Six on "our" Economy: ‘We work full time but still can’t afford food’; Why Japan’s factories in the US find a warmer welcome than China’s; American Factory; Why Are Workers Struggling? Because Labor Law Is Broken; Wealth won’t save America – let alon
panaritisp
And please don't forget to check out the pertinent images attached to every post
Thanks John and Gary
"But voting patterns can be personal - and unpredictable - and politicians take the working-class vote for granted at their peril.
Deidre, Brianna and Adrielle all support Bernie Sanders because of his Medicare for All proposals - and do not want to see President Trump win. Brianna says bluntly: "If Trump gets re-elected I'm probably dead. He plans to cut all the programmes that make my life possible."
Meanwhile, Christopher and Angel both support President Trump - Christopher because he disagrees with the Democratic candidates' stance on abortion, and Angel because "when he says something, he does it".
Christopher uses food stamps, and is not convinced by reports that Mr Trump's proposed budget would cut food stamps and the safety net. "That's one thing I don't believe - if I see it, I see it, but I've heard nothing about that."
Meanwhile, Angel believes Mr Trump's proposal to reduce the safety net is a good idea. "I've been working since I was 13, and… I only used the system when I needed it. People don't do that anymore, now they use it because there's free stuff."
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"First they came for the unions. Reagan fired the air traffic controllers and ever since, “union” has been a dirty word, “Norma Rae” was released in 1979, during the Carter administration.
Then they lowered the taxes, telling us the wealth of those at the top would trickle down to the rest of us.
Then they told us since we had flat screens we didn’t need welfare.
Now it’s the politics of fear, all the time. And it’s not only coming from the right, but the left.
You should watch this documentary. It won the Oscar, it’s now on Netflix. If you think America can bring back manufacturing, you’re delusional. The Chinese are willing to work twelve hours a day, six days a week, with few safety precautions, while seeing their families once or twice a year. The unions established a shorter work week, the government instituted safety regulations, but now all we hear is regulations are hobbling business, and if we just relaxed them the jobs would come back and the economy would roar, even though robots do the work in the new plants, not people.
As for wages…
When GM was in Dayton, a worker made $29 an hour. The same work at Fuyao, its Chinese replacement, pays $12 and cents. Talk about changing your standard of living.
The Chinese billionaire tells Ohio he is helping the state’s economy, as he plots to replace the slow Americans with robotic arms. And, in a language almost all Americans can’t speak, the Chinese laugh that the Americans are inferior.
But it gets worse. The Chinese are trim and fit. The Americans are lumpy and out of shape. We can argue the causes all day long, but one that’s been established is the substitution of fructose for sugar. That’s right, corn syrup is cheap, sugar is not. And you’ve got to keep those farmers happy, even though despite all the hoopla about family farms, most of the growing is done by multinational conglomerates.
So, the workers at Fuyao want a union. Those who agitate for it get fired. Fuyao brings in a team that specializes in scaring employees not to organize. It’s all about fear. If you get a union, we’ll close the plant. That’s what the Chinese billionaire says. And people were out of work for years, they want to keep their jobs, even though they’re declining in number and turnover is humongous, because the work is so repetitive and back-breaking.
The politics of fear. It certainly has killed the union, but so much more.
It killed the raising of the minimum wage.
It killed Medicaid in states where the nation would pay for it. You see you cannot enable the takers, everybody must pull themselves up by the bootstraps, even though the elite in Varsity Blues are scamming their kids into college and Trump pardons his cronies. If you don’t think the system is stacked against you, you must be one of the winners.
And now it comes down to Bernie Sanders. Now it’s not only the right that is employing the politics of fear, but the left. Disgraced banker Steven Rattner is apoplectic, even though he already got his. All the opinion columnists in the “Times” are talking about how Bernie will lose and the country will continue to go in the wrong direction and if he wins, the Democrats will lose the Senate. And you wonder why Trump got elected.
The Democratic elite have seceded from the party. They stole the name, ran flawed candidate Hillary Clinton and changed the rules so Michael Bloomberg could debate. But they didn’t foresee what a bomb he would turn out to be.
Today Bernie Sanders wins handily in Nevada and the lead story in the “Times” is how his road forward is fraught with difficulties. That’s like focusing on LeBron’s theoretical injuries in the future as opposed to how well he is playing for the Lakers today. You see the “Times” is trying to mold your opinion, but the “Times” has lost touch with the public."
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"How odd that as we hurtle toward the future we seem to be tumbling into a nearly medieval past, a world divided between the divinely privileged and those who are, shall we say, not. Is it true that Mark Zuckerberg (net worth: approximately US$70-billion) requires one of his employees to blow-dry the anxiety sweat from his armpits, as a new book alleges? A king might have a groom of the stool; Mark has a peon of the pits.
Speaking of toilettes, there’s an odd thread that unites other billionaire-saviours. Jeff Bezos (net worth: US$130-billion) and Michael Bloomberg (net worth: US$62-billion) both enjoy accruing capital and naming things after themselves, but they share another trait, which is the belief that bathroom breaks are the enemy of capitalism. “Don’t ever take a lunch break or go to the bathroom,” Mr. Bloomberg said in 2013, summing up his recipe for success. Amazon, the empire over which Mr. Bezos presides, allegedly prioritizes customers’ calls over nature’s, and limits the amount of time employees can spend in the bathroom according to warehouse workers (one former employee is suing over this practice).
I never imagined we’d be living in a world where plutocrat’s pit-dryer and cross-legged factory serf were viable career paths, but here we are. At the same time, these three men are presenting themselves as saviours of a world they have each, in their own way, helped to break. Mr. Zuckerberg wants to be the saviour of truth; Mr. Bezos of the environment; Mr. Bloomberg of the republic. Because they are billionaires, they’re not proposing to do it through collective action or challenging structural injustices. They want to muscle in, aim some money at the problem and heroically effect change in ways that will salve their own egos – while maintaining their own lucrative interests, and the system that allows them to flourish.
Mr. Bezos just pledged US$10-billion over an unspecified period of time to combat climate change through the We’re All in This Together Fund (who am I kidding, it’s actually called The Bezos Earth Fund.) Various climate scientists applauded this generous infusion of cash, especially coming from a man whose company, in its first environmental audit, was shown to pollute at roughly the same level as a small country.
Others were more critical of Mr. Bezos’s gesture, pointing out that if he wanted to make the world a better place, he could start with Amazon itself, which has a troubling safety record in its factories, consistently works against the unionization of its work force and pays a shockingly low – and yet somehow still legal – amount of tax. A group called Amazon Employees for Climate Justice points out that the company provides support to the fossil fuel industry through its cloud computing service, and says that Amazon has threatened to fire workers who speak out against its climate policies. “We applaud Jeff Bezos’ philanthropy,” the group writes, “but one hand cannot give what the other is taking away.”
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"The notion that recessions had been eliminated is easy to laugh at. But you have to consider three things about the 1920s that made the idea seem feasible.
One is that the four inventions that transformed the 1920s – electricity, cars, the airplane, and the radio, and – seemed indistinguishable from magic to most Americans. They were more transformational to the economy than anything since the steam engine, and changed the way the average American lived day to day than perhaps any other technology before or since. Technology that spreads so far, so fast, and deeply tends to create an era of optimism, and a belief that humans can solve any problem no matter how difficult it looks. When you go from a horse to an airplane in one generation, taming the business cycle doesn’t sound outrageous, does it?"
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