Donald Jeffries

Toiling for the Rigged Marketplace

Karl Marx said at least one valuable thing. Workers of the world do need to unite, and lose their chains. If our brand of chrony capitalism doesn’t exploit workers, it certainly doesn’t value or respect them. Real pay and benefits for the vast majority of American workers have fallen precipitously over the past several decades.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I certainly don’t admire Karl Marx, or the system he advocated. He was, like virtually all famous historical figures, promoted by great powers behind the scenes. And Marxism/communism has been tried in a great many places. It obviously doesn’t provide a decent life for those living under it. In the case of the Soviets, it created misery for millions of “comrades.” And under their system, dissenting voices were sent to Siberia. That’s worse than what America 2.0 does to dissenters, like the January 6 political prisoners. But maybe if they open up the FEMA camps, and put all the “deplorables” in them, we’ll be worthy competition.

I thought about this subject while watching a Matt Walsh video yesterday. Now I often like Walsh’s commentary, and certainly agree with him on the “Woke” madness. But economically, he’s like far too many conservatives. Trusts the marketplace. Thinks the very rich “built” and deserved their wealth. Although he’s a millennial, he believes the Boomer myth, which they got from their parents, the “greatest generation.” That myth is that if you work hard, your efforts will be recognized. Cream will rise to the top. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. I couldn’t find any information about Walsh’s background. I would be shocked if he didn’t come from at least an upper middle-class family.

Walsh was ridiculing some Gen Z “influencer,” who was complaining about the dead end nature and low pay for most jobs in America 2.0. He didn’t call it America 2.0, of course, but that’s what he was describing. Walsh is only thirty seven, so he must think that his quick climb to prominence in the competitive online world of alternative media is a common phenomenon. It isn’t. Maybe he was just lucky, but my hunch is he had some wealth behind him. That’s what happens, and has always happened, in other industries, so why not the world of online “influencers?” There once was an author named Horatio Alger, who wrote stories extolling the American Dream. The rags to riches story. But he wrote fiction.

The original title for my book Survival of the Richest: How the Corruption of the Marketplace and the Disparity of Wealth Created the Greatest Conspiracy of All was You Didn’t Build That. Barack Obama said that, of course, proving that he, like Marx, was capable of making at least one sensible point in his political career. No one wants to admit that luck played a part in their success. I came up with the alternative title for the publisher. One of the best chapters in the book, in my view, was edited out of the published version. I published it on my old blog, “Keeping it Unreal.” It’s all about the upper-class backgrounds of so many celebrated figures, past and present. You can read that chapter here.

My research demonstrated quite clearly that even many of the gorgeous actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood until the present day, came from wealthy backgrounds. I’d naively always assumed that the Casting Couch was the biggest determinant in becoming a female movie star. The reality is, to borrow Gerald Celente’s expression, that Donald Trump wasn’t alone in being born on third base, and thinking he’d hit a home run. One could argue that nearly all the most successful people in the world were born on third base, or at least second base. Their backgrounds gave them a huge advantage in the rat race. Well, actually, the rat race is exclusively for the common riffraff, the ones born to meager financial circumstances.

I’ve written about what I call the other half of America, hidden from view like the dirt under our rugs. The bottom fifty percent of Americans make less than $30,000 annually, and have less than one percent of the collective wealth. That’s a figure that should astonish all Americans. It’s a glaring indictment of our chrony capitalist system. What kind of marketplace can’t provide virtually any wealth for half of the people? If you throw in the untold millions of illegal immigrants, which probably aren’t included in the statistics, the figure might be closer to fifty five or even sixty percent. That’s not representative of a First World economy.

Whether it’s Matt Walsh, or some comfortable Boomer, it’s unfair to dismiss millennials or Gen-Zs as whining snowflakes. They are the Boomers’ children and grandchildren. If they are indeed lazy and entitled, don’t we bear some responsibility for that? After all, we raised them. The young “influencer” that Walsh denigrated made some salient points. My generation-and I’m at the tail end of the Boomers- did have it much easier than the millennials and Gen-Zs. We had lots of decent jobs then, where you could climb at least a bit up the ladder, that didn’t require a college degree. It bears repeating that I was a community college dropout, and I did pretty well. We got yearly raises, had much better benefits, and a far less toxic work environment.

