capitalism

99% getting shafted again!

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Editor’s note: Sally Kohn is a progressive activist, columnist and television commentator. Follow her on Twitter @sallykohn. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) — Here’s something you don’t see every day: The 99% demonstrating in support of the 1%. But that’s exactly what’s been happening for several weeks all around New England at Market Basket grocery stores.

Sally Kohn

In 1916, Athanasios and Efrosini Demoulas, who immigrated to the United States from Greece, opened a grocery store in Lowell, Massachusetts. Almost a century later, the family has expanded it to a chain of 71 supermarkets across Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine.

In 2008, Anthanasios and Efrosini’s grandson Arthur T. Demoulas was elected president of the Market Basket board. By all accounts, Arthur T., as he is known, presided over a very successful and happy company. Not only did Market Basket continue to expand and reap profits — generating $4 billion in revenues in 2012 — but workers have thrived as well.

Full-time clerks start at $12 an hour. Cashiers with experience can earn over $40,000 a year. And managers can easily make into the six figures.

Are the super-rich obligated to do more? CNN Explains: The Occupy movement 2012: Does OWS represent the 99%?

Keep in mind that’s in a nation where the average annual salary for grocery store cashiers is $21,370 and the national minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.

The company also has a generous retirement plan, matching 15% of annual salary to employee retirement funds. What’s more, workers up and down the supply chain receive good bonuses throughout the year.

All this and Market Basket is affordable for customers, with prices regularly 10% to 20% lower than competitors. The company is profitable in an industry known for low profit margins, and has given $500 million in dividends to the nine family shareholders over the past decade.

In other words, at a time when corporate executives and wealthy investors regularly try to argue that companies cannot pay workers well and be successful in generating profits, Market Basket has been an impressive and stunning example to the contrary. Market Basket has been a good company all around — until recently, when things changed.

So what happened? Well, the family board switched sides, ousted Arthur T. and installed his cousin Arthur S. Demoulas as president.

One of the first acts under Arthur S. was to distribute $250 million in profits to the nine family shareholders, what a Boston Globe editorial called “an uncharacteristic act of greed for a firm known for its generous treatment of its workers and concern for price-conscious shoppers.”

There have been other ominous signs that Arthur S. and his allies plan to push profit at all costs — at the expense of workers and the values of the company. And so in an unprecedented mobilization, managers and workers have protested at Market Baskets across New England, calling for their beloved CEO Artie T. to be reinstated.

Last week, more than 6,000 Market Basket workers and managers joined in a peaceful march outside the company’s headquarters in Tewksbury, Massachusetts. If you go to any Market Basket store around New England right now, you’re likely to find employees and even some customers holding up signs protesting the new executive and supporting the ousted Artie T. Employees are also using social media to get their message out, using hashtags like #MarketBasket.

Of course, if you go inside a Market Basket you’re not likely to find much; even the warehouse workers are on strike. These protests aren’t being organized by unions; after all, Market Basket workers aren’t unionized. They’re being organized by the employees and managers of the company.

Already, eight managers have been fired for helping lead the protests. But the protests continue. As a result, the company is reportedly losing $1 million a day.

A reporter interviewed one of the Market Basket workers at a protest. “I have a friend who works at Walmart,” she said, “and I asked her, would they ever do this for their CEO?” The woman laughed. But what has become of capitalism in America is not funny: the extreme greed of a few overrunning the best interests of everyone, including workers, communities and a healthy growing economy.

Just like the Occupy Wall Street protesters before them, the Market Basket workers are not protesting against capitalism. They’re protesting for a certain kind of capitalism, a capitalism that works for owners as well as for workers and communities. It’s the kind of capitalism that has made Market Basket a successful business for generations, the kind of capitalism that once meant shared prosperity and opportunity in America.

The Market Basket managers and cashiers and bag boys joining in protest aren’t just holding signs, they’re also holding the aspirations of the majority of Americans. Those of us concerned about the growing economic inequality in America don’t want to “eat the rich” — we simply don’t want the rich to chew up and spit out everyone else.

