Editor:
Corporate profit margins just hit an all-time high. Companies are making more per dollar of sales than they ever have before. (And still some people rant that companies are suffering from “too much regulation” and “too many taxes.” Pure bunk, that).
Yet fewer Americans are working than at any time in the past three decades. One reason corporations are so profitable is that they don’t employ as many Americans as they used to.
They are laying off people and pushing the workload onto the remaining employees without raising their pay… all work and no pay. Technology is taking its toll as well. Globalization.
And wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time low.
Another reason companies are so profitable is that they’re paying employees less than they ever have. And that, in turn, is one reason the economy is so weak:
People lack money to buy. They get rid of full timers so they don’t have to provide retirement benefits, health insurance. They fight unions tooth and nail. Read your history to learn of all the nasty things big business has done to its employees. Don’t forget child labor.
It’s American business at work as per usual. Screw the employee by making it impossible for them to organize. Divide and conquer.
Those at the very top of the economic ladder have developed and used political muscle to dramatically cut their taxes, deregulate the financial industry, keep corporate governance lax and labor unions hamstrung.
Read “Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer–and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class,” a book by political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson.
The authors argue that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the dramatic increase in inequality of income in the United States since 1978 — the richest 1 percent gaining 256 percent after inflation while the income of the lower 80 percent grew only 20 percent — is not the natural/inevitable result of increased competition from globalization, but of the work of political forces.
Is this what America is supposed to be about … a land of serfs?
Even the father of the free market, Adam Smith, warned “Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”
About two-thirds of Apple’s $97.6 billion cash pile is offshore. That’s a lot of money for an American company to keep outside of America.
Another interesting fact: Apple is now one of the most profitable companies in the world. Last year each employee brought in on average $473,000.00 worth of sales, yet themselves only made $11.91 per hour.
When that went over the air waves Apple finally gave – some – a raise. Just $2 to $4 per hour, though.
Republicans boo-hoo-ing over big biz needing more tax cuts and more deregulation (i.e., no accountability/responsibility) etc. etc. to “survive” is BS. Big biz is back in the catbird seat. Or will be 100 percent if you vote for Romney/Ryan.
And instead of Romney singing “America the Beautiful,” he and Ryan will be harmonizing “America the greedy, May God thy gold refine, Till all success be nobleness, And ev’ry gain divine.”. The original poem, by the way, from whence the song “America the Beautiful” came said nothing about gold, success as nobleness or ev’ry gain divine (ie the making and accumulating of money).
It said:
“America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain,
The banner of the free!”
Diane Daiute
Sweet Home