Rand Paul's going to Detroit to -- I kid you not -- unveil his new legislative proposal to remove
bankrupt Detroit and other economically blighted areas from poverty and the
shackles of big government. Uh huh, that's right: Another Republican who never held elected office before being swept into the U.S. Senate by old white people with safety-pinned tea bags on their XXL-sized clothing in 2010, is going to set Detroit free! (What the hell does Rand Paul know about this subject, anyhow?) But never mind all that. Sen. Paul's real mission is to unshackle African Americans from the Democratic Party. That he might be an odd choice may have occurred to you, dear readers. This is, after all, the same guy who believes that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 went a little too far in ensuring that minorities had unfettered access to the same rights that the cream-colored citizens of this country have always enjoyed. Notably, the senator from Kentucky doesn't think that the federal government should tell businesses that it is against the law to discriminate against anyone who wishes to engage in legal commerce inside their establishments.
Paul's comment so enraged Kentucky's Republican State Senate -- as well as Democrats, of course -- that the members immediately adopted a resolution declaring any form of
discrimination to be inconsistent with American values. The only African American senator saidthat Paul's "extreme belief" has made Kentucky
"a laughingstock."
The Ignorance of the Arrogant
OK, forget all that, folks. This is my Etch-A-Sketch moment.
Picture this: The Republican Tea Party is sending a Kentucky know-nothing/do-nothing quasi politician into a city that voted 98% to reelect President Obama last year. His assignment: to convince Detroit's African American citizens that they will be much better off voting for the GOP in the future.
Yes, dear turkey eaters, the party that has voted to repeal the Affordable Healthcare Act forty-seven times, has cut the SNAP program, wants to take a woman's right to choose what is right for her and her family away from her -- while depriving her of all contraception methods, of course -- refused to pass the President's jobs bill (and has not proposed one of their own), and made it harder for minorities to vote, expects to attract the African American vote!
Even Michigan Republicans hate the idea of an African American Engagement Office. One said, It sounds like we're 'separate, but equal' office in Detroit...it's absurd, offensive and pathetic.
The Michigan Democratic Party was, of course, equally harsh, saying thatthe GOP has repeatedly proven they are so far out of touch, they can’t even
see it.
It will be interesting to see how Senator Paul's visit to Detroit turns out. Stay tuned!
Mitt's back. Yay. With hubby-hand-holder Ann. Oh goody. Sadly, neither has gained a scrap of insight into the real reasons why Americans went to the polls and re-elected President Obama last November. See, even Pat Robertson promised the Romneys that God said Mitt would win and serve two terms, and when you've got both Karl Rove's polls and God on your side, what could go wrong? We know all about Rove's polls, but perhaps God was just having the Romneys on a bit, because Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, and Michelle Bachmann all proclaimed that God had told them to run for president in 2012. Haven't we talked about keeping religion out of politics? Yeah, I thought we had.
*In an interview with Miami’s most prominent Cuban-exile station during the 2012 campaign, Romney informed his hosts that he loves Cuban fruits and is a big fan of papaya. Papaya is Cuban slang for, um, vagina.
Here We Go -- Again
Like another former governor we could name, Mitt Romney has obviously not been perusing any of them, all of them reading materials during his self-imposed exile in one of his many homes. Perhaps when he and Ann are not shopping at Costco, he's been spending his days building a new house in Utah or doing something or other to the house in La Jolla. I dunno. But had he paid any attention at all to the gazillion postmortems of his failed campaign -- including from his own party -- he would have had some inkling as to why he is not referred to today as President Romney.
And it's as simple as this:
Moving Forwardto the Past
Mitt is extraordinarily disappointed in President Obama's second term performance, so he's inserting himself back into the political arena to help shape national priorities. Well, that's certainly a relief! I mean, the stock market is at an all-time high and unemployment is going down, so certainly the nation needs his expertise. Oh wait...
No, what the flip-flopper is hot on right now is helping the GOP with their Latino problem. Well, who else could stop the Republicans from spewing the verbal diarrhea of their racism but their 2012 candidate? Sure, he insisted on continually calling undocumented immigrants illegals and recommending that they self-deport and get in line in their own countries, but...
Although he was asked many times to state his policy ideas for immigration reform, he consistently hedged, at one point telling a Latino group that I
will put in place my own long-term solution that will replace and supersede the
president's temporary measure. From the results of the election, it seems that the attendees were not particularly impressed with that illuminating revelation. No Fair! Obama Was Being Presidential!
