Voice in my head

27 June 2006

First of all, you cannot legislate a living wage. Raising the minimum
wage is a feel-good impulse on the part of Rep. LaRosa, but the
legislation is an index in a dynamical process. It is a very useful
index and there is absolutely no reason to do away with it, but raising
the minimum wage at this moment is like an guitar that has "11".

Given that the minimum wage is a constant, for all intents and
purposes, it is, as I say, a useful index for measuring the living
wage, which is the point where a family of four has paid all the bills,
especially credit cards, and begins to realize disposable income.
Again, given the minimum wage as being a constant $5/hr since I came
back from Vietnam in 1971 and began earning my living as a civilian,
the living wage and the poverty level were both below this level. In
fact, the living wage was as much as $1.50/hr below the minimum wage,
and maintained this relationship pretty much until 1986, when the Tax
Reform legislation replaced the Baby Jesus economics of the US
Constitution with the predatory Robber Baron economics of Supply Side
economics. Since then, the living wage rose to about $10/hr until the
derivatives bubble burst in 1994 and the living wage retreated to
somewhere between $7 - $7.50/hr until the Enron Gambit burst the dotcom
bubble and the Karl Rove wing of the GOP took total control of the
economy and the living wage is somewhere over $12/hr. If you are
Teamster driving for UPS and earning $16.50/hr plus overtime, your
salary doesn't begin to get traction until it exceeds $12/hr. If you
are earning $600/hr with The Cochrane Firm, your billing doesn't
begin get traction until it exceeds $12/hr. If you are earning
$5.75/hr, you are paying MacDonald's for wearing their uniform and
making the Wall Street analysts to smile on the CEO who gets to reel in
more than the Cochrane firm.

Now, if you have read the Winds of War and War and Remberance, you will
be confronted with how the Nazis Fianl Solution sucked all the useful
labor out of their slave labor by feeding them less calories than they
delivered in measurable work. The Nazis had found a way to convert body
fat into calories for the worker's body to consume while on the
clock. It's an excellent way to slim down. Of course, the Final
Solution expected for the worker to eventually die, sooner than later,
at which point their gold teeth could be harvested and the corpse
tossed in a hole.

This is exactly the way Supply Side economics is working. If you are
earning $50,000 year or less, you are in the same economic class as the
Nazi slave laborers. If you are earning $70,000 a year or more, your
life style is being subsidized by everyone earning $50,000/yr or less.
This is the two tier economic reality of America that John Edwards has
been talking about since he showed up in the Senate.

We can't afford Supply Side economics. We need to restore the Baby
Jesus economics of the US Constitution, but this doesn't mean going
back to the pre-1981 paradigm, but to adopt a newer, better model based
on the lessons learned from the applied stupidity of Supply side
economics. And the minimum wage provides the necessary reference point
for reform.

If I was king, the first thing I'd do is reduce the minimum wage to
$4/hr. The object of the exercise is to reduce the living wage to its
historic level BELOW the minimum wage. I've told John Sweeney,
AFL-CIO, of this as a re-calibration and if progressive Democrats and
Lugar Republicans were running both houses of Congress, this adjustment
could be accomplished with contingent legislation with a date certain
sun down plus mechanisms for bailing out prior to that suspense date if
I'm wrong. I think we will know within 18 months, right or wrong.

This isn't the only thing that needs to be done, but this will give
labor an additional tool in its exploitation of GATT/Nafta for
rebuilding its membership to at least the 1955 per centage of the
working population. Possibly the necessary structure in universal
health care and Social Security transformation is the industrial
organization. The relationship between what Ayn Rand might nominate as
the Producers and the means of production will come to be closer to
that of the Hollywood Studio model, in that the trades and skills
behind the lens conduct their careers usefully and largely independent
of the ambitions and appitites of the people getting points, but in a
loose confederation of aligned trades and services which allows them to
leverage the economies of scale that a large population provides a
permanent life insurance its financial wherewithal for common financial
outcomes associated with a free enterprise economy.

