Capitalism and Class
Capitalism and Class
by
Ken Melvin
Whence this attitude that the working class is expendable and that the middle and upper classes are not?
Donald J. Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Betsy DeVos, being the brave, patriotic souls that they are, demand, for the sake of the nation, that the working class step-up and take the risk of going back to work and sending their working-class kids to school an do so without sufficient protective measures in force and with no legal recourse against the employers and districts.
Whence this attitude that the working class is expendable and that the middle and upper classes are not? Why is that, time and time again, we see the working class taking the brunt of, being wiped out by, economic downturns? Are they really without merit? Of such little or no consequence?
Including all those who work for a salary as being part of the working class, the working class is of the utmost consequence. The country would absolutely come to a standstill without them. The country would come to an absolute standstill without those who work for hourly wages — the unemployed are only those looking for a job, a way to help.
‘Tis those as worthless as the tits on a boar, those who live off of unearned income, those who are incompetent, lazy, corrupt, . . . who are of no merit. Trump failed in every manner conceivable to provide the leadership the country needed. At least the boar’s tits do no harm. Trump has only made, continues to make, things worse. Do you think for a moment that if Hillary had been president that she wouldn’t have acted quickly and aggressively? That she would not have prepared the nation? That she would have spent so much time watching TV? Stuffing her face? Golfing? Ignoring intelligence? Mitch and Betsy, too, did nothing of merit; instead, both worked hard at doing the nation great harm.
Where would we be today if it weren’t for The first responders? The supermarket employees? The Amazon, UPS, and FedEx employees? The cooks and janitors? The food producers, the food processing plant workers? The truck drivers? The police and fire? These are those of merit. These are those of merit too many of whom are paid too little to live on and don’t have healthcare coverage. These are those that Donald J. Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Betsy DeVos; and Governors Abbott, Ducey, DeSantis, Kemp, Hutchinson, Ivey, Reeves, and McMaster were so willing to sacrifice. These are those whom lickspittle Lindsey Graham feared might demand higher wages and crash the economy. These are those of the now second one-hundred-plus thousand being sacrificed for the good of the economy.
Did it come from our past, the feudalistic – antecapitalism – days, how far have we come from those days when serfs were cannon fodder in every way? Were Medieval Europe’s Feudal Lords equivalent to the modern day upper class? Are today’s small business owners equivalent the vassals of yore? And, the working class, are they the equivalent of serfs, or the Helots, of ancient Greece? Does the upper class of today look upon the working class as the Lords of yore once looked upon serfs? Do they think that the working class is there to serve them? Is this Twain’s rhyme of history we hear?
Understand that the working class often lets itself get played by the upper class. The moron in chief used lies and skillful manipulation of the divisions among all classes to get elected and it has been the GOP playbook for some time. Working class people if they vote, vote in the basis of racial or gender animus, love for firearms and religious beliefs rather than in their economic best interest believing with some justification that neither major party is going to give them more than crumbs anyway.
Trump keeps focus elsewhere as COVID-19 cases continue steep climb
via @BostonGlobe – July 13
WASHINGTON — The daily number of new coronavirus cases in the country continued to top a troubling 60,000 over the weekend, led by an outbreak in Florida, while California on Monday became the latest large state to significantly reverse its reopening.
It’s an urgent public health crisis that is dominating the country’s attention. But President Trump’s focus mostly has been elsewhere.
He has no coronavirus-related events on his public schedule this week, instead holding events on “rolling back regulations,” infrastructure, and praising law enforcement officers. On Twitter, Trump spent the past few days delivering his thoughts about how often he plays golf, his Friday night commutation of the jail sentence of his friend Roger Stone, the border wall, the “lamestream” media and recent polls.
The few times recently that the president has publicly talked about the virus ripping through the country have been to criticize the Centers for Disease Control’s guidelines for safely reopening schools, which he has characterized as overcautious, and sharing posts mocking the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and alleging a conspiracy of doctors against his reelection. Trump created news on Saturday by the simple act of donning a face mask to visit veterans at a military hospital, the first time he let the media see him wearing one.