Pandering to the smaller-government faction of the Republican Party has rarely worked out very well. During one of the endless Republican primary debates of 2012, Romney answeredAbsolutely when asked if disaster relief should be transferred to each individual state and added: Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal
government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction.
Still unable to acknowledge that it was his -- and his party's -- policies that turned the majority of Americans toward the Democratic candidate in 2012, Romney's has recently emerged to whinge about the reasons for his loss. Of the several excuses he's given lately, what may be the most massive and destructive hurricane in our history arrived one week before the election and that haunts him still.
It's not quite fair to say that Romney believes in the Alex Jones bullshitconspiracy theory that the government (read: Obama) has a weather disaster weapon, but it may have crossed his mind. No, Mitt's beef is two-fold: #1, the hurricane came at a bad time for his campaign; and #2, the fact that FEMA is a big-government program allowed President Obama to fly into the affected states -- New Jersey and New York -- and act all, uh, presidentially. So Mr. Romney learned a good lesson: be careful what you wish for; next time it may be a Republican president who has to be presidential during a natural disaster.
And what was the GOP candidate doing during this crisis? He was soliciting canned goods and clothing for the victims, which were not needed or wanted. The Red Cross was asking for cash, a commodity Romney certainly understands but one which he is always reluctant to hand over. It never occurred to him to call the White House and say, Mr. President, what can my campaign and I do to help the people affected by this terrible disaster? That would have made him appear presidential, at least to a small degree. Mitt Romney simply has all the wrong instincts when it comes to political leadership. Experts and Enthusiasts Conference -- What?
Wanna kill some innocent skeet with Rand Paul? Play putt-putt with Paul Ryan? Split a two-foot hoagie with Chris Christie? Sorry, you missed your chance. Maybe next year.
But that's what potential puppets and puppeteers were doing at Romney's second-act shindig in Utah earlier this week. For $5,000 you could have spent three days listening to Mitt tell attendees that they had to become less partisan and develop strategies for 2016. And there was that Latino thingy, too, as you remember. Well, telling Paul and Ryan to become less partisan is pretty much like telling a dog in heat to practice abstinence-only in her social life.
Since it was a private conference, no media was allowed to report on it. As a result, there's no indication on which of the Obama Administration's policies Romney was advocating for. Healthcare? Immigration? Gun reform. Yeah...riiiight.
But the conference was also an opportunity for two hundred Republican donors to take a look at what may well be shaping up to lead the ticket in 2016. I'm not sure which were the experts and which were the enthusiasts in this crowd, but it sounded much like giving two hundred wealthy donors an opportunity to choose which loser they would throw money away on come the next general election.
And although not one of them has solicited my advice, I have some... End Note
...Make sure you offer Republican voters a better choice than was presented to them in 2012. You're welcome.
It should come as no surprise to those Americans who don't have pickle relish for brains that the GOP is in disarray. Perhaps disarray is too mild; the GOP is in the midst of a self-made tsunami of chaos. And hey, it wasn't the Democrats who said that the Republican Tea Party would never have the elite, smart people on their side. It was Rick Santorum who engaged in that bit of intellectual segregation.
CPAC 2013 -- Only Wingnut Faithfuls Welcome
The Conservative Political Action Conference (fondly referred to as Conservative Politicians Are Clowns by the liberal establishment) will be held March 14-16. CPAC is actually sponsored by the American Conservative Union, which boasts as members of its board of directors such black holes luminaries as David Keene (NRA), Carly Fiorina, John Bolton, Grover Norquist, etc.
There are a couple of head-scratching paradoxes going on at CPAC this year. First is the rather weird news that Mitt Romney is attending.
The Mittster, of course, convinced CPAC participants in 2012 that he was severely conservative, and he ended up winning the straw poll with thirty-eight percent of the vote. OK, so they're idiots, but that's not the point. This year it is expected that with all the usual suspects -- and some of the other losers -- having speaking roles that the focus will again be on proving that they lost last year because the nominee was not conservative enough. And there will be Romney in the middle of it. Hmmm...can you say awkward?
The other shoot-yourself-in-the-foot issue is that it seems there will be several panels devoted to discussing how the GOP can become a more inclusive party. Well, that's all fine and dandy, of course, until it comes to some who will never be included. GOProud and the Log Cabin Republicans have once again been barred from attending because both groups are advocates for -- shh, quietly now, gays and lesbians. Gasp! Oh yes, in 2012 the far-right Christianista family values groups pitched a hissy-fit and said they would pull their sponsorship if those people were allowed to attend. Same for this year.
