Merry Xmas to the Poor

Well, we missed a week. The Curmudgeon was playing the part of the loving grandfather over the Christmas holiday. Of course it wasn’t a merry Christmas for 1.3 million families that had their unemployment insurance cut off by the far right sleaze in the House of Representatives. Nobody seems to mention that this figure will rise to almost four million over the next couple of years if we don’t re-legislate this atrocity.

Senator Rob Portman,( R) Ohio, discussing the minimum wage, spoke this weekend, about going into  MacDonald’s and finding no one except a cashier behind the counter.  A drink machine had replaced the server that used to make drinks. This made him worry about the effects of raising the minimum wage and would it force employers to lay off more workers.

Well, that might hold true in some few businesses that are balancing in the edge of failure but certainly not MacDonald’s, Walmart’s or any number of the most egregious under payers on the national scene. If we do raise the minimum wage, what will encourage companies like MacDonald’s and Walmart’s to cut their work force is greed not any threat of failure.

One finds it almost impossible to imagine that people like the Walton’s or Don Thompson, the CEO of MacDonald’s are such inhuman pigs that they are okay with their full time employees having to get food stamps to feed their families because the wages they are paid are so low. How rich do these inhuman swine have to get before they can manufacture a single human instinct? And with all their success, can they really be so stupid that they don’t realize that are cutting of their own consumer base by underpaying their employees? Rich people don’t eat at MacDonald’s, poor people do until even they can’t afford the price of easting out and they stay home and cook because it’s cheaper. Then what happens to MacDonald’s? Will Don Thompson be on the unemployment line? It would be a pleasing sight but don’t bank on it.

Mary Matalin on This Week…, talks about how the poor don’t care about the rich having all the money. Yeah, right! Does she think the poor are as dumb as she is, that they don’t understand that people like the Walton’s are rich because they take money out of their employee’s pockets? It’s the worker’s labor that enables the Walton’s to be rich. They wouldn’t get very far if they had to get out of their limos and shovel dog shit off the sidewalks in front of their stores.  These are second generation rich. Their father’s made the money, they, like Trump and the Koch’s, just use it to abuse their employees. None of these clowns has ever done a day’s manual labor in their lives. Their father’s could run the stores but they can’t. They need their underpaid employees to make them their fortune.

Unfortunately the employees of these brutes have neither the savings nor the confidence to walk out.  All these sickening employers desperately deserve a company wide strike. Sure the Walton’s and the MacDonald’s are so rich they could survive the strike better than their employees but they wouldn’t have the stones to let that happen.

There is an enduring image in the minds of most Americans who are not rich. It isn’t of the entrepreneur who created a successful business, it is of his progeny, fat, useless and spoiled, who reap the benefits of said entrepreneur and live like kings while their worker’s children starve.  This image has existed since the Middle Ages, and it is becoming even clearer now, mainly because we have better communications.

A study out of Berkeley this week announces that one third of bank tellers in this country are on food stamps or some kind of additional public assistance. These are people with full time jobs, working for institutions that have gotten all kinds of public assistance. We need to pass a bill that any business that gets any kind of tax break, government guarantee, like too big to fail, government subsidy, or any other kind of help from the government in any way, must pay a living wage to its employees.  This would include farming, fossil fuel companies, banks, in fact any business that receives special tax treatment or any kind of subsidy. Does anyone think, that’s not fair? Of course not and the answer to the question of why we don’t already have this kind of legislation is that our crooked congress wouldn’t pass any law that interferes with the profits of the guys who pay for their election expenses and their kids new teeth.

These greedy pigs take from the public treasury and instead of giving back to the employees who make their businesses possible, they put the money in their pockets and then figure out new ways to screw their workers.

Lloyd Blankfine the CEO of Goldman Sachs tries to make a case for the rich when he says; “We know how to create wealth, we just don’t know how to distribute it.” Well, Lloyd the first thing you have to do is stop stuffing it into your own pockets. It’s hard to distribute wealth when you are hogging it all yourself. Henry Ford, who knew something about getting rich, was also smart enough to know that if he wanted to stay rich he had to sell his cars to someone, so he paid his workers more than the union workers at other manufacturers just so they could afford to buy his cars. My father worked for Ford and we always owned a Ford product. I remember when I bought an old Chevy. It was all I could afford but my Dad almost threw me out of the house. “This company has paid for our whole lives,” he told me. “Have some respect and some loyalty.” Ford respected my father enough to pay him a living wage and give him benefits that allowed him to retire comfortably. I just don’t see that in today’s employers.

WalMart and MacDonald’s don’t really fall into the same category as Ford because their goods and services are aimed at a less affluent trade then car buying. Maybe they are really trying to force their employees to buy their cut rate goods by not giving them enough money to but nutritious food of wearable clothes and, of course, the logical result of that is lower and lower wages as the company makes lower and lower profits and eventually the company fails and the people are all out of work and the owners sell off the plant and retire to the Cayman Islands while the workers go on unemployment insurance and eventually welfare and the whole country goes to hell.

Is there a solution? Sure, but it’s really a nasty one, because it is based on the workers rage and the violence that comes from that rage. It’s the same rage that cost Marie Antoinette her head and Tsar Nicholas Alexander his life and the lives of his entire family.

The middle class, on which, this country based its self-image, is gone. We are now left with a land of princes and paupers. The difference between our paupers and those in most other countries is that our paupers are armed to the teeth, a circumstance brought about by the greed of our military/industrial complex, who in their greenback induced blindness have failed to see the end result of their unbridled stampede toward the almighty dollar. They have failed to understand that in their desire to make more and more and more, by selling weaponry to every potential revolutionary in the country old enough to hold a gun in one hand, they have sown the seeds of their own destruction.

The militias, those crazy, scary, armed to the teeth psychos who are constantly at war with civilization have always understood this and wouldn’t it be bizarre if those semi-lucid, neo-military freaks turned out to be the instigators of the whole overturned apple cart, the final solution to the problem of greed.