An Election Lost … a Dream Recalled:

The seat in the United States Senate so long held by the Kennedy family passed from the Democrats to the Republicans in last Tuesday’s election. It remains to be seen if the dream of greater equality was also passed. For that is really what the election was all about. The analysis showed that the independent voters in Massachusetts went for the Republican candidate by over 60%. These are the same voters that swung both the election in New Jersey and Virginia to Republican candidates last fall.

How did such a thing happen is the question. Was it health care or was it just misguided faith. I feel that the Republican Party does not represent what I wish America to be. So perhaps we should define what it is that Americans want America to be that needs our attention. I want America to remain a land of opportunity where hard work results in social and financial betterment. I oppose slavery because slavery deprives the slave of any chance of improving his status. Why do I raise the issue of slavery you might ask? The reason is simple. I have seen no improvement in the status of the American middle class in the past 15 years. The American middle class in fact has been decimated by frozen wages and job losses and decreased benefits by major corporations.

What exactly is an excessive profit? An excessive profit is when the price of an item consists of more for the owner of the plant producing the item and less for the worker assembling the item. This can be most clearly seen in the factories along the border with Texas. Here 100 feet from America factory girls are paid five dollars a day to work in plants owned by Sony and Samsung. Five dollars a day is what Henry Ford paid his workers in the first decade of the 20th century. It is what I call a slave-wage. In the 1960s an America auto worker earned 25 dollars an hour. Instead of a five dollar day American workers took home 40 times that amount. Recall that this is a wage of only $52,000 per year. Yes I know it is a wage many today would envy. And that is just my point. When we as a people begin to look at wage levels from 50 years ago and think they are better than today something has gone seriously wrong.

The wrongness is not a political issue it is an economic issue you might say. Hog wash politics is all about fairly dividing the profits that a society’s economic system generates. The key word is fairly and here is where political opinion begins to enter the equation. The question is what should be the ratio of salary paid to the corporate employee making the most and the corporate employee making the least. Today that ratio has become very large. I maintain that in fact it has become excessive. The salary of the chief executive officer of Exxon-Mobil is more than 425 times what a newly hired “hand” makes.

A worker bringing home a paycheck looks at his wages as his return on investment. He invests his time at the company working on tasks assigned to him. For doing this he is paid an amount of money. The worker himself has very little say so in determining what that amount will be. Those on the political right say this is the natural order of things. Those on the political left say the wage earner should have some control over what they will be paid. How does the individual worker gain enough power to make this concept a reality? Labor unions have been the traditional method of wresting some measure of control of wages away from management and vesting it in the worker. That my gentle reader is what it all comes down to. Do the workers of America have a right to demand a wage higher than a slave wage? I think that they do. And that is my dream and what I hope was not lost in this last election.