Ellen Goodman described the working world in bleak but undeniably true terms when she said, “Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for- in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.” How many working class people don’t hate their jobs? Yet, they are forced to spend one-third of their lives doing them. Ordered around by supervisors and managers that are universally unenlightened, prone to favoritism, and now adherents of the “Woke” agenda. They all hear about the lucrative year-end bonuses top management gets, while they get nothing.

Huey Long is my political hero for many reasons. He was advocating a thirty hour, even perhaps a twenty hour work week, in the early 1930s. He wanted all workers to be guaranteed a month’s vacation. Thanks to pressure from him, the best part of the New Deal was the 1938 legislation passed that created the forty hour work week, overtime and vacation pay, and opened the door to tangible benefits for lower paid employees in all industries. My grandfather, who died in 1930, was typical of his era. He worked seven days a week, 365 days a year, as a security guard. They let him go home for lunch on Christmas Day. Worked his entire life without going to the beach, or anywhere else. Stricken with cancer, he had to toil until the end because there was no sick leave.

Think of the coalminers in places like West Virginia. Dying at tragically young ages. Spending one third of their days in darkness underground, breathing in the toxicity that will kill them early. Our system- chrony capitalism- fought every effort made in their behalf. They felt perfectly fine underpaying them, exposing them to dangerous working conditions, and helping to create all those widows and orphans. In the postwar boom, great factories existed, which provided a real living wage and nice benefits to those working the assembly lines. Now, these “unskilled” laborers (the demeaning term invented to reveal just how little they are valued), have no factories to apply to, because we’ve outsourced our industry. And they have to compete with cheap immigrant labor. For scraps.

The reason why Survival of the Richest was ignored by all prominent voices on the Left except for the likes of Naomi Wolf, is that I talk about the impact of immigration. Immigration is unquestionably the main reason for the drop in real blue-collar wages, and the virtual elimination of meaningful benefits. And the great capitalists- whom Libertarians still inexplicably worship- dismiss the issue by taking a swipe at the workers they refuse to pay a living wage. How often have you heard that immigrants are “just doing the jobs that Americans won’t do?” I lived in a time when no illegals were around to mow the lawns, or do the landscaping. Someone used to do all that, because it got done. American citizens just can’t work for slave wages.

Economic statistics are not exactly consistent, when it comes to figuring out the average salary for an American worker. It usually is somewhere in the $50,000s per year. But I’ll put it higher than any source does, and use $100,000 as an average salary. We know that’s not right, but it suits my purposes here. If you work the usual fifty years, and average $100,000 over the course of time (which very few people would ever do), you would have made $5 million collectively. That’s a decent Christmas bonus for top executives. Carly Fiorina got a $40 million golden umbrella when HP fired her for gross incompetence. Think about that; someone getting eight times what an average worker earns in sixty years, in one lump sum. For failing miserably at the job.

The average salary for a Major League Baseball player last year was $4.9 million. Essentially the same as a full-time worker makes in sixty years. And again, that’s using wildly inflated stats. The average American salary is much closer to $50,000, So do the math- $2.5 million for a lifetime’s worth of often grueling physical labor. That’s pocket change to the average CEO. The average NBA player makes more than double what a blue-collar worker earns in sixty years- at around $10 million per season. Eighty games of bouncing a ball. We know how much movie stars can make for a single picture, although Hollywood appears to have killed the goose that laid that particular golden egg.

In his statement to the court, upon being convicted under the Sedition Act for protesting our senseless involvement in World War I, the great socialist Eugene Debs said, “I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.” Anyone who has spent significant time as a blue-collar worker understands the timeless wisdom in his words. The hardest workers under the rigged marketplace are those doing the dirty work, the common laborers. Does anyone really think that the average Vice-President in Charge of Looking out of the Window is a more valuable asset than the cleaning crew?

During the COVID psyop, Jeff Bezos reportedly made $13 billion in one day. Think about how many hungry human beings you could feed with a fraction of that. If my math is correct, and it’s always been one of my weaker subjects, that equals what 5,000 full-time workers, making what is surely about twice as much as the actual average salary is, would make working an entire lifetime. What exactly did Bezos accomplish on that day, to make him worth what 5,000-10,000 workers are worth cumulatively over sixty years of full-time labor? Did he cure cancer? Double life expectancy? Even cure baldness, or find a magic pill to eliminate obesity? No, he simply had a fantastic day investing. That’s what the richest people in the world are good at doing- making a lot of money through investments. And nothing else. It would take the average worker 13 centuries to accumulate the $13 billion Jeff Bezos made in a single day.