And so it goes with the Republican Tea Party attempting to, um, reinvent itself.
Who Will Speak at CPAC?
Why, the Tea Party will speak at CPAC, that's who. What, you were expecting a half-way sane Republican like Jon Huntsman? Splort! Not a chance. As it stands today, the brain-cell count in that room will dip into negative numbers. In fact, the conference's theme this year is -- wait for it -- CPAC—America's Future: The Next
Generation of Conservatives. Let's take a quick look at several of the saviors swirling around in CPAC's Tea Party dreck.
Dem strategist's email during Jindal's 2009 SOTU rebuttal: I'd pay a lot of money to be back watching a Palin speech.
*Bobby Jindal (LA-Tea Party) -- Gov. Jindal had quite a lot to say about the results of the 2012 election (not to belabor the point, you understand, but: Obama 332, Romney 206). His main criticism was that the GOP should stop being the stupid party and should embrace a larger group of constituents. (Psst! Hey, Bobby, does that include gays and lesbians? If so, perhaps you should inform CPAC.) Things aren't faring too well in his home state these days, either. While Jindal is said to be a favorite among conservative intellectuals (isn't that an oxymoron?), he is living with an approval rating of less than fifty percent because both Democrats and Republicans are unhappy with him. Oh, well!
If I just take a quick gulp, no one in the whole country will notice, right?
*Marco Rubio (FL-Tea Party) -- Anointed by Time Magazine as The Republican Savior (no question mark; Time is seems to be certain about this) should make Sen. Rubio the creme de la creme of the GOP. To be sure, he's steeped in the Tea Party's ideals. In his rebuttal to President Obama's State of the Union address recently, he pulled out the same old party lines: Obamacare bad; raising taxes bad; accepting climate change science bad. Long before he felt the urge to re-hydrate himself during the rebuttal, Rubio had announced his support for Florida Gov. Rick Scott's illegal purge of vote registration rolls. What about this inclusion thingy the GOP was talking about? He's a real piece of work, is Sen. Rubio, but that's exactly what the Republican Tea Party is looking for. Can he save the party? Well, it's according to what your definition of savior is, I suppose.
Going UP or Going DOWN?
*Ted Cruz (TX-Tea Party) -- The newest loudmouthed Tea Party agitator has been blessed with the coveted Last Speaker spot on the CPAC agenda. Oh yes, the Cruz Missile is the newest darling of the far-right wingers. On a recent escape to Texas where he is adored, Sen. Cruz stopped by a lumber yard and a factory that spits out AR-15 rifles. Hot damn! He told his supporters that Texans elected a senator to go to Washington and speak the truth. The only problem here is that he doesn't exactly tell the truth, relying instead on innuendo. He's made absurd accusations about Chuck Hagel and he's saidthere there were 12 communists actively plotting against the government at HarvardLawSchool while he was there. Hey, the man sees radicals and communists everywhere, leading many to refer to him as the new Joseph McCarthy. This kind of thing might play well in Peoria, but when his own party has to rebuke him for his outlandish rhetoric, he might have a small problem.
I am DOWN with this Tea Party stuff, you betcha!
*Mia Love (UT-Tea Party) -- Mama Mia! This one's a treat. A Mormon, an African American, and a Tea Partier, she just might be one Karl Rove wants to keep an eye on when he's making his not-right-for-the-GOP list. Love's parents came to the U.S. from Haiti in 1973, leaving their first two children behind. Mia was born in 1975, and then the parents sent for her siblings. Can you say Anchor Baby? She is the mayor of Saratoga Springs and ran for the House of Representatives in 2012. During her campaign she made the statement that once in congress, she would join the Congressional Black Caucus and take that thing apart from the inside out! I'm sort of sorry she lost, actually. I'd love to have seen her come up against the likes of long-time respected members of the CBC such as Elijah Cummings, Keith Ellison, and John Lewis, just to name a
few. Talk about taking that thing apart. Whew!
Bendy Straws, Anyone?
*Sarah Palin (AK Failure-Tea Party) -- Frankly, I have no earthly idea why Palin is speaking, except to remind Democrats and Moderates how far outside the Bell Curve she is. There are smarter, younger, and more motivated far-right conservative wannabes than she is. We're talking Sarah Palin here, the same Quitting/Fired Failure who lacks the intelligence to organize a pissing contest at a sports bar on Super Bowl Sunday. The Next Generation of Conservatives?
