Thursday, November 20, 2008

God bless Sam

My Dear Barack,

Let this be an object lesson for you: In 1914, Henry Ford shocked the capitalist world by paying his workers the unheard of sum of $5 a day and reducing the workday from nine to eight hours.

At the time, Ford’s logic was sound. He paid his workers enough so they could afford the cars they were producing, and an eight hour day allowed him to run three shifts instead of two.

Unfortunately, this opened the door for a prolonged period of wage abuse by workers and unions until it peaked with auto workers receiving an obscene annual salary of $67,480.

What followed was an example of the dialectic of success. When workers were being paid peanuts, the union movement was tough and militant. Eventually, wages increased to the point that the working class was able to join the middleclass. Once that happened, the unions went soft and lost their militancy. The upshot was that in 1980, the blue collar demographic helped vote Ronnie into office, and he immediately began a process of union destruction.

But, the true hero of this saga is Sam Walton. As his empire grew, he started putting pressure on his suppliers to slash their prices. The pressure was so intense that manufacturers had no choice but to ship their operations overseas where they found a large pool of exploitable labor.

As factories became deserted, high-paid workers lost their jobs and ended up flipping burgers or pumping gas, neither of which paid well. Middleclass workers once again became working class, but without the union militancy to stir things up.

As savings were exhausted and plastic maxed out, the only place they would afford to shop was Wal-Mart. Thus Wal-Mart was able to invert Ford’s formula by depressing wages until the working class was forced to shop at the big-box stores that were the cause of their ruin in the first place.

The bottom line here, Barack, is that Providence intended that all societies be two-tiered, with the elite on top and the masses on the bottom. Henry Ford unwittingly unleashed a demon when he started paying his workers a living wage, and that demon was a middleclass that was constantly destabilizing the proper order of society. It was this middleclass that was responsible for the progressive movement, the New Deal, and the chaos of the sixties.

Sam Walton deserves the Medal of Freedom for firing the first shot against this wage abuse. We are on the cusp of destroying this troublesome class, and the process of sucking America’s wealth back up to the top of the pyramid where it belongs is nearing completion as our economy melts down.

We have transitioned from production capitalism to finance capitalism with the emergence of a shadow banking system that is successfully looting the nation’s treasury.

Our kleptrocracy is counting on you to finish what Sam began.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones