Even the word “greed” is not negative enough to characterize the all-out assault on workers by today’s corporate elite.
From offshoring jobs to busting unions, from slashing wages to looting pensions, corporate take-aways from America’s used-to-be middle-class workforce certainly are driven by the avarice of top executives and wealthy investors. Plainly put, the more they can take from workers, the more they can put in their own pockets (or, most likely, in their offshore bank accounts). It adds up to a massive redistribution of wealth from the many to the few.
In addition to greedy, though, these people are rank thieves. As Woody Guthrie succinctly put it: “Some’ll rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen.” We’re now in a rapacious fountain-pen economy. Since the Wall Street crash of 2008 (itself a product of grand theft by financial elites), the productivity and creativity of all Americans have regenerated every bit of the wealth that was frittered away by bankers, and we created trillions of dollars in new income. What a phenomenal national achievement that is, produced in an astonishingly short time by the shared effort of our people!
But strenuous effort is all we shared. The richest one-percent of Americans have grabbed 91 percent of the gains in income, and the even-richer one-tenth-of-one-percent sucked up 22 percent of the new wealth. Thus, the vast majority of us have still not recovered the wealth we lost (homes, cars, savings, etc.) and 99 percent of us are getting less income today than we were before Wall Street crashed our economy seven years ago.
It’s time we robees started talking plainly about what’s going on. The rich are not getting richer because they’re more enterprising than everyone else, harder-working, or of strong moral character. They’re thieves. They’re getting richer by stealing from you.
“US wealth inequality - top 0.1% worth as much as the bottom 90%,” www.thegurardian.com, November 13, 2014.
“Top 1 percent capture most of wealth gains,” www.timesfreepress.com, January 27, 2015.
“The 1 Percent Have Gotten All The Income Gains From The Recovery, www.thinkprogress.org, January 28, 2015.

Big Food trying a big hoax

Near my home in Austin, Texas, there’s an old refurbished motel with a keep-it-real attitude that is expressed right on its iconic marquee: “No additives, No preservatives, Corporate-free since 1938.”
The good news is that more and more businesses across the country are adopting this attitude, providing a buy-local, un-corporate, anti-chain alternative for customers. Food shoppers and restaurant goers, for example, have made a huge shift in recent years away from the likes of McDonald’s, Pepsi, and Taco Bell, preferring upstart, independent outfits with names like “The Corner,” “Caleb’s Kola,” and “US Taco Co.”
But, uh-oh, guess who owns those little alternatives? Right – McDonald’s, PepsiCo, and Taco Bell. Leave it to ethically-challenged, profiteering monopolists to grab such value-laden terms as “genuine” and “honest,” empty them of any authenticity, then hurl them back at consumers as shamefully-deceptive marketing scams.
In Huntington Beach, California, US Taco Co. poses as a hip surfer haunt, with a colorful “Day of the Dead” Mexican skull as its logo. The airy place peddles lobster tacos and other fancifuls at $3 or $4 each – very un-fast-foody. Nowhere is it whispered that this is a Big Chain outlet, created by a group of Taco Bell insiders. They even usurped the enterprising word “entrepreneur,” stripped it of its outsider connotation, and twisted it into a corporate vanity, calling themselves “intrapreneurs.”
The problem with these fabricators of “corporatized authenticity” is that reality will out. Small and local has a genuine feel and flavor that the imitators can’t sustain as they sprawl out into 1,000 and then 10,000 stores. And as they do that, it becomes obvious to customers that they’ve been duped – and that’s not a good marketing strategy.
“Big food marketers trying hipster guises,” Austin American-Statesman, February 28, 2015.

Hillary Clinton tries on the populist tiara

I have some BIG political news, folks: Hillary Clinton is a populist!
No... seriously. She says she is. Well, she hasn’t actually used the P-word to describe her 2016 political persona, but the managers of the Greater Clintonista Political Perpetual Motion Machine are casting her as the very embodiment of pure populism, even asserting that Hillary was “populist” before populism was cool.
Indeed, they’re even claiming that she is the original Elizabeth Warren, today’s hell-raising, senatorial champion of the poor and the middle-class. If that assertion strikes you as a not-so-subtle putdown of Sen. Warren – it is. To back up Clinton’s claim of populist superiority, her partisans have issued a 16-page document itemizing 40 instances in which Hillary took populist positions on issues before Elizabeth did. And if that’s still too subtle for you to get the message that Clinton is to be considered Populism’s Numero Uno, one of her close confidantes has tried to kneecap Warren, bluntly dismissing her as a “footnote.”
How tacky.
Populism is as populism does – it’s not a brand-name to throw on like a designer scarf, but real, pointed policies and actions that democratize money and power in our society. Yet, Clinton – a former member of Walmart’s board of directors – hasn’t even had the guts to say no to the latest anti-worker, plutocratic, trade scam called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Her milquetoast response to this audacious assault on our people’s sovereignty by global moneyed elites is a vague statement that the corporate deal should “protect American workers.” On the other hand, rather than playing political pattycake with this raw power grab, Sen. Warren is going after it hammer and tong, demanding that Congress kill it outright.
That’s the real populism.
“Hillary Clinton’s hedge on trade leaves Obama without political cover,” www.washingtonpost.com, May 12, 2015.
“Campaign Casts Clinton As the Populist It Insists She Has Always Been,” www.nytimes.com, April 22, 2015.