What’s Left 4: We Need a Real Minimum Wage

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            When Gallup pollsters ask Americans what causes them the most stress and worry, personal economic concerns—the cost of living, lack of money, the gap between rich and poor, difficulty finding a job or, if they’re employed, low wages—consistently come in first, so much so that they can’t imagine saving for the future. General economic issues like poverty, hunger and homelessness come in next. In a capitalist country with decades of rising income inequality and a modest safety net, these findings come as little surprise.

            The rent is too damn high; buying a house gets more and more out of reach. We’re living paycheck to paycheck, expenses rise faster than salaries, and bosses, who can fire you at will even if you’ve been working hard and following the rules, have absolute power in a country where 10% of workers belong to a union. No wonder we’re worried sick.

            Economic insecurity is America’s biggest political issue. Yet neither of the major parties campaigns on it. At most, they’ll refer to it obliquely, as when nativists call for reduced immigration—sometimes they argue that new arrivals take away jobs from the native-born.

            Many of the other things that keep people up at night are partly or fully grounded in economic insecurity. Crime and violence are more pervasive in poor neighborhoods, courts are better-staffed and more efficient in wealthy areas. Patients worry about being able to afford to see a doctor and pay for medications at least as much as they do about the quality of healthcare. Racial tensions dissipate in places and periods of prosperity.

            The failure of bourgeois electoral democracy to address the nation’s biggest political issue, economic insecurity, is tailor-made for the agenda of the Left, which historically has been grounded in Marxist class analysis.

            Naturally, the ultimate goal of Leftists is the overthrow of capitalism, which centers inequality and monopoly as inevitable at best and laudable at worst, with a socialism that provides equal access to the basic necessities of life and equal opportunity to achieve more. But Revolution is not like a cake; there is no recipe to follow. All the conditions must be ripe and, frustratingly to the revolutionist, the determination that those conditions exist can only be affirmed after the fact of success.

            One predicate for revolution is a well-organized grassroots movement. There are few better ways to build such a structure than to consistently and relentlessly agitate for improvement in people’s economic living conditions—which are, after all, their biggest problem—in elections, street demonstrations, strikes, sit-ins, sabotage and other militant actions centered around a Left programme that demands improvements in wages, benefits and government safety-net programs.

            Never has the public been more predisposed to the argument that government ought to intercede on behalf of those who are having trouble making ends meet, or fear that unemployment might put them into such a position. People’s buying power has been ravaged by inflation, corporations are again turning the screws after a brief period of liberalization driven by the post-pandemic labor shortage, and it has been 60 years since a major party proposed a federal anti-poverty program (LBJ’s Great Society).

            Some bourgeois political analysts, particularly the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, identify the vacuum in the dialogue space of economic injustice. But neither party can meaningfully address issues like poverty and homelessness for one simple reason: they are capitalist parties. Whatever room existed for the reformist impulse vanished after the postwar period yielded to the beginning of America’s late-capitalist decline. Admitting that capitalism leaves millions behind is unthinkable, let alone developing legislative attempts to fix the problem.

            We, the Left, have the signature issue of economic justice all to ourselves, provided that we do not obsess over identity politics to the exclusion of class divisions.

            Wages come first.

            A day’s work should pay enough to pay for rent, a car and other necessities. If the federal minimum wage had kept up with inflation since 1970, it would currently be $30 an hour. The average worker is twice as productive as 1970, so make that $60. For a full-time worker, that’s $120,000 a year. But 1970 wasn’t a perfect time for workers. We deserve and demand better. The Left should think of $60 an hour as the bare minimum necessary to live decently in the United States, and push for more for skilled labor.

            Think that’s unrealistic? If so, you’ve been corrupted by capitalistic propaganda that devalues labor. Bernie Sanders and the Squad are still struggling to raise the federal minimum from $7.25 to $15.00—that’s what passes for progressive! What a joke! The bosses themselves consider $60 an hour to be the real minimum wage to subsist in the world we live in today; in New York, where I live, you can’t qualify for a rental apartment unless your annual salary is 40 times the monthly rent. You need $120,000 to be considered for a $3000 per month apartment; good luck finding anything for less than that. It’s not that landlords want to discriminate against working-class tenants. They’ve learned from experience that people who earn less than $120,000 are far likelier to fall behind on the rent until they have to be evicted, costing building owners and managers money.

            Be reasonable. Demand the impossible: $60 an hour minimum wage.

            Next: the Left’s programme for economic security.

 (Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

In Capitalism, Workers Lose Even When They Gain

If you are an American worker who is finally getting a higher salary after decades of losing ground to inflation, there is something especially dispiriting about seeing your raise get completely me up by inflation that is increasing even faster.