The president, who faces reelection in less than four months, has continued to project a sunny vision of a vanquished virus, similar to when he said this month that coronavirus would “sort of disappear” and urged states to rapidly reopen their economies. But as the nation is again facing a soaring case count, that strategy is crashing into reality.
Trump’s fight against Fauci has only one winner. His name is Joe Biden
“The approach of trying to pretend that this is not happening is going to backfire. You can’t hide infections and deaths,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and associate professor with the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University. “People are going to start demanding more from their leaders when they start to see their loved ones affected. It is not a sustainable strategy.”
The president is also entering uncharted waters, politically, as the virus has begun to tear through red states such as Texas and Florida, which are key to his reelection. “That is the unique dynamic now,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist and one of the founders of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project super PAC. “It is affecting his core base.”
A poorly attended indoor Trump rally in Tulsa, Okla., late last month, which local officials believe led to a spike in COVID cases, offered a clue that Trump voters may take the virus more seriously than the president appeared to believe.
“If that is not a sign that he is headed in the wrong direction I don’t know what is,” Madrid said of the sea of empty seats in the Tulsa arena. “That is like a glaring, neon stop sign blaring at you with a megaphone.”
Public health experts, including Fauci, stress that the rising cases are very worrisome and that mass testing, contact tracing, and mask usage are still the best way to control the virus.
“All you needed to do was look at the films on TV of people in some states who went from shutdown to complete throwing caution to the wind — bars that were crowded, people without masks,” Fauci said Monday during an event held by Stanford University. “You don’t necessarily need to shut down again, but pull back a bit.”
Still Trump, who has frequently undercut the public health experts who work for him, is sticking to his own rosier version of events.
On Monday morning, he retweeted a commentator falsely claiming that doctors and the CDC are spreading “lies” about the pandemic to influence the election, and another post critiquing Fauci. Over the weekend, White House officials anonymously provided reporters at the Washington Post and other outlets a dossier of quotes from Fauci designed to raise doubts about his expertise by showing he downplayed the severity of the disease in the early stages of the outbreak. But those comments, such as saying the coronavirus was unlikely to be spread by asymptomatic people, were made when less was known about the virus.
By criticizing the CDC’s own guidance for school reopening, and sidelining the government’s top infectious disease expert, Trump is sending a confusing message to Americans during a time of crisis, experts said.
“At a time like this, the president needs his top health officials to be sending out the most powerful public health messages possible and his role should be to support them, not to undercut them,” said Howard Koh, the former assistant secretary for health under President Obama. “These actions only serve to further disrupt and distract a public that needs to continue to focus solely on conquering this virus.”
Trump brushed off the conflict on Monday, telling reporters his relationship with Fauci was good. “I find him to be a very nice person,” he said. “I don’t always agree with him.”
The White House has dismissed concerns about the surge in cases, saying the focus should be on the death count, which has ticked up in July but is far below its April peak, when more than 2,000 people were dying per day.
Fauci called the lower death rates a “false narrative” on a Facebook Live appearance last week and warned: “Don’t get yourself into false complacency.” Death rates tend to lag rising case counts by several weeks, and even though the average age of infected people is lower than in the spring, experts are concerned those younger people will infect older and more vulnerable people.
As Trump continues to train his focus away from the unfolding coronavirus crisis, one of his own former top aides raised the alarm Monday, writing an op-ed about how COVID-19 testing is still woefully inadequate. “I know it isn’t popular to talk about in some Republican circles, but we still have a testing problem in this country,” wrote Mick Mulvaney, who was replaced as acting White House chief of staff in March. “My son was tested recently; we had to wait 5 to 7 days for results. My daughter wanted to get tested before visiting her grandparents, but was told she didn’t qualify. That is simply inexcusable at this point in the pandemic.”
Stephen Moore, a member of the White House’s economic task force, said Trump focuses less on the public health crisis posed by coronavirus because he is more interested in juicing the economy. “He’s so focused on the big problem, which is getting the economy up and running and trying to get businesses up on their feet,” Moore said. “That’s been their number one priority.”
