Give the people a living wage

Alec MacGillis asks a good question:

Liberals have spent years now agonizing over why it is that many working-class white Americans vote for the party whose policies on taxes, organized labor and much more work against their own economic interests—the "What's the matter with Kansas" problem. Well, here is an issue where lower-income people who vote Republican are quite clear about what's in their own interest—that is, they state a preference at direct odds with their party's line. Maybe it would be a good idea for Democrats to try to peel them away by actually talking up that issue?

Raising the minimum wage polls well with pretty much everybody except crackpot cons who are against anything that doesn't piss liberals off and the people who make a living exploiting minimum wage workers. All the focus inside the Beltway bubble is on the well off and reasonably secure but the working poor are the fastest growing demographic in our country. They're not feeling any grass shoots recovery in those circles.

Championing this demo could not only win back the House but a successful push to raise the damnably inadequate wage would actually help all the people. Hell, it might even restore the people's faith in government.

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A McBudget for the working poor

"McDonalds has partnered with Visa to launch a website to help its low-wage workers making an average $8.25 an hour to budget." If this sample McBudget wasn't so cruel and insulting, it would be so absurd as to be funny.



Have to love that it starts by assuming their workers need two jobs to make ends meet. Of course that ignores the fact that few of their workers actually clear even as much as $1000 in a month, much less are offered schedules that allow them to get a second crappy minimum wage job with enough hours to make up the difference. And apparently they believe all their workers live in the tropics and thus need no money for heat.

In response to an email from Think Progress asking how they came up with this work of fantasy fiction, McDonald's had this to say.

The samples that are on this site are generic examples and are intended to help provide a general outline of what an individual budget may look like.”

I'd suggest their CEO try to live on that budget for a month or two and then get back to us on how well it worked. Measuring on the stupid or evil scale, this farce goes off the chart on both.

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The Koch plan for prosperity

Charles Koch studies the problem of poor Americans. He's figured out what's keeping the poor folk down and has come up with what he thinks is a brilliant solution. Eliminating the minimum wage.

But how to convince the working poor that this odious requirement they be paid at least $7.25 a hour is a bad thing? That the real problem is a "culture of dependency" on government mandated fair wages because, as the Buddhists say -- money is suffering? Well, he launched a $200,000 ad campaign for that. Thus says the man with a personal worth of $43 billion:

The Kansas ad does not specifically mention the minimum wage, but it does claim that Americans earning $34,000 a year should count themselves as lucky, because that puts them in the top 1 percent of the world. “That is the power of economic freedom,” the ad concluded.

Said world including billions of people who work for pennies a day in countries where there is no minimum wage.

I imagine the next ad will explain why a living wage is holding our economic growth down because giving the working class more money to spend is never going to increase buyer demand in a consumer based economy.

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Predatory capitalists

There's no real news this weekend so here's your long read. ProPublica posts an eye-opening piece, "The Expendables: How the temps who power corporate giants are getting crushed."

In cities all across the country, workers stand on street corners, line up in alleys or wait in a neon-lit beauty salon for rickety vans to whisk them off to warehouses miles away. Some vans are so packed that to get to work, people must squat on milk crates, sit on the laps of passengers they do not know or sometimes lie on the floor, the other workers’ feet on top of them.

This is not Mexico. It is not Guatemala or Honduras. This is Chicago, New Jersey, Boston.

The people here are not day laborers looking for an odd job from a passing contractor. They are regular employees of temp agencies working in the supply chain of many of America’s largest companies – Walmart, Macy’s, Nike, Frito-Lay. They make our frozen pizzas, sort the recycling from our trash, cut our vegetables and clean our imported fish. They unload clothing and toys made overseas and pack them to fill our store shelves. They are as important to the global economy as shipping containers and Asian garment workers.

Corporations have been using temps to cut costs for decades, but under the latest iteration of this business model, the plan appears to be to virtually cut full time hires to the barest minimum in order to exploit a desperate job market and effectively shift the social costs of their predatory capitalism onto the taxpayer.