 

-FROM ME- Yet again, the inherited privileged assholes attempt to decimate one of the few businesses left that give employees a fair shake. Give people the means to educate themselves and move up the ladder, and you eliminate people that would rather sit and collect welfare. Getting rid of decent paying jobs erodes the economy and proves even more that the 1% are international and will leave this country for the next one after they have turned it into a land of poor people. 

The shit thru the fog.

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Well, dear reader, we have been assailed,yet again, by superfluous shit straight from the mouth of the very people who have nothing but corporate interest in mind! We have assholes on the border in Murietta, CA. hurling insults at children in busses, accomplishing nothing in an issue meant to distract us from the important bullshit that is benefitting the 1% of those that actually control politics! Yeah, fuckers! This is coming from me, the one person who still refers to illegal immigrants as such and doesn’t give a shit who cares. Yes, I know that the microeconomic impact of this problem is immense, but I also recognize that the powers that be are using this problem to distract people from the most important of social problems.
Today we have a version of socialized medicine placed before us, but don’t realize that the real problem was, in fact, socialized education. We had forsaken this for medicine, not realizing that education would have lead us to this and would have put us back in the innovation forefront, but this was not the intention of the handlers of the assholes that we put in office to represent the billionaires over us, the general public. The 1% have been carefully dismantling the public education system for the last 30 years in an effort to create the second class nation that we have today. We bitch and moan and pass bond measures that end in school closures anyway and blame the opposing political party for the failures. The truth of the matter is that if the general public used skeptical thinking, critical thought and logic to analyze what was transpiring, they would have come to the conclusion that they were being duped by a higher entity, and they would have worked to thwart this divisive bullshit. Instead they choose to fight each other and tie the answers up in the partisan politics of the Left and Right!
The divide of Left and Right has lead to the ultimate demise of the American dream and made it easy for the oligarchs to seize control of absolutely everything! The controllers have made it so that families are cared for by those complicit in the destruction of freedom! Those that dissent are dealt with swiftly and efficiently so that others believe that they were wrong to have a different opinion of how things should be! Totalitarian regime anyone?!
Wake up and understand that this could happen anywhere anytime! You have drones watching you 24/7 by YOUR OWN MANDATE OF LAW! You put this in place! Is your front fucking lawn and your 2.000sq ft house enough payment for the demise of the security you enjoyed under the sacrifice of your WWII soldiers? Most of our pHD candidates are foreign born, is that O.K with you?? Wake up an return control of this country to those who actually respect freedom! Quit paying attention to these divisive peripheral issues and give your kids a free education! Learning equals freedom, period!

Immigration DID make this country strong and continues to do so, but accepting hordes of unskilled workers from all over the globe is overwhelming the country’s ability to absorb those without training. Regulation IS needed to keep a steady, controlled flow of entrants to this country so that it can both employ and assist immigrants in a smooth transition into American society. Intentionally overwhelming the financial ability of this nation to process entrants amounts to the most foolish of undertakings that will eventually bankrupt the resources that were designed to help these people. With no financial resources to ease the transition, the immigrant population is left to spread over a penniless economy that can no longer suffer the burden. What is the outcome? Possibly assimilating into a society as bankrupt as the one that was left behind, to a life of hard scrabble just as bleak as the previous one? Where is the economic logic in this? Why would the oligarchs pit the opposing political parties against one another so that hands are tied and problems grow unchecked? Maybe the answers lay in the fact that these rich assholes are international and have no loyalties to any country and just milk a system dry and move on to the next growing super power.

Common sense dictates that unstable circumstances be brought under control, this includes the problem of immigration, this includes controlling dispersal of firearms, population control, and societal contributions to the less fortunate without contract to educate or eventually separate them from Federal and state assistance. As long as we have walls between nations and unchecked greed, we, as common people, need to have sensible controls agreed upon by all citizens regarding social contract, fair treatment under the laws and control of the population as to regulate and share valuable resources.

