Hark! The Serfs Doth Revolt!

 

An Andrew Singleton gem, lifted shamelessly and in its entirety from McSweeney's:

 

“Job openings are at record highs. Why aren’t Americans filling them?”

— The Wall Street Journal, 7/9/21

 

My good lords, I must bring to your attention a grave issue that requires our utmost concern. You see, my fellow land-owning gentry, it seems that the invention of mechanized industry, the rise of “capitalism,” and the impact of the recent plague have brought upon us a wave of moral degradation and irredeemable sloth — specifically, nobody wants to be a serf anymore.

This newfound modicum of control the peasant class has over their lives has brought us to a dark new reality in which the serfs have become so lazy that they’ll no longer toil without pay on land they do not own yet can never leave, and instead leach upon the system by searching out more equitable work.

Surely you are already aghast, but I fear the problem does not stop there, my good, rich, sirs. Be sure to be seated upon your golden chairs for this next bit of news. Not only do our current serfs refuse to labor, but the serfs we ejected from our fiefdoms when we feared the plague would harm our profits now don’t want to come back and replace the workers we kept who then subsequently died of the plague. Did they not know that we banished them with the expectation they’d come crawling back at our earliest convenience? What has the world come to when the whims of noblemen no longer control the lives of the masses?

And it’s not just the serfs who have left; now that we have fewer laborers, we’ve required our remaining peasants to work longer hours without recompense. But the villains refuse! They demand something called “overtime.” Apparently, they now think their time belongs to them, and if we use too much of it, we should pay them for it! There’s no way to describe this phenomenon other than plain moral rot. How else would you? “Social progress”? Don’t make me guffaw.

Not to mention the safety demands! Simply because a large number of peasants have died of this plague, the remaining peasants do not wish to work under conditions that make them vulnerable. How can they value their lives so much when we’ve always valued them so little? Do they not realize by ascribing meaning to their lives and the lives of their family members, they’ve turned this mass death event from a simple labor issue into an incalculable tragedy? Don’t they know that the only thing standing between us and disaster is our resolution to ignore the human cost of our actions altogether? The cold, cruel fools.

I, for one, my good lords, am at a loss. We’ve already tried tossing them a pittance. What else shall we do? Toss them a pittance more? Establish a higher minimum pittance? Ludicrous. Something drastic must be done to stop this unscrupulous scourge of “exercising one’s personhood” from poisoning our laborers, lest feudalist society crumbles as we know it. For where would we be without the noble principles of greed and oppression that allowed us to build the shining cities on a hill that only we are allowed to live in while everyone else suffers in squalor? I dare say, we are in grave danger of losing everything great about our way of life that also makes us rich.

If we fail, our only hope is to bend this new, so-called “capitalism” to our will and turn it into something akin to our beloved feudalist oligarchical system. And that could take hundreds of years.

Brilliant. 

BONUS: Get thee over to Infidel 753 for more news on the shenanigans of these ungrateful varlets!

(Illustration:  Medieval illustration of men harvesting wheat with reaping-hooks, on a calendar page for August. Queen Mary's Psalter/ via Wikipedia)

CEO Compensation Exploded While Americans Struggled

 

Exhibit A as to why top executives and their companies should be paying for the Biden jobs/ infrastructure plan with their taxes:

The coronavirus plunged the world into an economic crisis, sent the U.S. unemployment rate skyrocketing and left millions of Americans struggling to make ends meet. Yet at many of the companies hit hardest by the pandemic, the executives in charge were showered with riches.

The divergent fortunes of C.E.O.s and everyday workers illustrate the sharp divides in a nation on the precipice of an economic boom but still racked by steep income inequality. The stock markets are up and the wealthy are spending freely, but millions are still facing significant hardship. Executives are minting fortunes while laid-off workers line up at food banks.

“Many of these C.E.O.s have improved profitability by laying off workers,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, who has proposed new taxes on the ultrawealthy. “A tiny handful of people who have shimmied all the way to the top of the greasy pole get all of the rewards, while everyone else gets left behind.”

Robert Reich elaborates:

“To my mind, they’re the logical consequence of our total embrace of shareholder capitalism, starting with the corporate raiders of the 1980s, to the exclusion and sacrifice of all else, including American workers,” said Robert Reich, a labor secretary under President Bill Clinton. “The pay packages reflect soaring share prices, which in turn reflect, at least in part, the willingness if not eagerness of corporations to cut payrolls at the slightest provocation.”

Now, make sure you're sitting down for this:

AT&T, the media conglomerate, lost $5.4 billion and cut thousands of jobs throughout the year. John Stankey, the chief executive, received $21 million for his work in 2020, down from $22.5 million in 2019.

T-Mobile said it would create new jobs through its merger with Sprint, but has already begun layoffs. It made $3.1 billion in 2020. In addition to [former CEO] Mr. [John] Legere’s windfall, the company awarded its current chief executive, Mike Sievert, $54.9 million.

The article goes on with many, many more examples of personal and corporate greed and bad corporate citizenship.

In the meantime, the Biden American Jobs Plan is asking that people making over $400,000 a year and corporations pay their fair share in taxes to "build back better," something that will pay enormous dividends for decades to come to America and to many of their companies (think of the windfall from broadband expansion, for example, for AT&T and T-Mobile).  When there are 91 Fortune 500 companies paying zero federal taxes on U.S. income, and when they're cutting payrolls rather than executive salaries, there's no moral or economic justification for this continuing inequality, especially when there's a demonstrable need for their tax dollars to be applied to the re- building of America.  Closing loopholes and returning the tax rates to where they were before Trump's tax- cuts- for- the- rich is one way to begin to address questions of equity while simultaneously benefiting the common good.

