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"Akunard" gripes about a $15 minimum wage for New York workers and says "It will cause fewer jobs and higher prices." Reich-wing lies, "akunard"! Try switching channels on the boob tube. - Aliceinwonderland
I have saved your comment and I will see you here in two years. The greedy will do their best to stonewall any attempts to raise the minimum wage and we might not get to see if you are right or not, but if things do not change and things get worse, we will see if I and others are right. I suspect that will be the case and America will continue to slip into a third world nation with a few incredibly wealthy and a even greater number of us who are poor.There are places like here in California though that are raising it, so I will come back here in two years and report on that success. California is already making a remarkable turnaround because we increased taxes on the wealthy (without a mass evacuation of our business interests - another right wing myth proven wrong)
Good ole American exceptionalism or as I call it an excuse for not doing anything to improve things here because everything is fine as is.......or could that be PRIDE GOES BEFORE A FALL. What ever happened to our nation's ability to embrace change ???? Land of the brave? Not anymore. Those who have the power and money do not have the courage (They are selfish) to do what is good for the nation. False patriotism. To depend on the top one or even two percent of us who are rich to support the nation is a mistaken mindset that will ruin our economy and sabatoge the nation. The so called job creators are job destroyers. The real job creators in America are the rest of us. give us more income to afford more than just survival (though with increasing prices on food,gas and others we can barely afford that) and we will spend it !!!!!!!!!!! We are good people who work hard at low paying jobs. We deserve more. And those endless opportunities are a delusion.We have to acknowledge that change is needed. That is not whining. That is courage. That is patriotism. We want a better and stronger nation.
Marc, it's pretty startling to hear how clueless your colleagues are about the TPP. What angers me is that the media isn't giving it any coverage. So it's not entirely the fault of your co-workers, being in the dark on an issue of this magnitude. It really highlights the importance of an informed electorate to any genuine democracy, something sorely lacking here in America. It was Jim Hightower's monthly publication, the Hightower Lowdown, that first opened my eyes to this threat. That was only a couple of months ago. All the facts shared in my marathon post were extracted from the Lowdown. So we can all be grateful to Jim Hightower for waking us up.
One of your opening comments was about "shooting the messenger". Is that how your colleagues responded to your efforts at enlightening them?! I sure hope not. - Aliceinwonderland
Americans standard of living is one of the highest in the world, with endless opperatunities and all I ever here on this blog is whining. What would you do in a poor country.
Aliceinwonderland ~ Thanks for that eloquently horrifying synopsis. I took the liberty of sharing it at work today. Talk about shooting the messenger. No one knew what I was talking about; and, these are some rather intelligent and well informed people in California no less. I fear for the future of our Nation as a result of this legislation with this terribly uninformed electorate we have. There is little pressure being applied by the public and these lawmakers are being inundated by corporate lawyers and lobbyists. No mention of this debacle is being made in the mainstream media. It's a complete black out. How long have you known about the TPP? From what I understand this legislation has been around since 2005; yet, I just heard about it a month ago, and Thom just started talking about it recently after several of us demanded it. The Corporations are trying to rush this stuff through by the end of the year. That is a recipe for disaster. I certainly hope we can wake people up before it is too late. Do you really think there are enough members of Congress who would pass this without any public feedback? It's hard to believe that even the Tea Party members would agree to such a nefarious scheme. Of course, it's hard for me to speculate as to what goes through those peoples minds. Nevertheless, thanks again for everything you have done. Post #15 was a generous dose of what we all really need to know. Now if people will just listen and ask questions...
Spread the word people!!
This is all about income, or more precisely the decline of income necessary to support oneself and a family household unit. Conventional wisdom says there is only one way to earn a living, and that’s to work. Yet job opportunities, especially that pay decent wages and salaries to support a family household unit, are constantly disappearing. Furthermore, the reality that is ignored by leadership and academia is that tectonic shifts in the technologies of production are exponentially destroying jobs and devaluing the worth of labor as "machines" replace people as the means of producing products and services.
Binary economist Louis Kelso stated: "Conventional wisdom effectively treats capital (land, structures, machines, and the like) as though it were a kind of holy water that, sprinkled on or about labor, makes it more productive. Thus, if you have a thousand people working in a factory and you increase the design and power of the machinery so that one hundred men can now do what a thousand did before, conventional wisdom says, ‘Voila! The productivity of the labor has gone up 900 percent!’ I say ‘hogwash.’ All you’ve done is wipe out 90 percent of the jobs, and even the remaining ten percent are probably sitting around pushing buttons. What the economy needs is a way of legitimately getting capital ownership into the hands of the people who now don’t have it.”
