There’s a wide consensus that capitalism is the best economic system,
but that’s only true if the system continues to provide jobs. Who was the genius who thought it was a good idea to send jobs to China and provide advisors to help them build factories? We’re talking conservative activists who are still fighting the Cold War. How does that make sense? Do they hate unions more than communists? American consumers went along with this ersatz idea because they thought it meant cheaper prices, but that really hasn’t been the case. One can’t help but think the real reason was to destroy the unions. The economy wasn’t that bad when unions were at their height. Once again the press didn’t help matters by stressing the mafia connection. But if you’ve ever belonged to a union you know your pay is better, you have a pension, and you have better working conditions. I belonged to the NEA; when I started teaching, I was making $7,200 a year, when I left I was making $41,000 with a Masters degree and forty-five credits, plus extracurriculars. Compared to a stock broker that’s peanuts, but it would have been much lower without the union. I might have been forced to live with my parents. Many of my married co-workers were working part-time during the summer to make ends meet. One even belonged to the National Guard.

The pay structure also seems to be out of whack with CEOs making something like 500 times more than the average American worker. Certainly CEOs come and go about as often as your average professional baseball player, but do they really need $250 million in a year, plus a golden parachute, stock options, and a yearly bonus? More and more corporations are eliminating health care and pensions. An ominous sign seems to be the number of apartment buildings being built. A worker can’t afford to buy a house because he/she is not certain he/she will be able to pay the mortgage. In other words, a career with the same company seems to be a thing of the past.

Another inequity is the tax structure. It’s not bad enough that the upper five percent don’t pay the same percentage of their income; they can also hire tax lawyers and lower it even further. Some companies go so far as to set up shell companies in other countries to dodge taxes. “60 Minutes” did a story on one of the companies involved in the Gulf oil spill that had set up a fake company in Zug, Switzerland as their home office. When the reporter asked to see an executive, the woman answering the door said she was the only one there. In my mind, that’s treason. If you’re an American, you have a responsibility to pay your fair share. Corporations also use more of the infrastructure than the rest of us. There’s a water problem now because fracking companies use so much of it. Republicans like to blame democrats for the national debt, but Reagan and Bush’s tax cuts are the real problem. The national government is not receiving enough revenue. and social security is considered part of the general fund instead of a separate entity. If the federal government had kept their grubby mitts off the social security fund there wouldn’t be a problem. Raising the cap shouldn’t be a problem either. Most of us pay social security taxes on all of our income. The cap was $110,000 the last time I looked. That’s pocket change to Mitt Romney.

If you look at capitalism politically you see corporations spending money to fight the new finance regulations on Wall Street. Why would they do that? Do they want to see a recession every seven years and a Depression every twenty? One would think that Wall Street learned its lesson when the mortgage bubble blew up in their faces, but obviously they didn’t. Just last year (2011), Morgan Stanley lost something like nine billion betting on the same derivatives that caused the recession in the first place, The Dow dropped 130 pts. in a few minutes recently because of an erroneous twitter feed said there had been a bomb set off in the White House and the president was injured. A super computer sold the stock without any input from a human being. It’s also legal for an investor to bet on stocks he doesn’t own. Even the most financially clueless investor knows what’s wrong with that concept.

Where are the economic thinkers? I know it’s the dismal science, but you’d think they could find somebody better than Milton Friedman to give the Nobel Prize to. When Obama said he wanted to see income redistribution, you would have thought he said he wanted to see free condoms for first graders. The real problem is all these deluded voters out there who vote against themselves. People making $30,000 have no business voting for a political party where a governor takes a job as a lobbyist for big banks after eight years fighting taxes on the rich. See Tim Pawlenty, a GOP presidential candidate. Perhaps his biggest sin was vetoing a billion dollar bill that would improve the infrastructure in Minnesota after the 35W bridge collapse. Thankfully it passed over the veto. Six Republicans crossed over to vote for the bill. Pawlenty immediately made sure they would lose the party endorsement. Minnesota is now one of the top states in respect to infrastructure, but we still need more work. Just because one bill passed doesn’t mean the electrical grid doesn’t need help.

Here’s a thought. Read your history books. Capitalists have always been bad dudes. Even the Boston Tea Party happened because the East India Company was trying to make American colonists buy their tea, not because of taxes as the Tea Party would have us believe. Readers should also check out the Triangle Fire documentary. Those women worked fourteen hours a day for two dollars a day. They had to bring their own supplies, and if they broke something they had to pay for it. Meanwhile they had a foreman breathing down their necks at all times. They couldn’t even go to the bathroom. The fire started in a waste basket from a discarded cigarette. The women certainly weren’t smoking. One of the main exits was locked because the owners, immigrants themselves, were worried the women would steal thread or shirtwaists.

Today workers are stressing out because they’re expected to do the work of those that were laid off. Corporations are sitting on four trillion dollars, still waiting for another Bush administration or at least a Republican senate and House of Representatives in 2014.

Here’s a suggestion: break up the big banks. If you can do it to Standard Oil and Ma Bell, you can do it to Morgan Stanley, especially when they so stupid as to invest in something that almost blew up the world’s economy on the basis of a mathematical algorithm.