It’s time for this country to understand the problems that low wages cause all of us and even more important for those who make more, to understand how those same low wages will eventually lower their profits and hurt the entire nation.

Now before you start getting your panties all in a bunch about this communist who wants to attack our capitalist system, let me assure you that I love the capitalist system, that I am a minor capitalist myself but that capitalism like all systems could use a tweak here and there.

Of course a good start would be for the capitalists who are making the big bucks and starving their workers to stand up on their hind legs and take the pay raise hit before their greedy actions cause workers and their sympathizers to seek serious balm for their grievances.

Maybe instead of locking your doors and calling the cops, management could sit down with a committee of workers reps and try to come to some amiable solution like one in which the taxpayers didn’t have to support their workers through food stamps and other subsidies. Yeah, you suckers out here, you are the ones supporting the workers of the likes of MacDonald’s, Walmart and any number of other fat cats that don’t want to pay a living wage.

This is the current situation outside Chicago where MacDonald’s workers are demonstrating for higher wages. MacDonald’s pays its workers $7.25 an hour, which comes out to $1,160 a month for 40 hour weeks. Less taxes, which probably aren’t much on such a puny wage, it probably works out to about a little under a not so grand a month. Who can live on that? I mean if you live outside India?

The answer, of course, is no one. Even at double that wage it has to be almost impossible to live in this country. But MacDonald’s has figured out the solution. It’s very simple and very good for the bottom line. Let the rest of the country pay for its workers. This is a truly brilliant solution, especially if being a millionaire just isn’t enough. People like the Walton’s have already turned this solution into an art form, instructing their workers on how to hit the, food stamp, unemployment and Medicaid systems for additional money that they are too cheap to pay them.

One would think that these rich cheapskates would look to their predecessors to learn examples of how to be super rich without having most of the people in the country gunning for them. I would think Henry Ford would be a prime example. Henry Ford was not a nice person. He was a bigot, an anti-Semite and not much of a patriot. During WWII Roosevelt had to force him to accept a union because we needed Ford’s tank and truck production. Henry was ready to close down rather than to accept a union. It wasn’t the money, he was rich enough, he said; he just didn’t want anyone telling him how to run his company. He was able to justify his position because he already paid far more than any other auto manufacturer, even the ones with unions. Why? Because he wanted his workers to make enough money to be able to buy the cars they were making. He was smart enough to know that he was creating his own market. And it worked. If you drove into a employee parking lot at Ford in the 1950s or 60s you would see nothing but Fords parked there; thousands and thousands of them, that Ford had sold to its own employees.

Now, I understand that only people who shop at MacDonald’s and Walmart’s are people who can’t affords to shop at better places or employees who may or may not get a discount but just think how much more of their products their own employees could buy if they were just paid more.

What’s really amazing to me, is that despite the economic benefits gained by low wage employees at places like MacDonald’s and Walmart’s from government supported programs, like aforementioned unemployment insurance, Medicaid and food stamps, those same greedy billionaires don’t seem to understand who their benefactors really are. Through their bought and paid for legislators they are constantly fighting to cut back on that same social support  system that allows them to pay lower than humane wages to their indentured servants.

It’s insane. The Republican and their billionaire controlled House, votes against every kind of help anyone wants to give to the poor and under-privileged and yet that help is exactly what is making them richer. Take away food stamps and Medicaid and the poor workers at MacDonald’s and Walmart’s would soon be rioting and cutting off the heads of these greedy oligarchs.

What’s even more interesting, is when these economic concerns become mixed up with bigotry; and it’s here that we run into the roadblock to immigration reform. The answer to immigration reform is very easy, for those to whom the good of the nation is the only goal. Unfortunately there are many whose goals are other than the good of the nation and that is what has created the problem.

The first problem is with a certain class of voters who don’t want any more brown, black or yellow people in the country, nor anyone who is smarter or who will work harder than them. These are represented, to a great extent, by white blue collar types who often, despite generations of like forbearers being here,

have not been able to drag themselves up the economic ladder, and now, faced with better educated or harder working competition are fighting back to keep said competition from these shores. They often use the excuse that the foreign element, which is already here illegally should not be rewarded for their illegal deeds.

The other group is the one that benefits from this illegal labor and doesn’t want their illegal status to change. Farming and low-end retail are foremost in this area, as much of the low paid manufacturing base has already been moved overseas by the same billionaires, who now want to benefit from the suppression of wages of those who are here illegally and greatly benefit those businesses that cannot, for logistical reasons, move abroad. The billionaires want these sources of labor to remain illegal, so that they can more easily control and exploit them. And they have the bucks to back up their desires, lobbying congress and often buying it outright.

This is not the first time such exploitation has gone on in this country. It was out of control during the industrial revolution, even taking in children. The result was, as it will be again, regulations that will make what we have on the books now seem like a complete lack of regulation.  When it happens the oligarchs will scream and whine. They will spend millions to try to stop it, but if we don’t get the kind of regulation that is necessary we will destroy the complete economic structure of this country and turn it into Brazil.