Occupation Valuation

Jim DeMint (R-SC) is allowed to keep his gold-plated retirement plan

My best bud, Roland, is a school teacher in Compton. He works hard. At the end of the day he's exhausted. He makes a modest living. I mentioned to him the other day that the son of one of my best friend's from college had just graduated from law school and stepped right into a six-figure job. "They work those lawyers like slaves," is what Roland said. They do? Like slaves? Really? I had a whole department of lawyers working for me at Warner Bros. They pulled their weight. But "work like slaves?" No; they didn't work any "harder" than anyone else did. Oh, some individuals may have-- but that because of their own work ethic and has everything to do with what drives them as an individual, rather than something intrinsic to their well-paid career.

Is there something intrinsic in a job that makes society value it-- financially, which is almost solely what defines value in our world-- above other jobs? Why do school teachers make a living wage while financial manipulators make billions? Why does a family doctor make a so-so living while an attractive soap opera actor make millions? And that had an awful lot to do with the whole Wisconsin kerfuffle that ended-- at least for now-- badly Tuesday night. Call it the politics of envy. Conservatives have been using it to divide working people for centuries and clobbered us with it this week.

Billionaires like the Koch brothers, particularly the Koch brothers, don't think they should have to pay for the costs to run a civil society. Wealthy conservatives never have. They can afford their own teachers why should they have to pay for someone else's teachers? They don't buy into this whole Elizabeth Warren way of looking at it. That's why there seems to be a marked tendency for billionaires to turn into sociopaths. It's why billionaires shouldn't exist. But the Koch brothers and their ilk have an awful lot of politicians on their payrolls-- Scott Walker and Paul Ryan only being two of the most prominent-- who violently disagree. In fact they have an entire political party that violently disagrees... and another one that is conflicted, confused and doesn't know what the hell it stands for anymore. Obama's first appointment after winning the presidency made it abundantly clear to me that the Hope and Change thing was a campaign slogan, not a governing proposition. There are no Republicans worse than Rahm Emanuel when it comes to protecting the special interests of Wall Street and the predatory financial manipulators. Obama gravitated-- heavily-- towards that end of the Democratic Party, especially when it came to his key economic appointments. That was the end of the game, before it even began. And now we have Republicans trumpeting that the results in Wisconsin Tuesday are proof that it's safe for Republican state governments to go full blast on the Koch/ALEC agenda of disabling democracy and destroying the middle class.

Tuesday night it wasn't just the results in Wisconsin that pointed in that dismal direction. Voters in two of California's biggest cities, San Diego and San Jose, also decided that whims of billionaires must be put before the needs of school teachers. They did? Oh, yes. Let's get it right from the mouth of one of the most dangerous neo-fascist politicians in America, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint. Writing for a far right website after the results came in, he realized how important for their movement the referenda in San Jose and San Diego were. Both cities have opted, by huge margins, to convert defined benefit pensions to 401 (k)-style plans. That's has worked badly in the private sector-- for millions and millions of workers... so of course the billionaires and politicians who exist to serve them (like DeMint) want to force it down the throats of public sector workers as well. He calls them "unaffordable" (and they are as long as billionaires exist) and "unfair," a divide and conquer strategy the wealthy always use to defeat working families.

"It is simply unjust," insists government employee DeMint, "for government employees to require private sector workers, who don’t have gold-plated retirement plans, to subsidize such plans for themselves. That is, it’s not fair for government employees to demand better benefits than their bosses, the actual taxpayers." With no class consciousness to speak of, workers in San Jose and San Diego were more than happy to go along with the billionaires' brigade... again.

"The status quo cannot be sustained," writes DeMint. I agree. Abolish billionaires through rational tax policies, the way it was before Reagan. And pay teachers better.