Bernie Sanders Is the Best on the Minimum Wage and It’s Not Near

On the issue of the minimum wage, no top contender for the presidency has been as aggressive as Bernie Sanders. But for workers, that’s not nearly enough. For the last six years, Sanders has been pushing a $15 an hour minimum wage. That’s a major improvement over the current rate but it’s not nearly enough to keep up with inflation. Even under Sanders, workers would, at best, fail to lose more ground. They wouldn’t gain anything. Just another case study of how capitalism is not reformable.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Distractor-in-Chief Trump Is Gaslighting Us Into Forgetting America’s Real Issues

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Eight days before Donald J. Trump took his presidential oath before a crowd whose size the president still insists on fibbing about, I wrote a column titled “Life Under Trump—What Happens Now?”

“In a dictatorship, particularly where the despot is a megalomaniac in the vein of a Saddam Hussein or a Muammar Gaddafi, citizens obsess over the Great Leader’s every move. These days, there’s no better place to witness this phenomenon than the Central Asian republic of Turkmenistan,” I wrote on January 12, 2017. I described how the founding dictator of that post-Soviet authoritarian state was manic, “constantly passing edicts and decrees about anything and everything that crossed his mind.”

“Whenever I visited Turkmenistan under Turkmenbashi,” I wrote back then, “the only thing anyone ever talked about – and this included ex-pats – was Turkmenbashi.”

Sadly, my predictions usually come to pass. As I expected, the United States remains a democratic republic but under Trump, everyday life has assumed some of the characteristics of an authoritarian regime, especially our obsession with Trump.

OMG can you believe what he tweeted?

            What the hell is wrong with him?

            How long can this go on?

            Trump’s antics have prompted two strains of pundit reaction. One, represented by the comedian John Oliver, urges us to “keep reminding yourself this is not normal.” Others argue for ignoring the Keeper of the Launch Codes, at least his tweets. Ever the contrarian, I subscribe to None of the Above.

You can’t ignore the President of the United States. He’s too powerful. On the other hand, chasing down and driving rhetorical stakes through a maniac’s barrage of nonsense is exhausting and futile. You feel like a character at dusk in a vampire novel — too many undead, not enough stakes, definitely not enough coffee. The proper tack is insipid: Keep Calm and Carry On.

            Here I offer my apologies.

For 15 months I have, like my competitors in the mainstream media, been reacting to Trump: to his tantrums, to his weirdness, and the incongruous hypocrisy of Democrats who complain about stuff Trump does that is exactly the same as what Obama did (mass deportations, bombing Syria). To paraphrase Walter White in the last episode of “Breaking Bad,” it was fun. I enjoyed it. And frankly, I didn’t think he would last this long. Trump was the Political Satirist Full Employment Act of 2016. I didn’t want to miss out.

But I’ve been remiss. I have always tried to be forward-looking, to change the conversation, to argue for what we Americans ought to be doing and talking about. Reacting to the agenda of our worthless political “leaders” was something I left to the mainstream idiots of the corporate media.

I snapped back to reality a few days ago after reading another piece about the booming economy. Never mind whether Trump is priming the pump before busting the joint or whether the good times are about to end with yet another recession. Things are humming now — so now, while the getting is good, is while Americans ought to be demanding that Trump and his Congress fork over big bucks to fix the country’s long-neglected problems.

Workers ought to be out in the streets agitating for a raise: a $25-an-hour minimum wage is literally asking for nothing, since it’s the same, adjusted for inflation, as it was in the 1960s. I say go for $50. While we’re at it, let’s set a $200,000-a-year maximum wage. No one needs more.

Universal health care: it’s time America joined the rest of the First World (and most of the Third).

Three out of ten American workers are self-employed. They ought to qualify for unemployment benefits when they lose work.

A high-speed national rail system is essential to modernize America’s infrastructure and bring it up to global standards circa 1990. Estimated cost: $500 billion. No big deal: Obama spent $800 billion on his 2009 bank-giveaway stimulus bill.

Then there’s stuff that wouldn’t cost a dime, like doing something about guns and gender inequality and police brutality.

Lack of money isn’t why we’re not addressing these issues. Trump recently gave $1.5 trillion in taxpayer funds to his rich friends (and his family). The problem is a lack of focus — because we’re all too busy focusing on the Lunatic-in-Chief.

It’s time to stop being reactive. This is our country. This is our time. These are our lives. It’s up to us to ignore the twitterstorms and the random rants and demand what is our birthright as Americans: the best possible lives we can afford.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the editorial cartoonist and columnist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

Donald Trumpism Explained: It’s Free Trade, Stupid

Originally published at Skewed News:

Skewed NewsDonald Trump is a nativist asshole. Why is he leading in the polls, and what does this say about Americans and/or Republicans?

