Michael Moore in his movie Capitalism: A Love Story (2009) suggests as the replacement for the destructive (laissez-faire) capitalism in America today, an economic democracy in the workplace. We see the viability of worker's cooperatives--like the gigantic Mondragon Corporation of Spain--beginning to establish themselves around the world. We see Germany, where the largest corporations are required by law to have one-half of their boards of directors elected by and from the corporation's workers. Finally, we see Japan, where unions are a constitutional right for all workers. Is this the future of American labor? We had better hope so, if we don't want The United States to become a Third World country. And if we become a Third World country, it will not be because of our National Debt.
That $16,000,000,000,000.00 of National Debt is lower--as a percentage of the GDP--than our debt was at the end of the Second World War. The "ceiling" associated with the National Debt did not exist as a matter of law until 1917, and may be unconstitutional under Section 4 of the XIV Amendment, " 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned." This argument about our debt is being used by the plutocrats, those Masters of the Universe who make up the nation's top One Percent economically, to obscure a far greater long term danger to our nation and its Constitution.
No, the real danger to our Constitution is our blithe ignorance of how bad things are getting economically for so many of us, especially the more than one in six Americans who now live in poverty. This number increasingly includes the elderly, the disabled, and an ever growing percentage of our nation's children .
Professor Jeff Nall in his October 26, 2012 Truthout article " Lies of the Plutocracy: Exploding Five Myths That Dehumanize the Poor, " starts his article with a simple statement, "If you believe that poverty is the domain of the comfortably poor, black, unemployed, unmotivated and uneducated among us, you have been sadly misled. Prepare to be astonished by numbers that tell a very different story." [Those remarks in parentheses are editorial comments in the article's footnotes by either Professor Nall or the editors of the Truthout website; brackets are my amplifications--RJG.]
Ours is a nation where we define each other, as well as ourselves, almost automatically by our job and our economic wherewithal. The most important lie that must be maintained by the "power elite," as C. Wright Mills called them, today's "One Percent," is the one which hides the truth of poverty in this country from the majority of Americans, including the poor themselves. Professor Nall points out five of these lies:
"1. The Bootstrap Myth: Negative assertions about the poor are in part a product of the American bootstrap myth: [Which is] Anyone who works hard enough in America will have a great life. And if you don't have a great life, then you lack the will, integrity or intelligence to succeed. These kinds of concepts are what the late Australian philosopher Val Plumwood called 'conceptual weapons.' They work together to structure a system of thought that distorts, oversimplifies and ultimately fosters ignorance about, and shame amongst, oppressed groups of people.
2. The Poor Are Unemployed: The bootstrap myth works together with the stereotype that all poor people are unemployed. This thinking gives rise to the conclusion that the best way to address poverty is to get everyone a job. But these fallacious assertions gloss over the glaring fact that many poor people are working. The Census reported that, in 2010, 7 percent of those aged 16 and older who worked some or all of the year were in poverty ( Census Bureau. 2011."Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010 ). And the Department of Agriculture reported that 30 percent of households receiving food assistance had earnings in 2010; 41 percent of food aid beneficiaries lived in a household with earnings from a job. ( U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service, Office of Research and Analysis. (2011). 'Characteristics of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Households: Fiscal Year 2010.' By Esa Eslami, Kai Filion, and Mark Strayer. Project Officer, ) Nearly a quarter--21.8 percent--of non-elderly adult food stamp recipients were employed ( USDA, ibid. , p. 61)."
As Joshua Holland pointed out in his April 20, 2011 article for AlterNet, " If Wal-Mart Paid its 1.4 Million U.S. Workers a Living Wage, it Would Result in Almost No Pain for the Average Customer ," a study conducted by Ken Jacobs and Dave Graham-Squire at the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education and Stephanie Luce at CUNY's Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies , "that if Wal-Mart paid its 1.4 million workers a living wage of at least $12.00 per hour, the average Wal-Mart shopper would pay an additional $12.00 per year." Mr. Holland also reminds us that employers like Wal-Mart are also drains on local programs for the needy in their community. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce in 2004 estimated that the 200 "associates" at a Wal-Mart "costs taxpayers over $420,000 per year."
"3. Poor (i.e. lazy, uneducated etc.) Equals Black: You'll notice that [Newt] Gingrich and [Rick] Santorum exclusively concentrate on the black community's reception of food assistance. This not-so-subtle message is that black people are getting by on white America's dime. But the fact of the matter is that about 1 in 7 Americans are receiving food assistance (Democracy Now,"' Nickel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America': Barbara Ehrenreich on the Job Crisis & Wealth Gap." August 8, 2011 ), and most of them are white: 35.7 percent of head of households receiving food aid are white, 22 percent are African-American, and 10 percent are Hispanic ( USDA, op cit., p.57).
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