Whatâs
Wrong Today:
We
are marking the sixth Labor Day weekend since the onset of The Great Recession
and Congress has yet to pass a jobs bill, it has yet to put a halt to
anti-worker tactics of many businesses and state governments, it has yet to
make poverty and hunger and homelessness a priority on the national agenda.
The working class no longer has any voice in or influence on the US government.
President and Congress have been a profound disappointment to the middle class,
the poor and the elderly. If you doubt that, remember this chart that the Wrongologist
posts regularly. It is the ratio of employed to our total civilian population:
It
is down about 4 percentage points since the start of the Great Recession. Over
the past 40 years, the plutocracy and the Conservative movement have made
certain that working women and men no longer count for much in the United
States of America.
Corporate
profits after tax just hit a record high as a percentage of GDP, while wages
are at their lows as a percentage of GDP. Workers are clearly getting less and
less of the American economic pie, while corporate profits continue to soar.
To illustrate how bad this is, the graph below shows wages and salaries
as a percentage of GDP in red, (scale on the right), against corporate profits
as a percentage of GDP, in blue, (scale on the left).
Why
wonât DC do anything to change these trends? This is just terrible for America
and American workers.
The
US has 2.3 million American males in prison. It has six times the rate of
incarceration per capita as China. As prison guards earn salaries, so do
lawyers and entertainers who provide parallel coverage to trials which
second-guess the legal system. All of this adds to our GDP even though they actually
are indicators of social decline.
The symbols of progress now reside elsewhere. The worldâs tallest building is
in Dubai, second tallest will soon be the Shanghiai Tower, part of a complex of
three new skyscrapers. China builds more autos now than the US.
The following Labor Day cartoons
are not meant for your enjoyment:
tis a pity. even worse, the white working class seems to think that those on the right fight for them. they don’t.