When will the Republican Party cross over to the millennium on economic issues? The Party is extremely defensive by connoting labor rights with entitlements. This is in the face of no apology whatever in the hierarchy of the corporate world bestowing outrageous and unearned executive salaries, gauche perks and top of the line health plans. The word “unearned” is seldom used in the hierarchy — other than the internal revenue nomenclature — because of the symbiotic rise to power deemed as a well-earned Herculean entrepreneurism. On the other hand, the common worker who puts in an honest day’s work should be grateful for whatever the company decides is a living wage predicated on the weakened demand in the labor marketplace, owing to the demise of the unions.

Even worse today is the strategy of outsourcing which bludgeons the definition of an honest day’s work. By eliminating millions of manufacturing jobs, capitalists flood the job market which devalues the demand for service workers — but for the highly skilled were never paid much anyway — thereby putting to rout, or at least diminishing, the value of labor, salvaged only by consumption of cheapened imports. What the Republican Party never takes into account is that the cheapening of labor is a precarious tool to amass the fortunes of a few at the expense of devaluating the worth of the lower class. Were it for the credit card the effects of this tool would be dramatic if the common worker had to thrive in a “cash only” economy. These few, however, cleverly invest in the credit card industry at enormous profit in order to keep consumption humming with the uncanny ability to absorb increasing bankruptcies and in tandem to ignore the obscene duress of millions of families.

 Actually this modern capitalism is designed to hoodwink the masses into thinking they never had it so good. If a breadwinner — an anachronism, since today’s economy demands the plural — can purchase daily bread for his/her family on credit so he can pay the rent, he/she believes he is surviving well, but never once in his/her consciousness is the welfare of his/her children’s future beyond presenting them a cell phone for graduating high school. Also in the consciousness of the Party is the belief that lower class Americans should stop whining because in other nation’s their perception of poverty is relative wealth. Further, the Party endorses the myth that all it takes is ambition to pull oneself out of the lower class, while the leaders are oblivious to all the “entitlements” from birth-right to lucky genes that imbedded them in a higher class.

Is this class warfare? Not so, the lower class has no power to wage war — alas, not even the Democratic Party. It remains with the Republican Party to step in and lose its vestige of insensitivity driven by plutocratic mares.

 Copyright © 2004 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: August 18, 2004.