PEELING THE LIES BEHIND NEO-LIBERAL ECONOMICS - THE MINIMUM WAGE ISSUE

The last few decades have been called the age of neo-liberal economics. Following the 'Powell memorandum', these policies have been implemented with a progressive takeover by big business and the super rich who own them, of public institutions - political parties, the media, the academy, major chunks of the judiciary, and so on, at the cost of decimated unions whose power was stripped away with technological changes that enabled off-shoring of manufacturing to places where labour cost 'peanuts'. The so-called 'free trade agreements' progressively (or rather regressively) turned corporations into Masters, nation-states into Servants begging for investment, and liquidating their natural resources at bargain-basement prices. Kevin Taft (former Alberta politician) has written on how this process unfolded in Alberta (as one example), with the Peter Lougheed government being the last one to successfully negotiate reasonably fair terms for the province and its people. Key elements of the fraud that has been neo-liberalism have included tax cuts for the super-rich with promises of 'trickle-down' jobs and benefits, but as Arundhati Roy has put it, all that happened was a massive Gush-Up; by a recent estimate of some $30 trillion to the super-rich in the West, at the cost of a rapidly disappeared middle-class, transformed from what was once the 'proletariat' into what is now the 'precariat'. Other massive cons were privatization - trillion-dollar thefts creating billionaire oligarchies everywhere (because 'public' enterprises were simply 'inefficient'), and the 'deregulation' tsunami that produced the multi-trillion dollar subprime fraud which nearly wrecked the world's economy, but resulted in Zero CONSEQUENCES for the perpetrators in Wall Street, who remain TOO BIG TO JAIL. Thus Wall Street followed up the junk mortgage fraud of the early 2000s, with an even more brazen mortgage foreclosure fraud in 2010, with banks foreclosing on thousands of American homes with fraudulent documents filed in courts. Soldiers returning to the US from service in Iraq found their homes had been seized by banks.... One of the neo-liberal frauds is that higher wages destroy jobs. Well Big business... at least some representatives of it - 100 CEOs who include at least some big corporations - Facebook, Tesla - are finally clueing on that robbing the worker blind does not make for a sustainable economy. That's what the Ford company which made the Model T a century ago understood well - that paying its own workers well improved the market for its own products. Michael Hudson's book 'Killing the Host' talks about how decimating labour wages was the parasite (virus) killing its own host. During the 1950s and 60s, US labor enjoyed its highest prosperity, executive wages were only 10-15 times the worker's wage, and tax rates were incomparably higher for the rich. The US economy remained the dominant one, but prosperity was shared. Neo-liberal fraud has changed all that. But at least some businessmen are getting what Ontario Premier Doug Ford does not - that there are 2 sides to the minimum wage issue. Ostensibly, higher wages make it harder for business to pay for workers.... in the short run. But in the long run, higher wages mean more money spent by wage-earners on the products such businesses make or sell... Duh! 'Ontario is open for business again', says Doug. What he means is he wants Ontario to join the likes of states in the US South, where 'Right-to-Work' means to work for next to nothing, with no labor unions fighting for the workers' rights. Profits and executive compensation then can go sky-high. As Michael Moore shows in Fahrenheit 11/9, a young man working in construction rages about how he makes $7.30/hour in a Southern state; and gets 17 hours of work a week. This is what the US has done throughout Central and South America, destroying labour movements, arming and financing death squads to topple 'left-wing' governments that want to create a better life for their populations; assassinating labour, political, even Church leaders (priests) so that American transnational corporations can make higher profits, squeezing the life out of overseas economies, labour and nation-states. Well that ideology is now operating in the West, starting with the US. The parable of the frog and the scorpion is instructive here - even though the scorpion needs the frog to cross a stream, it stings the frog anyway, because that is its 'nature'. Those increasingly lower-paid workers in the US pay for the massive costs of the Pentagon, CIA, private mercenary/security armies like the former Blackwater, the 70,000 strong 'Special Operations' forces, etc which enforce the wishes of the gangsters of capitalism, in anywhere between 130 and 150 countries around the world at any given time, according to recent reports, naturally unpublicized in the major corporate-controlled media. The 99% who pay taxes (which the top 1% are more or less exempt from) carry the burden of the racketeers for the capitalists that make up the 0.01% who have benefited from decades of neo-liberal theft. Before the Powell memorandum the 0.01% were the principal beneficiaries of the international racketeering; now the racketeering has turned to the domestic populations of the West, through neo-liberal frauds. So at home (within the West) the frog is slowly being cooked so it doesn't realize what is happening. That minimum-wages destroy jobs is a lie; that tax-cuts for the rich create jobs is a lie; and that 'austerity' programs for countries which end up being 'loan-sharked' by the biggest sharks on the planet - the IMF, World Bank etc., are needed is also a lie. Bankers create loans from thin air.... then charge interest... then break bones of countries which cannot pay... usually because the money loaned went not to the country's population, but to crooked elites (the 1%) who lost it and the burden then fell, as is also usual - on the 99%. The 'greatest nation in history', also the richest on the planet and in history, has unlimited funds to pay for wars, weapons of mass murder, terror, torture and mass destruction, but is being driven bankrupt by socialist programs like medicare and Social Security. So the brainwashing goes. And as it goes in the US, so it slowly goes in other Western countries, through an inevitable process of osmosis, pushed through the international financial system. In short, Capitalism (the rule of the 1%) is Democracy, and Democracy (the wishes of the 99% or a majority of the 'un-brainwashed') is Communism.