Analysts and pundits are obsessing over these questions even more now that the real estate developer billionaire candidate seemed to have jumped the political shark with his statement that he wants to ban Muslims from emigrating to or even merely visiting the United States as tourists. Some writers called that the beginning of the end, yet his poll numbers shot up as a result.

Are likely Republican primary voters a bunch of xenophobes and racists? Yes, that’s part of it. The GOP has a long, sorry history of race-baiting and bigotry. A 2012 AP poll found that 79% of Republicans are racist, compared to 32% of Democrats.

There’s nothing new about Republican racism. But Trumpism, being increasingly compared to fascism, is clearly a new phenomenon in modern American politics, which had seemed to be moving away from the charismatic populist Huey Long and Ross Perot types and increasingly toward the bland European postwar technocrat model epitomized by President Obama.

Experts are struggling to explain the effectiveness of Trump’s special sauce — militant xenophobia with a dual focus on keeping out Muslims (because some might be terrorists) and throwing out Mexicans (because some are rapists). He’s soaring, month after month, despite being untelegenic, way short on specifics, obviously ignorant, and being repeatedly caught lying.

Why is he having so much success, despite his shortcomings?

Mark Krikorian of the anti-immigration group Center for Immigration Studies comes the closest of anyone to the answer — but even he doesn’t fully get The Donald’s appeal.

“Every society needs elites, but our elites have come to reject the basic worldview of the people they purport to lead,” Krikorian writes. “We have, as the late Samuel Huntington wrote, a patriotic public and a post-American, post-national elite that is mystified, at best – and disgusted, at worst – at the public’s demand that our government put the interests of Americans first. This disconnect is why immigration policy is at the core of Trump’s success.”

Absolutely right. But then, he goes a little off the rails:

“Mass immigration is perhaps the most potent symbol of the elite’s unconcern with America’s sovereignty and the well-being of ordinary people. Many Americans – not just Republicans but also independents and some Democrats – want policies that promote America’s sovereignty and self-determination. Our elites are more out-of-step with the public on immigration than on any other issue. The Chicago Council of Foreign Affairs surveyed both the public and opinion leaders on a variety of issues broadly related to foreign policy and found the biggest gaps on immigration policy. Even questions like support for the United Nations or support for foreign aid didn’t show as big a gap as immigration. Surveys of specific constituencies found the same thing. Whether union leaders vs. union members, religious leaders vs. their members, or minority leaders vs. minority voters, the results were the same – huge gaps between the demands of ordinary people for tighter borders and commitment to American workers vs. elite preference for amnesty, loose borders and increased immigration.”

Krikorian is right: illegal immigration is a symbol, but it’s not the big problem itself.

Numerous studies have shown that illegal immigration has a neutral or even upward effect on the wages of legal citizens working in the United States. Overall, however, real wages of U.S. workers have been stagnant or declining since the 1970s, while the richest 1% and superrichest 1% of 1% have seen a massive surge in income and wealth.

Elections are mostly about pocketbook issues, and 2016 is no exception. Adding to pressure on average American workers is the fact that, since the 2008-09 financial crisis, credit has been extremely difficult to obtain. Not only are you losing ground to inflation year after year, you’ve maxed out your credit card and the banks aren’t sending you any new ones.

Worries about declining living standards are at the top of the concerns of American voters. But neither the Democratic nor Republican parties are talking, much less doing anything about, people’s fears that they and their children will keep finding it harder and harder to pay their bills.

It is true that the borders have been open for years, as Trump says. The two parties have long been perfectly fine with this. The Republicans’ business allies like the cheap labor and Democrats think second-generation Latinos are likelier to vote for them. But as I said above, open borders are only a symbol, particularly now that the U.S. economy is so bad that more Mexicans are going back home than coming here.

Both parties have also been in cahoots on free trade. From NAFTA to the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership), the Ds and Rs in Congress have rubberstamped every proposal to liberalize trade. But these deals are terrible for American workers, not least because they outsource U.S. jobs overseas.

Trump is the first major candidate in years to oppose free trade deals, saying he would kill both NAFTA and the TPP. “I am all for free trade, but it’s got to be fair. When Ford moves their massive plants to Mexico, we get nothing. I want them to stay in Michigan,” he said. Poor and working-class voters, many of whom are backing Trump right now, have long opposed free trade agreements.

Bernie Sanders also opposes free trade. Interestingly, Sanders would beat Trump, whereas Hillary Clinton would not.

I would modify Krokorian’s thesis to say that Trumpism is the primal scream of an American public sick and tired of politicians who put don’t put the interests of American workers first.

For Skewed News, I’m Ted Rall.

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