By the standard set by its own theme, we can assume that CPAC would not have the be-knighted Ronald Reagan as a speaker this year. In all probability, Reagan would be appalled at how the Tea Party has taken over the conservative movement in this country. It's also pretty obvious that, by CPAC's standards, Chris Christie doesn't fit in. Sarah Palin does. Go figure. A Reminder for Liberals End Note
Which part of NO didn't the Republican Tea Party understand in the 2012 Election results?
The Republican party has had a long-held opposition toward any talk of a living wage. This latest crop has their own ideas about how to deal with the poor. Rick Santorum, for example, seems to think that marriage is the solution to poverty.
What two things, that if you do, will guarantee that you will not be in poverty in America?” he asked the crowd. “Number one, graduate from high school. Number two, get married. Before you have children,” he said. “If you do those two things, you will be successful economically.
“ If you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself ... It is not a person's fault if they succeeded, it is a person's fault if they failed."
This attitude is fairly common with Fox-News-watching public. Reagan played that mish-mash of religion, patriotism and the much-touted work ethic very convincingly. The logical runs like this:
America is the land of opportunity.
We, as a nation, are blessed by God.
Wealth and success is a sign of God's blessing.
Every man's success and failure depends on the his individual attributes.
Therefore, government has no responsibility in the matter.
It is linked with the delusion that that the United States of America is a meritocracy where everyone is treated fairly and anyone can pull himself up by his bootstraps if he or she just works hard enough, pays their dues and keeps their nose to the grindstone.
The only problem is that for millions of Americans, it just not true.
The living wage, the Republicans generally say, is a denial of one of the fundamentals of the American economy, namely, the free market principle approach to labor, hiring and wages. This view is expressed by Steven Malanga, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow.
The living wage poses a big threat to their economic health, because the costs and restrictions it imposes on the private sector will destroy jobs—especially low-wage jobs—and send businesses fleeing to other locales. Worse still, the living-wage movement’s agenda doesn’t end with forcing private employers to increase wages. It includes opposing privatization schemes, strong-arming companies into unionizing, and other economic policies equally harmful to urban health.
Incidentally, The Manhattan Institute, founded in 1978 by William J. Casey, who later became President Ronald Reagan's CIA director, is by no means the impartial think-tank it pretends to be. Wikipedia has this to say:
The Manhattan Institute received $19,470,416 in grants from 1985–2005, from foundations such as the Koch Family Foundations, the John M. Olin Foundation, Inc., the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Scaife Foundations, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. The Manhattan Institute does not disclose its corporate funding, but the Capital Research Center listed its contributors as Bristol-Myers Squibb, Exxon Mobil, Chase Manhattan, CIGNA, Sprint, Reliant Energy, Lincoln Financial Group Foundation, and Merrill Lynch.
So much for its understanding about poverty and the needs of low-income Americans. And Sourcewatch adds some icing to the cake with this:
"The Manhattan Institute concerns itself with such things as 'welfare reform' (dismantling social programs), 'faith-based initiatives' (blurring the distinction between church and state), and 'education reform' (destroying public education)," Kurt Nimmo wrote October 10, 2002, in CounterPunch.
According to Malanga, the free market principles in which the wages are set by the employer and not by any kind of government regulation is the only solution.
(I)f living-wage advocates truly understood the free market, they’d know that it ultimately is far more moral than the centrally controlled economic system they endorse. If there is one thing that the last 50 years tell us, it is that the free market provides far greater economic opportunity and a decent standard of living for far more people than government-controlled markets.
And yet, that’s not what has actually happened at all. The free market approach to wages has encouraged a race to the bottom in living standards, pitting non-unionized dirt-cheap labor in developing nations against a highly productive but wage-protected labor in the US and Europe.
In fact, if this graph is anything to go by, the poverty levels in America didn’t begin to climb until after the conservative Republicans began their much-celebrated exercise in free market principles.
Starting from the 1980s and continuing through to the last Republican administration, the poverty rates have climbed and remained high. The free-market solution was no solution at all, as far as the poor were concerned.
According to Richard Caputo, writing in the Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, the Reagan years resulted in a higher percentage of both individual and family poverty. Forty percent of the nation’s personal net worth was possessed by 2.4 million people out of a population of 240 million. And look how that trend has been allowed to continue.
And yet according to the Malanga , the opposite is true.
What was remarkable about the American economy during the 1990s, when about 13 million low-skilled, low-wage immigrants arrived, is that poverty rates didn’t soar, and actually declined slightly—showing the muscularity of our economy in lifting even many of these newcomers out of poverty.
