Related to this is the problem of illegal immigration. You continually hear the Republican refrain, "Americans don't want to do these jobs..., and "the unspoken second part of this statement is"...for what we want to pay them."
Republicans have been, for most of the last century, what The Conceptual Guerilla has named on his website, the party of cheap labor. What Theodore Roosevelt called "big business," has been the primary proponents of "individual responsibility" while doing all they can for "ever higher profit margins," at the expense of their employees, consumers, and the communities where they do business. For these large, and increasingly multinational corporations, individual responsibility means if you are injured on the job or you can't work or you can't find a job at a decent wage, it is entirely your problem, not theirs.
Legally, all corporations' single, overriding concern, is providing profits for their shareholders, thanks to the 1916 Supreme Court decision, Ford v. Dodge. All other responsibility is limited to those imposed by local, state, and Federal laws and regulations, which have invariably been implemented as a reaction to a public outrage over corporate indifference, e.g., Love Canal, Triangle Shirt Factory Fire, strip-mining. And big business has fought these laws and regulations""so necessary for maintaining the quality of life for consumers, employees, and the people in their communities""almost every step of the way. In this they are following the socially amoral, legalistic tenets of people like Milton Friedman, who hold that corporate social responsibility can only be tolerated when it is insincere. (See Joel Bakan's book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power; Ch. 2, p.p.33-42.)
It is this shortsighted vision of earning the maximum profit possible every quarter""as the highest moral value for a corporation""that has led us to our immigration problem. In 1981, it is estimated that there were only two million or so illegal immigrants in the United States; the best recent estimate is more than eleven million. I believe that this is due to the shrinking of the minimum wage (in terms of constant dollars); the slow, insidious emasculation of the American labor movement; and the deregulation of so many aspects of our economy.
If you are asking what is wrong with corporations in America maximizing their profits in this manner, I will start with how it negatively affects our tax base.
George W. Bush's tax cuts have most positively affected those who are in the top quintile (20%) for annual income. In fact, according to Princeton economist Paul Krugman, the higher income you have, and the higher your tax cut as a percentage of your income. This increasingly places the tax burden on the middle and working class (the three middle quintiles of annual income). Further, they give the duplicitous excuse for harming the poorest Americans by reducing the benefits they need to survive, or eliminating programs that give them an opportunity to escape poverty, in the name of "balancing the budget."
Much of our real budget deficit is masked by the continual theft of money from the Social Security Trust Fund. This payroll tax, which is essentially a flat tax that primarily effects the two-thirds of our population with the lowest wages, has almost no effect on the so-called "investor class" of Americans. The payroll tax does not apply to wages and salaries over approximately $90,000.00 per annum. This means that the people most likely to need Social Security when they retire""especially in view of the annihilation of so many corporate pension funds""are paying the majority of the money into the Social Security Trust Fund, which is then being "borrowed" by the Federal government to help cover part of the budget deficit. This is done while providing tax cuts for those people who are least likely to need Social Security.
So, the American middle class is saddled with an ever-increasing proportion of our nation's tax burden, while their household incomes have stagnated or declined for the last quarter of a century. If I remember what I learned in my class on the history of the French Revolution correctly, it was the increasing tax burden on the farmers and townsmen of France (caused by a monarchy which had bankrupted the nation with war, favors to cronies, and ostentatious displays of wealth, combined with tax exempt status for the nobility and the Church...hmm, that sounds familiar), that created the cauldron of popular resentment which boiled over in 1789. President Bush's insane economic policies threaten to create a similar predicament for the United States within a few years.
The second problem with permitting corporations to maximize their profits, regardless of the effect on the rest of society, is that this will eventually destroy upward mobility, and I have seen several reports""media, academic, and governmental""that say that this is already occurring. This, together with declining wages, will eventually create a divide between the wealthy upper class and the rest of the American people""similar to the one that exists in Mexico""unless of course the middle class decides to hoist the banner of revolution as the French did 217 years ago (or, hopefully, a non-violent revolution like the Poles did seventeen years ago), and rid themselves of their tormentors.
American corporations continue to hire foreign immigrants, both legal and illegal, at depressed wages and benefits, for those jobs that they haven't outsourced. These immigrants potentially pose the same sort of threat to the United States that the enslaved war captives posed to the Roman Republic during their primary period of conquest, roughly 264 B.C. to 27 B.C..
These nearly perpetual wars, both civil and foreign, destroyed Rome and Italy's yeoman farmer (middle) class (remember, in those days a man's wealth and class was calculated by the land he owned), who were the foundation of Rome's legions. Disasters like the battles of Cannae and Arausio cost Rome and her allies tens of thousands of dead citizens.
As Rome's farming middle class was dying in their thousands, members of the Roman nobility and upper classes bought the farms of deceased and absent legionnaires from economically distressed families. These plutocrats worked these larger, combined estates with the enslaved war captives of Rome: which was better for their bottom line, give or take the occasional slave revolt. The dispossessed families and returning soldiers gravitated towards the slums of Rome and other cities, picking up what work they could (often government make work jobs), engorging those cities' food doles in the process.
This enforced joblessness (and underemployment) of so many formerly productive Roman citizens""because of the masses of inexpensive of slaves taken in conquest""took away the hope and self-confidence of these men, now reduced to second class citizenship as part of the landless Head Count. When the consul Gaius Marius began the practice of utilizing members of the Head Count during an especially grievous shortage of manpower, the newly minted legionnaires felt more loyalty to their general than they did Rome. They essentially became mercenaries, loyal only to their general, and his promise of plunder and land grants. This was the direct cause of the Roman Republic degenerating into an Empire.
We are facing a similar situation now: an estimated eight to ten percent of real unemployment, a similar number of underemployed. We have a shrinking middle class, facing both rising costs and stagnant wages, and military service has become the primary way out of the ghetto. The rich are getting ever richer; the top ten percent of the population have doubled their percentage of the nation's assets in the last twenty-five years. As Ariana Huffington pointed out, the United States is becoming a welfare state for the rich, and the worst sort of dog-eat-dog social Darwinism for everyone else. This state of affairs will destroy our republic as certainly as it destroyed Rome's.
It is time for the American people to take a hand in the governance of their nation, and reverse our nation's declining fortunes. I steadfastly oppose violence, and prefer the power of the ballot to the sting of the bullet. If we do not stop corporate dominance now, we may have that choice taken away from us.
America, do your duty.
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