College-Educated Professionals Are Capitalism’s Useful Idiots

[DKW 86 7,426]

Could not agree more: Already counting the facepalms and the thumbs down from the Useful Idiots...
Like my own story, I kind of came to my senses years ago about just what are we doing here. Tosay, At my plant, we cannot keep workers. We used to have high school graduates fighting for jobs here. 20-30,000 would apply. Now, we have to have two different temp services on site just to BARELY get the line started. Now? We will hire anyone, no diploma, bad arrest record, bad work history and most dont stay a month. We are literally 12 weeks behind schedule and cannot keep up. Everyone in our industry is the same way. Why? We wont pay enough to keep any employees. Our temps are making 10.25/hr for second shift. I would not even drive down the driveway for 10.25/hr. We now pay $50/week for  perfect attendance: IE showing up to work. Why dont we just pay them 1.25 more per hour? Because this is temporary if they can get us to drop it latr on when sales fall back to norm. Folks, we are usually at 95-98% Availability. This week? We are at 1-4 % depending on the product. That is no exaggeration. Pure fact. Yesterday, I heard something that is totally foreign to my work place. A Union is about to bust in the doors and the Vote will likely be well over 80%, it could go 90%. There is only so much the American Working Class can give away. 

I have friends that work in what were great jobs in the 50-70s that are now paid peanuts and get crap for benefits. That is why i want M4A.We spend $7BN on Medical now, we can get everyone decent health care. Today, most of the people I used to work with have a "Go to the hospital, come home, file bankruptcy plan." The PPACA was a great start, but now looks like a disaster, but it was trying to get others better care. My plan was once Platinum. It is now high bronze at best. My copay for surgery Back in February was $4100 at a walkin surgery center. If you havent gotten hit in the face, your day is coming. The 1% will never be happy with their wealth. It's why Bezos, while making more money than ever slashed Amazon's Healthcare Benefits. He wasnt making enough profit while making more profit than he had ever made. There are no longer good businessmen. I think we killed them all off in the 80-90s for even more profit back then. We have to stop circling the drain. 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-useful-idiot-capitalism/615031/

 

Quote

 

College-Educated Professionals Are Capitalism’s Useful Idiots, How I got co-opted into helping the rich prevail at the expense of everybody else
AUGUST 7, 2020 Kurt Andersen
Author of Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History

I didn’t really start understanding the nature and enormity of the change until the turn of this century, after the country had been fully transformed. One very cold morning just after Thanksgiving in 2006, I was on the way to Eppley Airfield in Omaha after my first visit to my hometown since both my parents had died, sharing a minivan jitney from a hotel with a couple of Central Casting airline pilots—tall, fit white men around my age, one wearing a leather jacket. We chatted. To my surprise, even shock, both of them spent the entire trip sputtering and whining—about being bait-and-switched when their employee-ownership shares of United Airlines had been evaporated by its recent bankruptcy, about the default of their pension plan, about their CEO’s recent 40 percent pay raise, about the company to which they’d devoted their entire careers but no longer trusted at all. In effect, about changing overnight from successful all-American middle-class professionals who’d worked hard and played by the rules into disrespected, cheated, sputtering, whining chumps.

 

When we got to the airport, I bought a newspaper at the little bookstore there that contains a kind of shrine to the local god Warren Buffett and his company Berkshire Hathaway. In it I read an article about that year’s record-setting bonuses on Wall Street. The annual revenues of Goldman Sachs were greater than the annual economic output of two-thirds of the countries on Earth—a treasure chest from which the firm was disbursing the equivalent of $69 million to its CEO and an average of $800,000 each to everybody else at the place.

 

This was before the financial crash, before the Great Recession. The amazing real-estate bubble had not yet popped, and the economy was still apparently rocking. But it was becoming clear that an egregiously revised American social contract had been put in place, without much real debate. “This is not the America in which we grew up,” I wrote in a magazine column at the time, by which I meant America of the several very prosperous decades after World War II, when the income share of the super-rich was not yet insanely high. Since the 1980s, the portion of income taken each year by the rich had become as hugely disproportionate as it had been in the 1920s, with CEOs paid several hundred times more than the average worker, whose average income had barely budged for decades. “We’ve not only let economic uncertainty and unfairness grow to grotesque extremes,” I wrote, but “also inured ourselves to the spectacle.”

This post is adapted from Andersen’s recent book.

I also thought: Mea culpa. For those past two decades, I’d prospered and thrived in the new political economy. And unharmed by automation or globalization or the new social contract, I’d effectively ignored the fact that the majority of my fellow Americans weren’t prospering or thriving.

 

In 40 years, the share of wealth owned by our richest 1 percent has doubled, the collective net worth of the bottom half has dropped to almost zero, the median weekly pay for a full-time worker has increased by just 0.1 percent a year, only the incomes of the top 10 percent have grown in sync with the economy, and so on. Americans’ boats stopped rising together; most of our boats stopped rising at all. Economic inequality has reverted to the levels of a century ago and earlier, and so has economic insecurity, while economic immobility is almost certainly worse than it’s ever been.

What’s happened since the 1970s and ’80s didn’t just happen. It looks more like arson than a purely accidental fire, more like poisoning than a completely natural illness, more like a cheating of the many by the few—and although I’ve always been predisposed to disbelieve conspiracy theories, this amounts to a long-standing and well-executed conspiracy, not especially secret, by the leaders of the capitalist class, at the expense of everyone else. A Raw Deal replaced the New Deal. And I and my cohort of hippie-to-yuppie liberal Baby Boomers were complicit in that.

MUCH MUCH MORE...

 

 

 

[bigbird 60,567]

[homersapien 11,388]

Even on this forum, a ridiculous premise can get ignored.

I figure that's progress.

[DKW 86 7,426]

3 hours ago, homersapien said:

Even on this forum, a ridiculous premise can get ignored.

I figure that's progress.

Quote

Could not agree more: Already counting the facepalms and the thumbs down from the Useful Idiots...

And just like magic, they appear...

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>See, they appeared right below here.