If this subject interests you, please check out Survival of the Richest. The numbers are overwhelming, but they tell the true story of this rigged marketplace. There is no real competition in our “competitive” marketplace. With so many mergers, there are fewer and fewer huge corporations that control everything. They aren’t going to compete against themselves. The wealthier you are, the less you pay for even things like insurance. The lower interest rates you get. I talked about the freebies the upper tier of the One Percent gets under this system in my book. Too many people think of a fat welfare recipient when they hear the word “entitled.” No one is more entitled than the wealthiest people in our society. “Venture” capitalists venture nothing to have a new sports stadium built, for instance, at taxpayer expense. Who couldn’t do that?

Ambrose Bierce defined “poor” as “Unable to pay taxes. For instance, Vanderbilt.” I describe in the book how the wealthy often pay no income taxes at all, thanks to the litany of loopholes only they benefit from. All those year-end bonuses are tax-free, thanks to our “representatives” allowing companies to ludicrously categorize them as “performance based.” Again, in the book, I cite countless examples where companies lost money, stock plummeted, and yet those executive bonuses were as healthy as ever. That’s quite a “performance.” Nothing stops that executive compensation. After the 2008 banker bailout, most of the banks that taxpayers rescued gave out more in executive bonuses than the company made in profits. I’d like someone to explain how that business model works. Someone once said that, if slavery isn’t wrong, nothing is. I say that if all this disparity isn’t wrong, nothing is.

Now, I understand the history of unions. Organized crime quickly infiltrated the big unions, and corrupted them. Senator John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert (as counsel) first burst into the national headlines for their work on the McClellan Senate Committee investigating the mob’s influence on unions. But the impact from unions in getting workers more pay and benefits is undeniable. I know a guy who worked as a Safeway cashier in the early 1980s. He was making $17 an hour then. That works out to about $112,000 in today’s money. Safeway, its union long busted, now pays its cashiers about $15 an hour. Food prices are obviously much higher than they were in the 1980s. The Right claims you’ll have to pay $100 for a Big Mac if they raise the pay of those who make them. So please explain the Safeway situation.

Also, please explain why massive executive bonuses somehow don’t impact the cost to consumers. If a company pays its lowest level workers a few dollars more per hour, that causes wildly inflated prices, but giving out $100 million a year in tax-free “performance” bonuses, and/or golden umbrellas to incompetent executives, doesn’t? Any talk like this is instantly dismissed as “class envy,” or “class warfare.” Every average worker should be envious of those who are paid more in one year than they can earn in an entire lifetime. For producing nothing more of value to society than any of the common riffraff. The wealthy elite have been waging a class war on us since the days of medieval peasantry. Very few average workers even know there is a class war being waged upon them. They’re too busy trying to survive.

Huey Long’s Share our Wealth plan would have exempted the first million dollars of income from any taxation. That’s comparable to about $12 million today. Who could oppose that, other than those with the very highest compensation levels? You know just who Huey was going after, which is why he was assassinated, and the great “liberal” FDR is still celebrated as some kind of champion of the little man. Or woman, or transgender, I guess. I’ll have lots more about the truly villainous FDR in my upcoming book The American Memory Hole. It’s impossible to picture Huey being alive today, and being anything but even more radical regarding our economy. He’d probably be demanding a ten hour work week, which I think would make sense.

I understand how the average millennial or Gen-Zer feels. Sure, they have lots of flashy toys, and the internet can be a wonderful thing, but the opportunities out there for them, in our vaunted capitalist marketplace, are few and far between. This is why we have such a plethora of adult children still living at home. Prices for apartments are outrageous, and you have to pay utilities separately. In my youth, utilities were almost always included in the rent. The cost of automobiles has shot up dramatically under Bidenomics. This includes even much older cars, with high mileage. Now it’s routine for blue-collar workers to take a cab or uber to the job. They can’t afford their own vehicle, so they must lose a hefty chunk of their inadequate pay for simply being transported to the job site. The lowest paid workers had cars in America 1.0.