Nikolas Guggenberger, executive director of the Yale Information Society Project, said he believes Trump has tried to hedge his bets with his communication about COVID-19. At times, he makes statements that warn people to take the virus seriously, and at other times, he has waved away the danger of the virus and falsely insisted it is disappearing or even winked at conspiracy theories, as he did with his Monday tweet suggesting a cabal of doctors want to stop his reelection.
On Monday, for example, Trump praised himself for eventually embracing the social distancing measures touted by his public health experts. “We saved millions of lives when we did the initial closure,” Trump said. “We would have lost 2 million, 3 million lives had we not done it.”
Guggenberger sees this as strategic: If the virus fades before the election, he can claim he was trying to get the economy going while Democrats overreacted. If the virus is still raging, he can point to his eventual — though half-hearted —embrace of masks or other preventive measures.
“The tragedy is that this is an election strategy that literally kills people,” he said.
Trump’s fight against Fauci has only one winner. His name is Joe Biden
A COVID test result that takes 5-7-8? days is strategically worthless.
Capitalism is the debt based ponzi of the bankers/aristocracy. The middle class just isn’t expendable, but impossible to keep without the debt ponzi.
The more the government interfers, the weaker the market looks. This is the paradox that even aristocrats who practiced socialism in the 18th century noted.
As I like to put it to people — If every corporate executive in the US went on strike for a month, and every garbageman in the US went on strike for a month, which strike would have more impact on the lives of most people? The answer is obvious.
What would happen if we didn’t have the sewer workers is too horrible to think about.
If anything good comes of the pandemic, it may be that people start to realize just how vital wage workers are.
Instead of dissecting all the ills visited on the working class — why not point to the easy path back to labor (in the form of labor unions) running the country. The formula is right here:
When is somebody going to start pushing for regularly scheduled union cert/recert/decert elections at every private (non gov) workplace? When? Anybody? Couldn’t be easier political position to push.
Our current — no longer working/no longer workable in the face of today’s fierce anti-union management — labor law was not brought down from the mountain top by God’s messenger. If we were starting to write labor law from scratch in today’s climate, wouldn’t regularly scheduled elections be the dish of choice?
Why do I have to go on and on? All the Obama/Trump switchers will jump right on board. Any voter attraction doubts — what are they? So let’s start the national conversation!!!
There are more question marks in this post than the GoT season finale’s plotline
“Couldn’t be easier political position to push. ”
You could not be more wrong or more naive than to say that.
Huge hlll to climb in the Federal government, made far steeper and longer by the opposition from the states. And the Supreme Court.
Nice dream. Gonna take a trifecta in DC; killing the filibuster: packing the Supreme Court; and fighting all of the right to work states.
Couldn’t be easier political position to push. Couldn’t be a better issue to chose for any legislative or executive candidate running for office — meaning couldn’t be more productive at the ballot box.
Can’t imagine how some commentators can get the USSC involved — what possible constitutional issue can a labor union law raise? ??? I’ve never heard of anything like that, ever.
Dennis,
See ACA. Commerce Clause. Individual Mandate.
Did you know that money is speech? That there is no racism in the US?
The SC interprets the laws. All of the laws.
Only person ever raised a constitutional question about our federal labor laws — that was me. I found (find) the current US (exclusively) set up for organizing a certifying to be a road that is impossible to go down in the face of today’s management’s unlawful repression — a gauntlet that most employees find impossible to run — hence 94% union free private (non gov) labor market.
First Amendment, freedom of association violation: current labor law requires a passage through a process that most find impossible to run. Only problem with my theory is that the courts cannot toss today’s law out because they have no way to replace it — not unless the courts take to writing legislation to replace it: a constitutionally impossibility.
