Letter to a Right-Winger

Workers create value; employers organize a workplace, but only when there is demand for products/services: employers DO NOT CREATE JOBS. Governments create jobs more directly than most investors. And produce value, like census data, standard weights and measures, highways, civil peace, international stability. If you want to know what it's like without government, look at Somalia.

You need taxes to pay for collective values. People with wealth, and owners of businesses benefit more from these collective goods than those who live in ghettos, or under bridges. So, they should pay more. Currently, they don't pay their fair share.

The current tax system is more skewed in favor of the rich than it has been since the 1920's. The money created from economic growth should not all go to the investor, but 95% of all increased value since 2008 has gone to investors, not workers. Is that a fair distribution of value? When you tax, or even if you don't tax, you distribute wealth.

While employers may play some positive role in providing goods and services, investors are much less important, since there is an abundance of capital in the world. Why do you think interest rates can be kept so low? Investment should not be valued more highly than people's work, but that is exactly what our current tax system does. It's unjust (capital gains or "carried interest" at 15%, work: 20-35%). Our current system steals value from workers and transfers it to investors. That's Robin Hood in reverse, and that's what Obama proposes to undo.

If we continue along the same path of taxing investors lightly, then we'll end up like a Third World country with a small wealthy class and a poor, desperate class. Don't be surprised if we end up not with a moderate Obama, but with a revolutionary like Venezuela's Chavez, who gained political traction because of the extremes of wealth and poverty in Venezuela. My mother's family lives there behind doors that look like safe vaults!

In Sweden and Canada, people don't have to lock their doors even in Stockholm and Toronto, because those countries have fairer taxes and higher levels of equality.

Do you want people desperate, or relatively satisfied and willing to support the status quo? If you want stability and civil peace, you have to pay for it. If you have more, then you should pay more: you've benefited disproportionately. Does a black son of a waitress in a central city have your advantages? He struggles not because he's lazy, or stupid, but because our system intensifies his disadvantages; it should eliminate them.

Obama is no revolutionary Robin Hood; he's attempting to rectify a system that favors only a tiny proportion of the population. If that imbalance continues it will impoverish us all, not enrich us--except for the tiny few, like the Roman Senators of Fifth Century Rome prior to the Empire's collapse.

Labor Day!

Back to work tomorrow, the summer officially over, the political campaign to begin in earnest. You mean, all those Tea Party protests weren't a political campaign?

Labor Day is supposed to celebrate workers. As Garrison Keiler remarked, everywhere else workers are celebrated on May Day. Everywhere else they must be Commies! Everywhere else in developed countries labor unions account for more than 7% of the private workforce, and corporations would love to gain the kind of rights they have here. Union-busting firms probably began here; they'll probably spread elsewhere.

And then, there's the unemployed: near 10% makes those with jobs afraid to ask for anything.

The American model is no longer the well-paid middle class worker belonging to a union. Time and a half for overtime or weekends is a distant memory for most of us. Forty-hour weeks are something that seems to have disappeared, too, for the majority. Either the boss demands that you work extra hours or weekends for the same pay, or if you're salaried, for no extra pay at all.

Unions created the weekend, and that still exists, although for millions it doesn't. A friend of mine lost his $60,000 a year programming job and after the maximum unemployment all he's been able to get is an $8.50/hour job in which he works a rotating schedule, off sometimes on the weekend, sometimes Friday and Saturday, sometimes Sunday and Monday, etc..

My son goes to work daily at about 9, but doesn't get off work until 7 or 8 . His partner works even longer hours. Both are salaried, so, they earn no extra for long hours.

This seems to be the new American model. It may also be why employers aren't hiring much; they can squeeze more and more work out of their current employees with little additional cost. It's also, why they enthusiastically fight unions, and why there are fewer and fewer unionized workers. Employers call it worker "flexibility."

Capital has won; Labor has lost. With the Citizens United court decision, the preponderance of capital over labor can only increase, because corporations can buy Congress, the Executive and the courts: their funds are almost unlimited, anyone else's are extremely limited. Democracy and the shiny worker model first enunciated by Henry Ford--workers paid well enough to buy his cars--is dying fast.

Americans already work longer hours, get less vacation, and fewer benefits than virtually any other developed country. Are we on course to become like Third World countries? American workers aren't competing with Germans and Japanese, but with the Chinese! We'll be competing against India and Brazil, too.

Empire? Yeah. We'll pay for that, but not to hire American workers, and not to pay them decently, either.

The future America will be corporate imperial fascism--until the corporations bankrupt us, or take over the world.