The Right simply has to understand that socialism will continue to attract young people, because our brand of capitalism offers them no reasonable alternative. Work hard? With no chance of advancement? With no benefits? Private pension plans used to be the norm for most American workers. Now they are very, very rare. You’re lucky if you have a 401K plan that the employer contributes to. For most older Americans, Social Security is their sole means of support. You can’t win a debate by laughably referring to the rich as “job creators.” This is an indictment of a failed system, not the shining city on a hill that Republicucks continue to fantasize about. I’ll have lots more about their hero Ronald Reagan as well in my next book. It’s easy for those who have managed to succeed in this rigged system to shame those who haven’t.

No one wants a universal basic income. But what is the marketplace offering in place of that? Pay that will not provide enough for independent living? No pension or anything beyond the doomed Social Security system to plan for the future? We also hear that AI will be taking over untold numbers of jobs. So how then are these millions of young people supposed to survive? The Stupid Party pushes the “entrepreneur” line. Carried to its logical extreme, if somehow everyone started their own business, who would work for them? In every society, someone has to clean the toilets. You can’t just keep shipping new caravans of illegals in to “do the jobs Americans won’t.” America 2.0 is a real, live ticking time bomb.

I can’t help thinking about that invisible half of America. I don’t really know many, if any of them. But I feel for anyone who is paying taxes, without any hope for a better life, in the wealthiest nation the world has ever seen. The problem is, all that wealth is accumulated in fewer and fewer hands. And those being screwed in this casino economy don’t seem to notice, or care. People with no estate to leave the world declare, “no one gave me anything,” and “I worked hard for all I have.” That’s just it- of course no one gave you anything, and while you are unquestionably working hard, the “all” you have isn’t much. A car, perhaps. A flat screen TV. A laptop. Some furniture. No one wants to redistribute your wealth, because you have none.

Now I know I might get the reaction I often do, when I write about this subject. People telling me how they came from nothing, worked hard, with no assistance, to achieve great things. Of course, that can still happen. And it used to happen frequently in the postwar era that Boomers enjoyed as children. But it’s very rare now. For every success story, there are probably ten or more stories that reflect the bleak reality of America 2.0. I hear from lots of these people. The vast majority of workers now are simply not paid enough to meet the ever increasing costs of living. But hey, we’ve got a record number of billionaires! And expensive, Orwellian technology that serves to invade the privacy and destroy the liberties of common people. Technology from which they should benefit, and should make their lives easier.

How can we solve this problem? First, a complete audit of the Fed, and a new honest money system. Means testing for Social Security, and no cap on income, so that Bill Gates pays more than a successful realtor does. Audit all those tax-free foundations. Tax all off-shore profits at 100 percent. Study Huey Long’s original Share our Wealth plan. It will still work. Stop all corporate welfare and subsidies. I detail many of these in my book. End tax-free “performance” bonuses. Bring back tax deductions for credit card, auto, and other consumer loans. Place an absolute cap of five percent on all consumer loans. Most significantly, let’s have a Year of Jubilee. We’re about 2000 years overdue. Those without debt would get a bonus from the government.

We’d have more than enough money for such bonuses, if we followed the advice of the Grace Commission, which Reagan ignored in the 1980s. They found that one third of all government spending is absolute waste. So, that would amount to a thirty three percent tax and spending cut for all. Eliminate all the unconstitutional government agencies, which is pretty much most of them. Start with Homeland Security, the Departments of Energy and Education, and all our intelligence agencies. That would free up more than enough funds to finally do something to benefit the American people. Like fix the roads and upgrade our power grids. If you’re going to have a minimum wage, tie it to a maximum wage, for corporations that employ over a certain number of people. No one’s life is worth millions more than any other’s.

I’m no socialist, and certainly not a communist, but I think it’s sinful that with all the money in this country, some are sleeping in tents on the street. While others own private islands they visit maybe once a year. I don’t want everyone to have the exact same net worth. Individuals should be able to rise up and become wealthy. Under this corrupt marketplace, only a small minority are able to do that. I think of all the workers Eugene Debs described, and those like my grandfather, who never got a break. There has to be a fairer way. Trickle-down economics obviously only created greater disparity. True, competitive free enterprise is the best way. But we don’t have that. If the eugenicists kill enough of us, they could solve the labor question. Until that happens, if it does, I stand with Eugene Debs and Huey Long.

Source: Donald Jeffries. IMG: © ClipArtLibrary
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