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The private sector is now running the country. I call it The Corporacracy, although the word Corporatocracy is used more frequently. I've been calling it The Corporacracy for quite some time.
The federal minimum wage was $5.15 per hour in the United States until Congress raised it to $5.85 in 2007, $6.55 in 2008 and to $7.25 in 2009, where in now stands.
The Chief Executive Officer of the corporation for which I worked was compensated with $21,337,757 last year. In comparison, the $7.25 an hour minimum wage equals a yearly salary of $15080 which is $6970 below the poverty line and 7/10,000 of the CEOs compensation. This should make the teabaggers happy. There are plenty of Americans there that aren't being protected.
"Get up off your ass and get a job" won't cut it today nor did it ever cut it. In the 235 years of this nation's existence, it's been only during a relatively short time that employment was such that all people had to do was to "get up off their asses and get a job". I refer to White people here since, as recently as 1988, a multinational Fortune 500 mega-corporation complained about hiring Black folks, Hispanics or women.
I've lived under a better government than this. That government was right here in The Former United States of America. It wasn't a democratically elected Socialist government that would make equality a meaningful word in this country. It was, however, a government that didn't mind governing, at least a little bit.
Unfortunately, it liked to govern so much that it tried governing Vietnam.
Unlike the clueless teabaggers, I want a government that governs. If I have to be taxed to help the less fortunate, so be it. The private sector would let those who they don't hire begin relying on "churches" to keep them alive. If you believe, you get a reprieve.
I want a government that recognizes greed when it sees it and controls it to the best of its ability. It can't cure the illness, but it can control the consequences. I also want a government that isn't, itself, afflicted with the disease.
I want a government that's ready to defend this nation, but keeps the troops home when this nation is not under attack. If this nation is under attack, I want a government that fights those who are attacking us and no one else. Most governments don't go around putting out fires that don't exist.
Controlling greed and ending war and poverty are not mutually exclusive. For those who are teabaggers because they're so enamored of The Constitution, I think that those things fall comfortably under the Preamble, the reason why, The Constitution was written:
"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
To friendship,
Michael
"At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie." -- Karl Marx