This kind of spurious arguing shouldn’t surprise anybody. As we have seen in earlier reports, misrepresenting the Reagan years (and the years since) is practically an art with the conservatives. Like the “trickle-down” theory, the real life experiment failed to live up to promise. No matter, the conservatives said, we will repeat the miracle story over and over until it becomes accepted as fact. To paraphrase Reagan, the trouble with our conservative friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't true.
In a typical effort to misrepresent the living wage movement, Malanga resorts to the usual disinformation campaign found in most ALEC-friendly right wing organizations.
Providing the intellectual muscle (such as it is) for the living-wage movement is a small group of Marxoid economists, led by University of Massachusetts–Amherst professor Robert Pollin, a longtime board member of the Union of Radical Political Economists, founded in the 1960s to bring Marxist economics to American universities.
As a matter of fact, the Far Right is now engaging in the same methods of academic deception that it accuses the opposition of. Utilizing a myriad of university studies financed by powerful corporate interests or dubious polls from organizations created solely for the purpose of muddying the debate, conservatives have continued to repeat the same dogma year after year. Whether true or not, in the long or in the short term, for most members of the Far Right, minimum wage limits have a negative effect on the economy. End of discussion.
However, some dared to question that line.
The tenor of this debate began to change in the mid-1990's following some work done by two Princeton economists, David Card (now at the University of California, Berkeley) and Alan B. Krueger. In 1992, New Jersey increased the state minimum wage to $5.05 an hour (applicable to both the public and the private sectors), which gave the two young professors an opportunity to study the comparative effects of that raise on fast-food restaurants and low-wage employment in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where the minimum wage remained at the federal level of $4.25 an hour. Card and Krueger agreed that the hypothesis that a rise in wages would destroy jobs was "one of the clearest and most widely appreciated in the field of economics."
Both told me they believed, at the start, that their work would reinforce that hypothesis. But in 1995, and again in 2000, the two academics effectively shredded the conventional wisdom. Their data demonstrated that a modest increase in wages did not appear to cause any significant harm to employment; in some cases, a rise in the minimum wage even resulted in a slight increase in employment.
The staunchest Conservatives, like the people of the Manhattan Institute, would like to portray the living wage movement as some kind of New Left socialist / anarchist /Marxist concept that spilled out of the turmoil of civil rights movement. According to Far Right sources, the movement began in 1994, as some kind of attempt to corrupt the "miracle" of Reaganomics, plotted by liberal professors and un-American leftists, those dreaded hangovers from the civil rights era.
In fact, its philosophical roots go back much further. Nearly a hundred years before, to be precise and is not a new thing at all.
Of New and Not So New Things
One of the seminal works on the subject of fair wages came not from the civil right movements of the mid- 20th century but from much earlier. On May 15, 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued an open letter, passed to all his bishops, that addressed the conditions of the working classes and of the poor. It was calledRerum Novarum (Latin for Of New Things).
It is, in fact, a remarkable document, and which elevated the Church from the promotion of a single faith to an ethical code for the advocacy of world social justice. This original papal document would be the source for a series of other social teachings by later popes, all of which related to the morality of fair treatment for the poor.
In the declaration, poverty in itself, Pope Leo explained, is no disgrace. It was unavoidable and part of the human condition. In an effort to maintain social harmony between the classes, he advised workers of the world that damaging or stealing of property of their employers was unacceptable. Had he stopped there, his message would have been nothing more than a carte blanche for exploitation. As one source explains:
But there was something else that concerned him very much: the material well-being of the working poor. He told them in no uncertain terms that they should receive what will enable them to be housed, clothed, secure, and to live without hardship. He made it clear that they were not to accept unjust treatment as though it were inevitable, and that they were to stand up for their rights at the same time that they helped to preserve good order in society. Protect your own interests, but refrain from violence and never riot ; your demands should be reasonable ; press your claims with reason ; form unions but do not strike. The message about preserving good order is clear and unmistakable, but so is the message about standing up for rights.
Leo XIII wanted the working poor to protect their interests, to make demands, to press their claims, and the principal means for doing this was the formation of unions. In their efforts to claim their rights, the working poor should find in the government an ally, and Leo made it clear that the working poor should be given special consideration by the government.
He also spoke directly to employers.
For Leo, employers have clear moral obligations: workers are not to be treated as slaves; the dignity of your workers' human personality must be respected; do not use people as things for gain; do not oppress the needy and wretched for your own profit. The approach to employers is on a high moral plane, but it is also very practical: you need your poor worker, so work with him harmoniously. It is immoral to treat workers unjustly, and it is also not in the best interest of ownership and management.