If that makes sense. The American labor union is the most important
economic innovation since the emergence of the centurion in the Roman
Republic. Another way to put it is that the centurion is the leading
edge of the industrial age. Without the centurion, we could have never
put a man on the moon. The Roman centuriate provided the Roman
Republic its constancy of purpose until Constantine converted the
legacy republic to a theocracy and accelerated the collapse of its
political dominance to its current boundaries of the Holy See. The
labor union is the civilian version of the military centuriate and it,
the labor union, provides exactly the constancy of purpose to its host
organization or industry that the centuriate provided to Rome for over
700 years. There is a direct connection between the enormous wealth
that has been generated since 1932, when the New Deal began to leverage
the economy against systematically against organized labor and 1981,
when the stupid white male dominated Reagan Revolution began to
systematically dismantle organized labor and to loot the payrolls for
the benefit of the executive class and at the expense of the long term
interests of the stockholders. Eastern Airlines is a case in point.
Reagan's treachery against PATCO is another. It is not a coincidence
that the living wage began to rise above the minimum wage at the same
time the Fortune 500 was putting 13 million people out of work between
1986 and 1991 in a general anti-union pogrom actively promoted by the
Reagan-Bush administrations.

Everything these people touch turns to ***.

But I digress. The first thing is to reform Congress by voting Supply
siders out of office. And one of the first things the new Congress
should do is to reduce the minimum wage to $4/hr.

I was going to talk about the weather, but the short version is that
the panic of the stupid white members of the Republican Study Committee
is attracting the Spirit of the Lord which has invested this tropical
weather system in the same way the Spirit of the Lord had invested
Katrina and was headed for Katrina where Cindy Sheehan was confronting
Bushie's dedication to Christian humility when he, Bushie, rolled out
a military mother as a counter-argument to Cindy Sheehan in Memphis or
someplace in that region and the Spirit of the Lord investing Katrina
turned towards the mean-spirited impulse in Bushie's ego like a shark
towards chum and New Orleans was on the way north. This storm system
is a direct result of the mean spirited impulse of Karl Rove's
politics and the mean spirited stupidity of the white male members of
the Republican Study Committee. Look at all the natural disasters in
the Red States, look at all the rape at the Air Force Academy, which is
deep in the bosom of the mean spirited boogey man Jesus of James Dobson
and organizations like Campus Crusade for Christ. All these people are
spiritually toxic and people like Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh and
Ann Coulter amplify these sludge and agitate it and serve it up,
straight. I mean, in terms of the weather, what is happening to DC is
what happened to New Orleans.

The good news is that we can employ the Holy Spirit to optimize weather
patterns globally. And reverse global warming from COO. The gospel
truth is that Jesus gave We, the People, the Holy Spirit to do big
projects as well as miracles at the tips of our fingers. The
difference between the Spirit of the Lord and the Holy Spirit is the
difference between a zebra and a Lipizaner Stallion. The Creationists
appeal to the Spirit of the Lord in pretty much the same way a lynch
mob and the Taliban do. The Dixie Chicks appeal to the Holy Spirit the
same way Jesus teaches.

Now, as to the local weather pattern, as long as the stupid white
members of the Republican Study Committee continue to try to
"energize" their base with things like Orin Hatch's Flag
Amendment or Rick Santorum's discovery of WMD or Cheney and Bushies
outrage at the NY Times report of this financial tracking system, these
odd storms will continue to form and drench us. Nancy Pelosi
accurately pointed out this last weekend that General Casey just issued
a force projection that pretty much reflects the Democrat's time line
in the resolution the stupid white males in the Republican Study
Committee shot down on a party line vote last week. As long as these
stupid white males are in DC control the legislative calendar and
prefer these stupid little campaign votes and the mean spirited debate
Karl Rove creates for the Bobble Heads to perform for the Ditto Heads
to echo at the water cooler, this weather pattern will persist. For
the moment, the best thing they can do for the rest of the hurricane
season is to shut the *** up.

I mean, the Democrats have a plan and the stupid white male members of
the Karl Rove wing of the GOP don't have a clue, have never had a
clue and refuse to even consider the idea that there may, actually, be
a clue means that they will never, ever, have a clue. Everything these
people touch turns to ***.

And that's the truth.

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