Our workforce has finally seen the light. After a year and a half of the COVID epidemic having closed down many small business, after a government experiment at supplementing unemployment insurance to a point where it didn’t pay to go to work, after decades of huge corporations and the filthy rich seeing their net worth expand to obscene sizes even as children starved,, parents went without childcare and the cost of healthcare expanded beyond normal people’s ability to pay, our workforce, maybe, just maybe has has finally gotten the message.
Across the country people have finally realized that poor service and shoddy workmanship are at least partly the result of low wages and poor working conditions. Millions of union workers all over the nation are striking major corporations with a vengeance. The realization has finally set in that half a life is no life at all. These workers, many of whom are too thick to understand that getting a COVID shot can save your life, are realizing that the money is there for the corporations to pay solid wages and cover healthcare, pre-school and a wide range of other perks that will make their lives decidedly more livable. Finally, they have read and understood the numbers and finally, their leaders have hammered home the point that while they are working two and three jobs to put food on the table the greedy owners are making more money than any normal human being will ever need.
But nothing is simple. When the guy who makes oven parts in Dubuque strikes, that shuts down the production line and the guy who installs those ovens in Tahoe is thrown out of work because he has nothing to install.
But it gets even more complicated when we add the inability to deliver the goods that do get manufactured. The supply chain right now is a disaster. Thousands of ships carrying millions of containers sit at our ports, unable to unload. When they do unload there are no truck drivers available to carry those goods to market. It was only a couple of years ago that the threat of robot drivers had the trucking industry in a panic. Now there are no drivers and no robots and nothing is getting to market.
But all these problems and all this chaos is solvable if we can get past one major obstacle: the greed of our corporate class. There are over 700 billionaires in this country right now and God knows how many millionaires. No economy can sustain this and still provide a fair living for the working stiff. If we don’t find a way to provide that fair living we are looking at an upheaval that will make the one we are going through now look like smooth sailing.
I am a firm believer in the concept of capitalism being the best economic system for the most people, but for capitalism to work at its optimum level it must provide for all, not just the filthy rich.
I find it ironic that the stock market, the institution that is considered by most to be the epitome of capitalism, isn’t actually capitalistic at all. It employs few workers, it creates no product, it is simply a transfer agent for the rich to increase or decrease their wealth. Fortunes are won and lost on Wall Street much the same as they are in Las Vegas. That is not capitalism that is gambling. It’s the same as the lucky child that inherits the thriving furniture company, sells it off and puts the money in “investments.” He isn’t a capitalist; he’s just a lazy gambler. What this country needs and will probably never get is a significant segment of those 700 billionaires to grow a sense of responsibility and understand that success is not necessarily measured by how many yachts one owns but by what one does to make our planet a better place to live.
Henry Ford was one of the richest men in America when WWII broke out. He was also a bigot and a fascist. But when FDR went to him and told him that the nation needed him to stop making cars and start making tanks and trucks and that in order to do that he must accept a union he had fought for years. He saw the light and agreed to everything. He had had kept the unions a bay by paying better and providing more benefits than most of the union houses against which he was competing. Ford may not have been a guy with whom you’d want to share a beer, but he understood that being successful meant being more than rich. He understood that a good part of making his company successful lay in having a reasonably satisfied work force. If you worked for Ford, you got a fair wage and benefits that allowed you to lead a reasonably tranquil life. I know this because my father worked for Ford from before WWII until he retired and we always had a nice life.
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On another note the debate over the administration’s Infrastructure and Reconciliation bills goes on… and on… and on. It’s hard to believe that the Democrats, given such a double winner could fuck it up so badly. Over seventy percent of the American people want these two bills passed and yet Pelosi can’t get Manchin and Sinema to stop dicking around and get on board. Admittedly no one really knows what Sinema’s problem is, probably not even her. It is obvious that she’s not able to lucidly explain her position, but we all know what Manchin’s problem is, he’s a closet Republican who knows where the votes are in his solid Red state. The only other explanation to his opposition to the climate sections of the Reconciliation bill must come from the fact that he makes nearly half a million a year from the stock he holds in coal companies all over West Virginia. These stocks are held in Energysystems, Inc., which Manchin founded in 1988 and is now run by his son, Joe.
His response to Bernie Sanders article in a West Virginia newspaper makes it clear that he is tucked comfortably into the pockets of that state’s coal industry.
Could you imagine Lyndon Johnson’s reaction to Manchin’s stand? He would have had ads depicting Manchin as an enemy of all humanity running on every TV in the country until Joe changed his position.
The Democrats must get the Infrastructure bill passed in order to show that they are, at least marginally more functional than the GOP. That they were seemed evident a year ago but right now it is in more than a little doubt. One would hope that there are at least enough Democrats that are smart enough to realize that they must pass the Infrastructure bill if for no other reason than to show they can get something done and to give them enough breathing room to get back into the fights on abortion, voting rights. police reform, health care and gun legislation, which could generate enough voter interest to get them big enough majorities in 2022 to make Manchin and Sinema insignificant.