Here is where the ultimate answer lies folks — gold laying in the street — someone just has to pick it up and run on it:
A Union Default for the U.S.
by Mark Harcourt, Gregor Gall and Margaret Wilson | Jul 15, 2020
Unions have traditionally had a strong leveling effect on incomes, transferring money from capital to labor, particularly to the low-waged. Thus, falling union membership and collective bargaining coverage over the last 40 years have been strongly linked to widening disparities, particularly in the US, Britain, and New Zealand. Yet, approximately half the workforce in these English-speaking countries says it still wants union representation. And, if anything, workers now favor unions more than 20 years ago. However, organizing workers has been problematic, not least because of the nature of the NLRA system and the EMPLOYER OPPOSITION IT ALLOWS. [my emphasis]
[snip]
What is a union default? A union default would default all employees within a given bargaining unit to union membership via an automatic enrollment process. Once enrollment was completed, employees would be free to opt out if they wished.
Is this compatible with freedom of choice? A default would preserve the freedom not to associate with a union as workers would not be obliged to remain members. And, a default could greatly enhance and strengthen the freedom to associate with a union by making it a lot easier for unions to organize new workplaces.
How would it work in the US? A default would operate in two phases. In phase one, a union would recruit at least 10% of a bargaining unit as members. The NLRB would then certify the union to only bargain collectively for its members. The certified union would also be granted default status. As a result, all workers in the bargaining unit, and any worker hired later, would be defaulted to membership of this union. However, each worker would still have a right to opt out for an individual contract with their employer.
[snip]
geez
Enter into a discussion and find myself at a pep rally. I am all in favor of unions and taking poer away from employers.
Not the point.
The point is that no such legislation will possibly be passed unless the Dems gain a trifecta and get rid of the filibuster. The point is tht any legislation will have to survive this Supreme Court and their anti-labor majority. That court weakened the ACA. They would obliterate any such labor legislation.
Dems should have both houses of Congress next year. With the popularity I expect of either giving workers automatic union cert/recert/decert elections — hysterical popularity I foresee — or what these professors are proposing above — might even be able to close a filibuster.
The filibuster rule can be undone with a majority vote (ask Joe Biden).
Without the moron threatening to end the careers of Republicans who do anything sensible, lots of them may cross over for total renewal of union building legislation — given the wild popularity I think regular union elections would arouse (especially in Obama/Trump turnovers). Just like lots would vote for sensible health legislation once freed from the iron grip of the moron.
The Supreme Court has shown its sensible side lately — NOT THAT any constitutional difficulty could even be imagined with union building legislation.
EMichael, do you get depressed easily (joking)? We are going to get both houses plus the White House and likely an at least somewhat reasonable Supreme Court — reasonable at least as far as there is no constitutional path to blocking big-change union building legislation (even the challenge to Obamacare required a constitutional trick opening). Are you always this flat out pessimistic where almost anybody else would see wide open daylight?
You are dreaming. There will be no Republicans who vote for any decent labor legislation.
A reasonable Supreme Court? Cause of a couple of votes brought about by ludicrous lower court rulings? Cases that were beyond weak, and only voted down because Roberts thinks Biden and the Dems will take over, and his greatest fear is court packing. Grow up and smell the roses.
Have you missed the last decade and a half?
The ACA was neutered by Roberts when he ludicorusly interpreted the Commerce Clause to allow states the right to ignore it in many ways. He, and they will do exactly the same thing when faced with 27 State Attorney Generals attacking any Federal Policy regarding unions and their rights.
I’m not pessimistic, I can read.
One of the best short pieces I read in a week or more. What disgusts me, is that we casually call this vermin (and that’s exactly what these are) “elite” … yet they don’t do a goddamn thing that benefits civilization … this Trump class of folks, are doing nothing more than trying to thin out what they consider as “the herd”, and keep folks enslaved and dependent on their worthlessness … in other words, we’re f’n cattle in their eyes, and nothing more than a commodity. Plus they throw patriotism and religion into it … and it’s growing.
Thomas:
Welcome to AB. Some interesting posts you have at your blog ranchchipjornal.blogspot.com
I can but recommend the documentary ‘Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century” based on Piketty’ book of the same name. If you’ve access to Kanopy, you can stream it.