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Six Little Words To Fix America’s Wage Crisis

By David Sirota

History books teem with six-word phrases, from the comforting (“Nothing to fear but fear itself”) to the inspiring (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”) to the embarrassing (“Read my lips, no new taxes”). But the six words, “on the basis of union membership”, could be more momentous than any of those. Though hardly Roosevelt’s rhetoric, Reagan’s bluster or Bush’s clumsiness,… return to article

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    Six Perfect Words to Restore the American Dream…

    “The Commonwealth Labor Party of America”

    We “Americans” no longer have a political party working on behalf of workers.  The Democrats are weak, cowards that will never force change at the expense of stock holders.  Neither parties will repeal Taft-Hartley, withdraw from NAFTA, nor regulate rampant monopolistic business practices and the selling off of America to foreigners.

    It’s time for 3rd parties to join together and form one equal 1/3 party in this country.  “God save America from the Corporations and the Stock Market.” Someone please create “The Commonwealth Labor Party of America.”

    United States Posted by middleamerican on Jul 25, 2008 at 7:37 AM

    Sirota -

    Good!  As in Good God, this is the dumbest thing I have ever read! 

    The states with the highest union membership are doing the worst economically.  The industries with high union membership are collapsing: Toyota (non-union) recently surpassed GM (union) as the world’s largest car manufacturer.  And you want to increase the burden on unionized industries by increasing wages and increasing regulation and work restrictions?  That is no way to increase productivity, and increasing productivity is the only way we can make the world a better place, for workers and for everyone. 

    Universal union membership in the USA will only guarantee that our workers, union members all, are the highest paid unemployed people in the world. 

    It is one thing to argue about how to divvy up the economic pie, and quite another thing to argue for policies that make the economic pie smaller.  The Socialist EUSSR has elected to make their economic pie smaller, and they have enjoyed an unemployment rate about twice as big as ours for two decades.  In the Lisbon Accords of 2000, the EU set a goal of matching USA productivity by 2010.  Eight years on, the EUnuchs have made zero progress toward achieving their stated goals.  Zero.  Nada.  Zilch.  The Socialist USSR collapsed from the type of policies you advocate. 

    When the Dimocratic Party went Marxist after Vietnam, it abandoned the workers, their traditional base, and became the plaything of elitist media (such as yourself), educators, union organizers, and Dimocratic politicians.  The result was Reagan Democrats.  The Dimocrats have enjoyed scant success since then; the only two Dimocrat presidents in the last forty years were Carter and Clinton.  Both of them had major problems, but neither was an ideologue Leftist.  McGovern, Dukakis, Mondale, Gore, and Kerry were Leftist ieologues, and see what it got them?  It certainly did not get them the votes of the workers.

    The big irony here is that free-market, rule-of-law democracy is sweeping the globe.  A century ago, there were about twenty democracies in the world.  Now the number is close to 140.  The United States of America inspired and supported all of these new democracies.  Did the International Marxist movement inspire or support any of these democracies?  Don’t be stupid. 

    So, now we have Merkel, Sarkozy, Berlusconi, and Harper, recently elected Rightists among our major political and economic partners.  We have Leftist Brown in Great Britain in electoral trouble.  And we have Obama, the weakest and most improbable presidential candidate ever, trying to buck this trend.  Don’t be stupid.  You can’t even get the American worker to vote for your candidate. 

    You want six little word?  Try this:

    “Fuck you, Marxists.  Up with democracy.”

    United States Posted by scorp on Jul 27, 2008 at 1:55 PM

    Scorp-

    1) Which states with high union rates are doing badly and why? 

    2) Unionized labor is efficient, just more expensive to the individual employer (but cheaper to society).

    3) The U.S. is ranked #11 in GDP/capita behind 9 Northern European states and Qatar.

    4) If Merkel, Sarkozy, Berlusconi, or Harper were U.S. pols they would be considered socialists.

    United States Posted by oliver cromwell on Jul 27, 2008 at 9:17 PM

    Wages for the American middle class have stagnated since the 1970s. We have almost $49 trillion in private debt and $10 trillion in federal debt. A nation without a strong middle class is a nation in decline.

    We’ve tried it the Republican way for 30 years with trickle down, supply side economics, unfettered “free” trade that’s exported American jobs to low wage, environmentally substandard nations. It doesn’t work, it concentrates wealth in the hands of too few people who concentrate it into even fewer hands by blowing it on chasing the latest market distorting bubble fad.

    I like the idea of making union representation a civil right. As long as we depoliticize the DoJ first. We have to rebuild the middle class or we’re going to wind up the world’s biggest banana republic with 1% of us filthy rich and the other 99% dirt poor.

    United States Posted by markg8 on Jul 29, 2008 at 7:39 AM

    I’m a new reader of InTheseTimes.com .  The Very first thing that I read on the InTheseTimes.com site was David Sirota’s “Six Little Words to Fix America’s Wage Crisis”.

    This Idea resonates with me because upon some behavior the consistent enforcement of written and reasonable government regulations is justified.  I do not fear such regulation.  I dread any government discretion.  Judges, panels and juries are not perfect.  We must continue to utilize them until we discover superior methods to make some determinations.

    I dread government discretion such as selective enforcement.  I dread insufficient recourse to challenge what may be any wrongful application of government discretion.

    As Srirota’s article points out our National Labor Relations board is part of an administration that’s anti-labor and we are dependent upon oversight by legislatures that are almost entirely of in agreement with the administration or fear acting to support union’s rights to exist.  Many key regulations as written and/or most regulations as interpreted by the NLRB are more or less anti-labor.  Reaching what is too often a determination contrary to labor is time consuming.  Justice delayed is justice denied.

    The idea that people could make an end run around the Labor Relations Board and be heard by judge and possibly a jury on the basis of a much broader law concepts appeals to me.

    PS: I’m a proponent of Warren Buffet’s proposal to significantly decrease USA’s trade deficit.  It would increase our GDP and median wage in “real” U.S. dollars.

    It is not a tax or a tariff.  It is market rather than government driven, granting government no discretion of policy. (Assessing the value of goods is a technical rather than a policy determination).

    Refer to www.USA-Imports.Blogspot.com .
    Respectfully, Supposn

    United States Posted by supposn on Jul 31, 2008 at 8:22 AM
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