Are you working class? Certainly not, if you are a member of the aristocracy, or its equivalent in America… one of the great merchant families such as  the Rockefellers, Fords, Vanderbilts and so forth.

Are you a landlord, living off of land rents and real estate? Happy you, if you are, and you’re not over-leveraged. But if this is not the case are you the owner of a major industrial enterprise or a financial mega-corporation? No?  Oh, sorry about that.

I guess that leaves  a small manufacturing operation with a handful of employees, or a small business, which is great so long as a Walmart or a giant manufacturing operation doesn’t force you out of business, and then you know what, boyo?..

…you’re a member of the working class. If you’re a wage earner with no control of your working conditions or wages, if you can be fired at will with no recourse and deprived of the right to collective bargaining then you are for sure a member of the working class, working for wages, even if you’re a highly paid middle manager for a corporation you don’t own.

Labor Unions are as American as apple pie but over the past thirty years their power has been clawed back by business interests and their political allies. The argument has been, “Well we needed unions once, in the bad old days, but we don’t need them any more.”

In good times, with a little home of their own and a bass boat parked in the driveway even many union members suckered for this argument  figuring they didn’t need union protection or union dues anymore. Sweatshops, eleven-hour days, inadequate wages and wretched or dangerous working conditions are largely a thing of the past. The result is we tend not to notice or care about Capitalism’s continuous attack on the power and even the existence of the union movement. This is not a good thing.

A union is the average hourly worker’s only defense against the economic power of a system that always tries to buy raw materials at the lowest possible price. It’s not dumb, if you’re an hourly wage person, to remember you’re just so much raw material to that system.

The union maid and her guy aren’t opposed to Capitalism. If you stop and think about it, the fact is that just the opposite is true. These folks simply want to behave exactly like all the other links in the capitalist chain of supply and demand. All they ask for is the right to bargain for the price they get for their labor and the conditions under which it is supplied.

Why should they be the only players in the game denied that right?

Most of us are working class and we need the union movement more than ever.

Happy Labor Day!

Financial markets are booming. The Dow is up 11% this month.  Financial institutions are delighted. (The jobless are, well, still jobless.) Who is responsible? Well, indirectly, or maybe directly, it is German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who dragged the Euro-Zone banks into agreeing to take a fifty percent haircut on their Greek bonds. The markets cheered.

In this morning’s NY Times  column Paul Krugman puts it all in perspective. (Italics are mine.

 It’s worth stepping back to look at the larger picture, namely the abject failure of an economic doctrine — a doctrine that has inflicted huge damage both in Europe and in the United States.

The doctrine in question amounts to the assertion that, in the aftermath of a financial crisis, banks must be bailed out but the general public must pay the price. So a crisis brought on by deregulation becomes a reason to move even further to the right; a time of mass unemployment, instead of spurring public efforts to create jobs, becomes an era of austerity, in which government spending and social programs are slashed.

This doctrine was sold both with claims that there was no alternative — that both bailouts and spending cuts were necessary to satisfy financial markets — and with claims that fiscal austerity would actually create jobs. The idea was that spending cuts would make consumers and businesses more confident. And this confidence would supposedly stimulate private spending, more than offsetting the depressing effects of government cutbacks.

You all know how successful that has been. The banks are hoarding money that might be leant to business start-ups and the jobless are still jobless. Nothing has trickled down.

Now the results are in and the picture isn’t pretty. Greece has been pushed by its austerity measures into an ever-deepening slump — and that slump, not lack of effort on the part of the Greek government, was the reason a classified report to European leaders concluded last week that the existing program there was unworkable. Britain’s economy has stalled under the impact of austerity, and confidence from both businesses and consumers has slumped, not soared.

 

Pow! Take that, Confidence Fairy!

Full text here

How restful.

Of course the political life of the nation ground tediously, mindlessly, on. I just didn’t pay any attention to it. August was a good month to take off, since our Congressmen  were on vacation raising obscene amounts of money from vested interests…none of which were mine.

Apparently joblessness continued at record highs, while the beltway cognoscenti reported that by and large the recession hurricane was over, or at least reduced to a financial depression.

God knows we were depressed here at The Data Port, which is why I tweaked my e-mail program to dump my political mail into the spam file.

The claim that “businesses cause jobs” turned out to be given the lie (I found out only today) by the practice of advertising on job sites like Monster.com that “no jobless need apply.” It used to be the Irish who need not apply.

The one area of American life that I did follow was the stock market. It was specially fun watching the little investors (if they still exist) trying to buy and sell fast enough to stay ahead of the market. It makes to laugh.

And now a short post-labor day quote. Guess who.

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.