocay in the last great depression did not free us from ruin with or without the impetus of a world war. What did help free us up to meet the demands of that world war was wise pro-labor legislation in the Roosevelt years.

You know, the original National Labor Relations Board and stuff like that. I certainly don't think that Roosevelt was re-elected three times because he worked on behalf of cheap labor capitalists.

Suppressed wages and benefits bleed the economic stimulus, keeping us in the lobster basket. We remain vulnerable to lobby purchased-blind insistence that self-serving corporate welfare will get us out of this mess.

It won't.

Until more people can afford to buy more stuff, all we are doing is treading water and diverting resources to the more undeserving and most harmful-to-the-common good sector of our economy.

How many times do we need to watch these pin-stripe suits  demonstrate how little they have a clue until we finally get it?

Honesty dictates that we stop buying economic arguments pretending that unions had any significant part in what went wrong with our big business and big banking economy.,

If consumers borrowed recklessly over the last 20 years and made of themselves co-culprits with Wall Street and government financiers it's not because the consumers belonged to unions.

Look at the current minimum wage as compared to the average monthly incomes of salaried workers and it is clearly discernible that high hourly wages have not been the problem.

One could argue perhaps that if the national minimum wage for the 90% of American labor that remains unorganized had somehow doubled in the past twenty years, our economic collapse might not have been as devastating. A stimulus package to create spending incentives would not need have been so costly.

More income would have  been in the hands of those upon whose spending the economy rests and less in the hands of those trying to grab and keep as much as they dared regardless of who gets hurt.

Street-level empathy is where we will ultimate revive things. That includes empathy and work toward what unions stand for.

Laborers in this country need and deserve a living wage that is not granted piecemeal as a gift or bribe from condescending politicians who consider such concessions as necessary evils in a program that worships big business.

Health care is not a commodity affordable for some but not for all. Economically that notion has never made sense yet for decades we as a nation have collectively looked the other way when it comes down to honest assessments of health care.

What was wise for the British at the end of WWII was something we - in our ignorance - refused to consider as a national approach to values.

Medical providing as a profit-driven system which by definition has become a marketable commodity means that health is easy to obtain for some but difficult for many more.

That is not a justifiable reality. We need to give up the notion that being a health care provider should be included in the profit and earning incentive upon which the overall economy is based. Why must we be a society where college kids aspire to careers with exaggerated earnings based on human vulnerability and the danger of unequal access to treatment?

Most Americans have to choose from among wage-based careers as a means of providing for families. There ought to be nothing in our core values that insists that colleges and medical schools  can confer some right to the wealth and prosperity of a career based on available or withheld services to needy human suffering and emergency based on ability to pay.

Medical providers can seek wealth and prosperity just like the rest of us who do not work and train to become part of a vulture system of healthcare in this country.

Organized labor has the ability to do more for equalizing and sustaining equal access in this country than all the corporate welfare and financial bailout schemes combined.

Both avenues to restoration would be costly but I see no reason why we should not look at labor when the corporate avenue we've been trying to fix has proven to be a miserable failure all the while keeping it's hand out with no end to the unrepentant begging in sight.