A meme about the stock market recently got my attention. It brought not only rage and tears but confirmation about what we must be fighting for now.
The meme was simple enough but poignant.
The next time you feel poor, and can’t fill your gas tank, and you hold back tears trying to put together a grocery trip that can get you and your family through the week on just $40, remember that the stock market is at a record high and America is great again.
Only a few are partaking of this “great economy.” Ask yourself a question. Why aren’t wages going way up with so little unemployment? Does supply and demand work no more?
It is not about economics 101 anymore. One should remember that when a resource is scarce, that resource increases in price. As such, if we are at full employment, it is clear that wages should be increasing at a high clip. But that is not occurring.
One reason wages are not increasing isn’t at all hard to infer. Many are made to believe that their jobs are not secure. You ask for too much then the threat of a factory move becomes a concern to employees,
It is clear we have a rigged economy. The population is manipulated to believe this is all they can strive for and anything different is on the fringe.
Allowing pharmaceuticals to profit from drugs whose genesis was the expenditure of taxpayer dollars for their initial creation isn’t corporations getting free stuff but Medicare for All we all pay for is? Private insurance companies who created a false product to skim money off the top of every payment is not getting free cash while forgiving student loans to juice an economy that will create more wealth is considered a giveaway?
A Politics Done Right listener wrote this while watching the program.
Every human being needs health care at some point in their lives. It’s the nature of being alive. We are a monopoly market. We need universal care – 100%, even 99% isn’t sufficient. Insurance companies are not health care companies, they are financial services companies. They are the middleman whose role is unnecessary except to make profit for their shareholders and executives. The employees who currently administer claims at insurance companies would be able to shift to work administering Medicare for all.
Personal costs out-of-pocket for my husband and me are not quite $6000 per year. His employer’s contribution is estimated to be around $14,000. We must meet co-pays and deductibles and are required to choose our providers based on PPO. Medicare-for-All would mean $12,000 for us, so $8,000 LESS than our current costs and would eliminate all deductibles and co-pays, and we could choose ANY doctor. He could leave his job and start his own business. It means freedom. This is why I support Medicare for ALL..
Soaring stock market with low wages is systemic theft
Perspective and narrative is everything. A soaring stock market with full employment and low wages is a failed system, systemic theft. If that is the result of the purported best economy, then one should wrap that reality around the neck of the politicians making that claim. Moreover, it is incumbent on us all to elect politicians with a vision that does not border on the insanity of repeating the same modus operandi over and over again and expecting a different result. And in that light, another listener/reader wrote the following message.
Please do not frame the problem — low incomes — as pertaining to Millenials rather than Baby Boomies. I think that is important because so many elder voters seem inclined to vote for Joe Biden. However, Bernie is eager to help Boomies, while Biden is disinterested. For example, Bernie’s idea for Social Security is expansion (i.e., increase retirement payments to low-income recipients). All I found on Biden’s website was “protect” Social Security. Moreover, you may recall that Obama wanted to reduce Social Security payments in order to get a “grand bargain.” I don’t know if Joe was involved in that subterfuge, but the difference between Bernie and Biden is not being stressed at all. I haven’t heard Bernie mention it, either. Isn’t taking money away from retired people important to the victims?
This problem is always with us, since employers always want to get as much productivity for as little pay as possible. That has been exacerbated at least since 1981, because Reagan’s Revolution, which is neo-liberalism, intentionally eliminated or destroyed New Deal-related forces (e.g.,unions and government regulations) that made the employers pay what employees were owed. People of all ages should understand that without force, employees always will be paid the lowest possible wages and salaries.
Everyday Americans are getting it. It is time for the Democratic Party to lean into its rank and file with the appropriate narrative. That will make them fishers of more people ready to vote “correctly” as they see true differences and finally a reason to engage, not for a privileged few who demand their vote without a substantial return on voting investment but for themselves.
The hoarders of capital in the healthcare industrial complex, the banking industrial complex, and others are the ones on the fringe and it is my job as well as the job of every progressive activist out there to shine the light on the truth and disinfect the pathogens.