Right now we have warring political factions carrying out the mandates of people who live above the law and who use the public as pawns to achieve their goals, whatever the fuck their goals are! I assume that it lies in the halls of power and resource, because money is just paper that is used by many to purchase goods. It is backed by neither gold or silver and is just fancy paper with expensive ink and pretty pictures. The true controlling factions do not waste their time accumulating worthless pieces of paper and believing that they are wealthy, they corner resources and transportation networks to deliver those resources so that they can exercise true control. The Gold Standard hasn’t existed on the dollar for years.

The following is an explanation of the suspension of the Gold Standard meant to enlighten you a bit as to the insignificance of common power based on the money that we earn.

The Fed was formed in 1913, the same year the income tax was first allowed. As most readers know when the Fed was formed the American money was “Redeemable” in Silver or Gold, mandated by the U.S. Constitution.

In about 1917-1918 WW I broke out in Europe.
The U.S. got involved and the Fed began to issue way more dollars than the Treasury had in Gold { @ $20 per ounce} to pay for the war expenses.

When WW I ended there were way too many unbacked American dollars in circulation which led to a period called the roaring 20’s because there was too much money in circulation which caused stock prices to climb way up, by investors spending their extra dollars by investing in stocks.

In 1929 investors suddenly realized all the dollars in circulation couldn’t possibly be backed by Gold, which caused a mass sell off of stocks called the “crash”.

By 1932-33 the Treasury department realized that so many Gold backed American dollars had gone overseas, if the overseas people decided to cash them in for Gold the Treasury couldn’t pay off,,,which led to Roosevelt signing an excutive order confiscating all Americans privately owned Gold, to cover the Treasury’s shortage.

Later he changed the official value of an ounce of Gold from $20 an ounce to $35 dollars an ounce, where it remained until 1971.

In 1971 the world’s Gold supply & demand factor kicked in sending the European price to over $38 dollars per ounce, which caused Europeans to cash in dollars for Gold until Nixon decreed that the U.S. dollar was no longer redeemable in Gold.

Mass inflation followed in the U.S.

Congressman Ron Paul {elected in 1976} & Senetor Jesse Helms of North Carolina tried to reinstate the Gold standard by forming a group called the U.S. Gold commission. From the beginning the commission worked against them since other members of the commission were bought off by the Fed to oppose a re-instatement of the Gold standard, (and while I am describing how worthless our currency has become, I am certainly not endorsing the political party of the creators of The Gold Commission).

Currently the world is flooded with unbacked American dollars, bringing the value down, as it now takes many more of them to buy an ounce of Gold that used to be worth $20.

Now I know that there was an extended focus on immigration at the beginning of the article, but this was used as an illustration of the current divide in American politics and an example of the foolish policies adhered to by both the left and the right. The fact that the public is not reading cost analysis for many of these problems attests to the educational problems in this country. Intelligent informed skeptical thinkers would insist upon justification for Govt. policy BEFORE it was enacted, but most Americans lack even the basic understanding of their own Govt/Financial system and choose to remain with heads planted firmly in the sand. Why, in the medical field most pamphlets given to the public have been printed at the 3rd and 4th grade level due to the complete and abhorrent lack of general education and basic literacy! Most people are too busy watching American Idol, or that cavalcade of fucking idiocy Duck Dynasty, to fight for the preservation of a once great public school system! Skepticism is born of education and continued study throughout one’s life, not by pablumizing one’s mind with insipid nonsense fed to the masses by mass media in attempt to distract them from real and present dangers.

I speak on these peripheral nonsense issues and their power over the public at every turn, and actively sign petitions, give money and exercise my voice in an effort to change public focus to the issues that actually carry weight. I frequently ask the intelligent people to recognize divisive tactics in politics and to ignore distractions meant to pit people against one another. The key lies in common sense, reason, logic and skeptical thought. While many chase the Supreme Court decision over the Hobby Lobby case, the power brokers broker ever larger contracts for greater influence literally ‘fiddling as Rome burns.’ They don’t have to worry, they can move on, we, the common people are left to pick up the remnants of a shattered economy.

The key is education, and a quality, well rounded education that teaches one to learn from their past mistakes. Rebuild the school system and most of these problems will all of a sudden be recognized by fresh intelligent people. Dummy our children down and we can look forward to desperate uneducated masses grateful for  jobs paying shit wages from cradle to grave. Our choice.