The gift our country needs this Holiday season is an economy that
serves us instead of us just serving those who own or control most of
the economy.
Professor Thomas Kochan at MIT's Sloan School of Management is
reporting that economic productivity of the American worker rose by 8.1
percent in the third quarter, but pay did not. Instead, at this holiday
time - and pretty much continuously since Reagan declared war on
working people in 1981- wages are stagnating and workers are stressed
out with larger workloads while fearing for their jobs.
We need policies that bring our jobs back home and make it possible for us to return to buying American.
Americans often judge George Washington harshly because he kept
slaves. At least he looked into the eyes of his slaves. He knew their
names. We here in American still have slaves, but we pretend we don't
because we don't see them. We instead have sociopathic CEOs running our
largest companies and political hacks like Tom Delay who lock OUR
slaves away in overseas, unsafe, grimy factories, working under
conditions that we would never inflict on our children or our
neighbors. We haven't ended slavery in the United States - we've merely
exported it. And we should end it, while returning our jobs to America.
We also need to invest in our infrastructure, and not just the
obvious physical things like our old bridges and trains but more
importantly our human infrastructure. Like most fully industrialized
countries we must go back to times before Reagan ended free college in
California and make it, at the very least, affordable again so our
children aren't graduating with the chains of decades of debt repayment
around their necks.
We must "cool our planet's fever" with the introduction of a carbon tax to help save the planet.
We must continue to push for "Medicare Part E - Everybody" - so we
can rebuild the social safety net to encourage entrepreneurialism - and
along those lines let's fix the bankruptcy bill, and strengthen social
security.
Finally, we need to think of work differently. Lincoln once said
that labor is superior to capital because it precedes it. Nobody gets
rich until somebody makes something. We once had an economy that valued
laborers - the true producers of wealth - and the middle class. Because
of our income tax code in the years before Reagan, the lowliest worker
rarely made less than 30 or 40 times the top person. After Reagan's
draconian tax cuts on millionaires and billionaires, we now have CEOs
who routinely make hundreds to thousands of times what their workers
do. We must roll back the Reagan tax cuts to restore fiscal sanity and
fairness.
And don't forget to help pass the Employee Free Choice Act - it's coming along soon, and labor needs your help.
You know. almost everything on this gift list was, in their day,
enthusiastically endorsed by Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower. And Barry
Goldwater. And Richard Nixon. Somehow this country went insane in 1981
when Reagan took power and declared that "greed was good" and America
was to be reinvented.
Now we've seen the results of 30 years of Reaganomics, and it's
been a disaster. It's time for some real change that we can believe
it... change consistent with basic human values and the core teachings
of all the world's religions. Happy holidays to you and yours...
--Thom
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