The solution is to educate people about the source of income and wealth accumulation that makes one rich––capital ownership. Conventionally, most people do not have the right to acquire productive capital with the self-financing earnings of capital; they are left to acquire, as best as they can, with their earnings as labor workers. This is fundamentally hard to do and limiting. Thus, the most important economic right Americans need and should demand is the effective right to acquire capital with the earnings of capital. Note, though, millions of Americans own diluted stock value through the “stock market exchanges,” purchased with their earnings as labor workers, their stock holdings are relatively miniscule, as are their dividend payments compared to the top 10 percent of capital owners.
Structural reform is needed in America to significantly expand private sector individual capital ownership financed with the future earnings of investment. We need to embrace "full production" rather than "full employment." As a result, in the relative short term "full employment" will occur because every person willing and able to work will be needed to build a future economy that will support general affluence for EVERY citizen. At the same time corporations will benefit from the populous support to keep labor input and other costs at a minimum in order to maximize profits for the owners––which will consist of both the current ownership class and a new, ever expanding ownership class that ultimately comprises EVERY citizen. With such structural reform America will be able to compete more effectively on a global basis as American corporations will be able to operate far more efficiently with less costly overhead. Such structural reform will put us on a path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice without taking from those who already own and destroying the principles of private property, and without having to rely on redistribution of wealth and income to support the masses needing taxpayer-supported government welfare sourced from tax extraction and national debt .
The test of the theory is New York City. The new mayor is committed to raise the min. wage to $15 or higher. It will cause fewer jobs and higher prices. Save this and throw it in my face in 2 years.
huh,huh (beevis laugh) not to mention we really are headed, huh, huh, to the bottom of the list as "educated" the more the dumbing down and mis information continues!!! finland and korea! @ the top of the list. the good ol US of A? kind of like ground feeders...SAD!
As much as the issue is ignored, reality will keep hitting us upside the head: What should we do about those who can't work, due to health or circumstances, and those for whom there simply are no jobs available? People don't disappear simply because they are not of current use to an employer. These people end up suffering the hell of being homeless until they're either swept up and put into the jail/prison system, or die. The better-off can't seem to comprehend that millions of low-wage workers are a single job loss from losing everything. How do you get a job without a home address, phone, bus fare? When your wages barely cover the most basic needs, it's not possible to "save for a rainy day."
This arguement has been around for decades (that improving wages would result in job loss), and the record clearly shows that it is false. It's almost as irrational as the widespread belief that welfare caused poverty. There is only one way to save the US from complete economic collapse, and our own history shows what that is: Ordinary people, the working class and those much worse off, need to have the means to purchase basic consumer goods. As poverty is eased (both via job creation/fair wages and welfare aid to the unemployed/unemployable), consumer purchases increase, increasing the need for more production, thereby increasing the number of workers needed -- thereby strengthening the economy and shrinking poverty. (We must also restore regulations on corporations -- and at the least, stop giving them massive amounts of taxpayer money to cover the costs of moving our jobs out!). Learn from history. From FDR through Reagan, the US reached its height of shared wealth AND productivity. We then reversed course, and the results are obvious. In just the short time since Reagan, the US has gone from being #1 in overall quality of life/productivity, down to #11.
!!! logic dictates logically that if you took even a small % of the total wall street wealth and actually put a little in joe's and my pocket (you know a few more bucks and hour), quantify by 100,000,000 laborers, logically the economy would expand logically because while we are still squiching out our golden egz for the coporate pigs of greed we'd at least have alittle more green to put back into the economy, logically! think about it, maybe Tyson food processing could process more chicken 'cuz i gots mo green to buy me some mo chicken to fry and they could then offer a better living wage to all the migrants slashing up chickens, logically. Oh that's right, i forgot. there is no logic in America anymore it's all money grab and pocket greasin!!!!!!!
In the proverbial nutshell, the rich are simply doing to the middle class what the middle class already did to the poor.
http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/stop-the-trans-pacific
Time to stop this corporate greed that is destroying democracy.