Read it in full to see our future. They're stealthily turning us into a banana republic. Hard to see how this ends well for anyone except the owners and their CEOs.

[Big thanks to Batocchio for kindly linking in at Mike's Blog Round-up.]

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Austerity kills

Austerity doesn't just kill economies, austerity is literally killing people:

Detailing a decade of research, Oxford University political economist David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, an assistant professor of medicine and an epidemiologist at Stanford University, said their findings show austerity is seriously bad for health.

In a book to be published this week, the researchers say more than 10,000 suicides and up to a million cases of depression have been diagnosed during what they call the "Great Recession" and its accompanying austerity across Europe and North America.

The effects of forced austerity has reached practically genocidal proportions in Greece and if our homegrown austerity maniacs get their heart's desire we won't be far behind in the USA. They've been fraying the edges of the social safety net at the state level since GOPers took over the local legislatures and now with the stupid sequestration cuts, the federal safety net is in danger of falling apart altogether.

Difficult to not to sound like a conspiracy nutcase, but you don't have to be a brain surgeon to figure out if you keep limiting access to food and health care assistance for the poors and olds and kick people into poverty and homelessness, they're going to die sooner. Which of course eliminates the need to spend money taking care of them, the better to give more tax breaks to the wealth holders. Reminds of this classic quote:

"If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

Not making any grand accusations, but as the world economy hinges more and more on a relative handful of people making money simply by moving around their money, the blue collar working class is becoming as obsolete at the buggy whip.

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Sweet charity

I didn't find this at all surprising. Anybody who has ever worked in the restaurant/hospitality industry knows the rich are tightwads. Indeed the richer the are, the stingier they are with tips. So it goes with charitable giving.

One of the most surprising, and perhaps confounding, facts of charity in America is that the people who can least afford to give are the ones who donate the greatest percentage of their income. In 2011, the wealthiest Americans—those with earnings in the top 20 percent—contributed on average 1.3 percent of their income to charity. By comparison, Americans at the base of the income pyramid—those in the bottom 20 percent—donated 3.2 percent of their income. The relative generosity of lower-income Americans is accentuated by the fact that, unlike middle-class and wealthy donors, most of them cannot take advantage of the charitable tax deduction, because they do not itemize deductions on their income-tax returns.

It's not that rich don't donate at all, but they do it mainly for self-interested reasons. Like tax breaks. This is especially true of conservatives. Something that was made perfectly clear after the fiscal cliff farce of 2012 finally concluded and Ari Fleischer tweeted this threat.



The super wealthy also do it for prestige. Billionaires will donate hundreds of millions to museums and universities and other cultural insitutions that cater mainly to their social class to either get things named after them, or to advance academic work that suits their personal agenda. You won't see the Kochs endowing a chair in civil rights studies or labor law. Nor will you likely see the Waltons donating to Planned Parenthood even as Walmart's business practices create the welfare clients who desperately need the affordable health care.

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The invisible victims of casino capitalism

I may as well have titled this "expendable people." Those would be the millions struggling to cope with having lost everything that formerly defined their comfortable lives. They live among us, nearly unnoticed by the throngs of the still secure who stride confidently down sidewalks to their next appointment or linger in cafes absorbed in their mobile devices. In the vast halls of our policy makers, they only exist as random numbers on charts and spreadsheets. The political overlords do not see their faces. They're too far removed from the reality of the invisibles' existence to have even the faintest understanding of their misery.

The luckier invisibles can still afford tenuous shelter in cheap motels but there is little hope they will find a way to return to any semblance of the middle class comfort they once enjoyed. Once the jobs they performed were essential to the creation of wealth for the investor class. Casino capitalism changed all that. Workers are expendable, a negative expense to be eliminated from the balance sheets lest they interfere with the profit margins.

Most of the invisible newly poor played by the rules. They worked hard to build decent lives. They were cheated out of everything, in one way or another, by the investor class. The end of their road looks like some version of this.



No one thinks it could happen to them before they get there. Truth is, it could happen to anyone.

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