Baltimore And The Choices We've Made

(click on image to enlarge)

(Matt Wuerker, Politico, via gocomics.com)

In today's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof tells us that "inequality is a choice":

THE eruptions in Baltimore have been tied, in complex ways, to frustrations at American inequality, and a new measure of the economic gaps arrived earlier this year:

It turns out that the Wall Street bonus pool in 2014 was roughly twice the total annual earnings of all Americans working full time at the federal minimum wage.

You read that right: Just the annual bonuses for just the sliver of Americans who work just in finance just in New York City dwarfed the combined year-round earnings of all Americans earning the federal minimum wage.  (our emphasis)

And why is that, you say?

We as a nation have chosen to prioritize tax shelters over minimum wages, subsidies for private jets over robust services for children to break the cycle of poverty. And the political conversation is often not about free rides by corporations, but about free rides by the impoverished.

Kristof cites an upcoming book by British economist Anthony Atkinson that offers policy recommendations should we, as a nation, ever want to get serious about addressing the issues of poverty, inequality and the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a wealthy elite.  Here are a few of Atkinson's recommendations, as summarized by Kristof:

o Trade unions should be bolstered to represent workers’ interests.

o Government should provide public-sector jobs at minimum wage to those who want them, in areas such as meals-on-wheels, elderly care, child care and so on.

o In addition to a minimum wage, there should be a framework to restrain pay at the highest levels. Atkinson cites companies that have voluntarily decreed that executive pay should be capped at 65 or 75 times the average pay in the firm.

o Every child should get a “child benefit” payment, to help keep kids out of poverty.

2016 could be a defining election in this regard, because the contrast couldn't be greater between the Republican Party's interest in protecting the wealthy few at the expense of the middle and working classes, and the Democratic Party's interest in promoting economic and social equality.  But, as Kristof concludes: "The problem isn’t inequality; the problem is us. We’re paralyzed."

There's one way to begin to end the paralysis, and that starts in November 2016.

BONUS:  Robert Reich has a good read on economic inequality and what we need to do to address it.

Democrats Introduce The Raise The Wage Act

Today, Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA) will introduce the Raise the Wage Act, which would raise the Federal minimum wage to $12 by 2020.  Jared Bernstein outlines the main components:

1) Raise the minimum wage in increments to $12 an hour by 2020.
The Raise the Wage Act would raise the federal minimum wage $0.75 in 2016 to $8.00 an hour and raise it an additional $1 per year for the next four years.  The Economic Policy Institute estimates that 37.7 million workers would benefit from the cumulative five-year increase.  As shown in the infographic above, the family of the average person in this group relies on the earner for more than half of its total income.

2) Tie minimum wage increases to increases in the median wage after 2020.
Historically, inflation has eroded the value of the minimum wage between legislated increases.  The Raise the Wage Act would prevent future erosion by indexing the minimum wage to the median wage after the full phase-in.

Past proposals would have indexed the minimum wage to inflation instead of the median wage, but prominent minimum wage analyst Arindrajit Dube offers a compelling rationale for why the median is appropriate.  Keeping the minimum-to-median ratio around 50 percent, which this proposal would do, would put it “in line with the international average and with the U.S. historical average during the 1960s and 1970s.”

3) Gradually eliminate the subminimum wage for tipped workers.
In many states, tipped workers (for example, waiters and waitresses) currently have a minimum base wage of only $2.13 an hour.  These workers are still supposed to make the regular minimum – employers are required to make up the difference if adding tips to the base wage doesn’t get a tipped worker all the way there – but this requirement is difficult to enforce in practice.

Republicans and their Koch-supported minions are expected to use the same shop-worn excuses for why this shouldn't happen (and given the makeup of Congress, it won't), but it should be one of the main issues Democrats at every level should run on in 2016.  It's one of those bright line issues that separate the party of the 1-per-centers from the party that's fighting for the middle and working classes.  It's also a political winner since, as Bernstein notes, 75 percent of Americans support raising the minimum wage even higher than this proposal, including 53 percent of Republicans.  Democrats would be smart to promote it at every opportunity.

Pope Francis: Redistribute Economic Benefits

Pope Francis, today in Rome:

[E]quitable economic and social progress can only be attained by joining scientific and technical abilities with an unfailing commitment to solidarity accompanied by a generous and disinterested spirit of gratuitousness at every level. A contribution to this equitable development will also be made both by international activity aimed at the integral human development of all the world’s peoples and by the legitimate redistribution of economic benefits by the State, as well as indispensable cooperation between the private sector and civil society.

In our imagination, the entire Wingnut World -- from Fox "News," to the Catholic League's "Sweaty" Bill Donohue, to the New York Times' Ross "I Seriously" Douthat,  to Weeper of the House John "Mr. Tangerine Man" Boehner -- is sharting mightily today.

UPDATE:  Hate radio's porcine poo flinger Rush Limpballs is wetting his XXXXL Depends:  his response to the Pope's statement is "Marxism and socialism."  Which would put J.C. Himself in the same category as the Pope….

UPDATE II:  More sharting on the right.   Jim "The Dumbest Man on the Internet" Hoft applies his weightless analysis:  "Marxist Pope"  (via dimbulb Matt Drudge)!

UPDATE III:  Regarding Fox "News's" Sean Hannity and "Sweaty" Bill Donohue, we rest our case.