The time has come for workers to stand up and protest. 40 years of slowly bleeding out the middle class must end.
http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/stop-the-tpp
TAKE ACTION AND GET THE WORD OUT NOW. Sign petitions,write letters, write emails,make phone calls, demonstrate,etc.
Gary -- What fault do you find with the economic models of the 30's, 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's? We have been adapting to automation since the industrial revolution. A strong labor movement helped decrease the number of hours worked. I say all we need is the passing of card check. After the creation of a stronger labor movement, it will create a force to raise tariffs, pass laws to stop granting waivers to the Buy American Act of 1936, and most importantly kill the TPP.
The claim "raising wages causes job loss" is usually wrong because a multiplier effect stimulates the economy when money is spent locally on real stuff rather than sitting in a few bank vaults owned by the ultra-rich with a multiplier effect approaching zero.
PLEASE - WRITE THE PRESIDENT!!
Dear President Obama, how can you run for office on a platform emphasizing the importance of protecting the middle class in this country, then turn around and consider giving the green light to something like the TPP? It is hard to imagine anything more contradictory to the interests of the middle class than a so-called trade agreement that would kill workers' rights and minimum wage, and hijack social services in this country (i.e. the commons). How could you even consider signing onto something that would rob us of any national or local legislative autonomy, while giving corporations the legal status of autonomous nations? Why would you want to nullify policies protecting things like food safety, internet freedom, the environment, the economy (via banking regulations), privacy and public health? How could you justify any of this as a constitutional scholar? What kind of legacy do you want your presidency to leave behind; a legacy that stood for democracy, or for corporate fascism? When it comes to issues like the TPP, there's no middle ground. If you sign onto this dangerous international "trade" agreement, you will be putting us all at serious risk for social & financial ruin, imposing a death sentence on many of us while condemning multitudes more to unimaginable suffering. You would be exposing all but the wealthiest Americans to a world of hurt. How could you even consider such a thing? Whose side are you on, anyway? Sincerely...
Let's flood the White House with letters, folks! - Aliceinwonderland
Politicians are supposed to filibuster, not public servants or statesmen. Code words? How about putting politics before the well being of the country? Their "greed is good", Ayn Rand philosophy is so possessing them they just can't get it, "What, aren't you supposed to harm the country for your own selfish purposes?".
The old Dixiecrats are the new Republicans. Why make it harder to vote? "I don't want everybody to vote. Quite frankly, our leverage goes down as the voting population goes up." The fact is, whenever you make it harder to vote you lose some voters and they are disenfranchised. Absent a real problem of voter fraud there's NO reason to make it harder to vote - other than to disenfranchise.
Minnimum wage jobs are also dead end jobs. These panelists know NOTHING about poverty. The one complete, absolute and transparent fraud, Bob, saying WE'RE paternalistic. Manufacturing is gone, lotsa work is gone. People with several degrees and student debt can't find jobs.
We should make the minimum wage $15/hour linked to inflation. We should pass fair trade laws to replace free trade so that manufacturing in the US can compete. Those 2 things could go a long way toward ending our current depression and restoring a middle class.
We are already in a state of absence of democracy. They are doing what they want completely indifferrent to our consent.
If we have to get ourselves beaten up and killed by the police for even the possibility of stopping them the people are not the boss.
Its shameful that min wage is still $ 7.25 . Slave wages Do unto others ...
Fantastic stuff, DAnneMarc! Thanks. I'd bet old UBL is smoking a hooka and sipping tea somewhere in some penthouse right now. That, or he died of a kidney ailment many years before the US raided that Pakistani village ostensibly killing him. Maybe he's rubbing noses with GWB back at his Texas Ranch. I've read a few of those things you wrote about before but there was so much more to tell. Wow!
Wow! AIW, that was some scary stuff you laid out there. Maybe each one of us should incorporate...people can be corporations too! Some people have been doing that for quite some time...I think maybe in order to protect their personal assets. But then, it takes a certain amount of money to incorporate and lots of people may not have the money to do it. Not that I seriously think that would be a solution to the problem you've shown us about TPP. You know, I used to listen to Jim Hightower all the time. I got so busy doing other things that I let that slide. I'll have to start again I guess.
I heard that Elizabeth Warren may be running for President in 2016. I hope so...I'll certainly vote for her. And I agree with you about Hillarious Clinton...she's too much of a hawk and a sell-out to capitalist oinkers.