Conservatives and The Elite 1 Percent Have Violated America's Most Basic Tenets
For most of the last century, the basic bargain at the heart of the American economy was that employers paid their workers enough to buy what American employers were selling.
That basic bargain created a virtuous cycle of higher living standards, more jobs, and better wages.
Back in 1914, Henry Ford announced he was paying workers on his Model T assembly line $5 a day – three times what the typical factory employee earned at the time. The Wall Street Journal termed his action “an economic crime.”
But Ford knew it was a cunning business move. The higher wage turned Ford’s auto workers into customers who could afford to buy Model T’s. In two years Ford’s profits more than doubled.
That was then. Now, Ford Motor Company is paying its new hires half what it paid new employees a few years ago.
The basic bargain is over – not only at Ford but all over the American economy.
New data from the Commerce Department shows employee pay is now down to the smallest share of the economy since the government began collecting wage and salary data in 1929.
Meanwhile, corporate profits now constitute the largest share of the economy since 1929.
1929, by the way, was the year of the Great Crash that ushered in the Great Depression.
The full essay is at the link. Conservatives and their supply-side economics ( which some Democrats have also bought into over the last three decades) have not quite brought back the economics of the pre-Civil War plantation, but they have brought us closer. There is till a healthy middle-class, but half of America, about 52% are wage slaves. They can work hard year in year out and their chances of getting ahead are much slimmer then the chances of their grandparents. We have this America because conservatives want all the money that was produced ultimately by labor in the hands of the very wealthy. In America wealth is power. Why does the incredibly wealthy Rupert Murdoch use the Wall Street Journal and Fox News to spread absurd propaganda about health care reform, the minimum wage and the social safety net ( Medicare). Because they want the fruits of America's labor going to the top, not to workers. Power follows the money and conservatives want the American people to be as powerless as possible.