It was not a call for communism nor socialist but for an ethical re-examination of a capitalist system. According to the Pope, it was a government’s obligation to take a role in protecting workers’ rights and in keeping the peace. Fair wages are defined in Rerum Novarum as at least a living wage, but Leo recommended paying more than that: enough to support the worker, his wife and family, with a little savings left over so that the worker can improve his condition over time.
To a Right Wing conservative, that statement (for Newt and Rick it's an infallible source, by the way) is tantamount to heresy. It's hard to reconcile the statements made by the candidates- who have professed to be Catholic when it comes to abortion and homosexuality- with the official position of the Church on the poor. Why, you can ask, would the GOP be waging a war on religion?
In any case, the Pope’s letter would later have a profound effect on a leading moral theologian, priest, professor, author, and social justice advocate, Monsignor John Augustine Ryan. In 1906, published the book,A Living Wage.
While at St. Paul Seminary in 1894, Ryan read Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum and it was to form the basis for Ryan’s socio-economic views. As he saw it, the separation of economic thought from religious and ethical rules were the cause of social injustice brought about by the industrial revolution. The failure of employers to pay a sufficient wage would, in his eyes, inevitably damage the fabric of all society.
The living wage movement was not confined to the religious sphere. Around the turn of the last century, the fascinating English husband and wife reformers, Martha Beatrice Webb and Sidney James Webb wrote a good deal about the necessity of social and economic reform. They advocated the idea that the State should enforce a national minimum of wages which would provide the laborer with "the food, clothing and shelter physiologically necessary, according to national habit and custom, to prevent bodily deterioration."
They considered the industries that took more than they gave back to be little better than parasites on the community. The Modern Conservative has declared it is the poor who are the parasites. And, apparently their only solution to poverty is blame the victims, to remove their government safety nets and to force them to have more babies they cannot afford. All in the name of their professed morality .
In 1919 The Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America drafted a program of social reconstruction back which included in its demands “a Living Wage enforced by the State,” and “declared that “this Living Wage should be made the first charge upon industry, before dividends are considered."
Finally, perhaps a more unexpected proponent of the Living Wage concept, was none of than the arch-capitalist Henry Ford. On Jan. 5, 1914, Henry Ford, head of the Ford Motor Company, introduced a minimum wage scale of $5 per day, more than doubling the wages for most employees.
James Couzens, the Ford treasurer, said: “It is our belief that social justice begins at home. We want those who have helped us to produce this great institution and are helping to maintain it to share our prosperity. We want them to have present profits and future prospects. … Believing as we do, that a division of our earnings between capital and labor is unequal, we have sought a plan of relief suitable for our business.”
The Wall Street Journal accused him of injecting "Biblical or spiritual principles into a field where they do not belong." The New York Times correspondent who traveled to Detroit to interview him that week asked him if he was a socialist but also added that his decision as “one of the most remarkable business moves of his entire remarkable career.”
Despite his what was claimed, his main reason for the unprecedented wage increase was more likely to be economic rather than humanitarian. With its high turnover, the motor company faced a constant retraining of new workers. By the keeping and rewarding the best workers, the wage increase was offset by increased production and smaller training programs. Additionally, the wage increase provided Ford employees with enough money to purchase Ford automobiles, which further increased the company’s sales. In the end, through his ostensively labor-friendly policy, Ford’s business goals were realized and his wage increase had its intended effect: turnover declined sharply, and profits doubled to $60 million from $30 million from 1914 to 1916.
One further example of the long pedigree of the living wage movement: in 1917, The Interdenominational Conference of Social Service Unions, comprising ten religious bodies, including Catholics (like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum), spent more than a year formulating a statement of social reconstruction. They issued this statement:
"In an industrial system such as ours, the right to life practically resolves itself into the right to a Living Wage, by which we mean not a mere subsistence wage but a wage sufficient to maintain a reasonable standard of life."
Despite what the conservatives would like everybody to believe, the history of the living wage movement is extensive and historical and it should be a source of pride for any progressive.
The twentieth century was, in fact, one long struggle between the capitalist on one hand who felt that labor was a resource to exploit and progressive social reformers who demanded a fair living wage of labor.
______________
In the final installment, I will take a look at the last great attempt to address the problem of the living wage, the remarkable success of this movement and its catastrophic downfall.
Listen to this incredible emotional speech by Maureen Walsh. A Republican. Miracles never cease, I suppose. By the way, I was also a little worried when she started talking about sex.
