How can anyone who could see this as good business claim to be a capitalist? This is a legal con game, a legal shakedown, and a way to destroy the American way of life.

Mitt Romney, American Parasite – Village Voice.

How Swedes and Norwegians Broke the Power of the 1 Percent | | AlterNet.

This story of the struggle of the Norwegians and Swedes to break the power of the 1% over their economies is actually pretty sketchy and does little to inspire hope for ourselves. The best part is that the Scandinavians did manage to do so, and that even conservative people there realize that pumping money from the top, where it does nothing but collect into a diseased swelling that cripples the economy, into the bottom, where it explodes upward in a frictionless orgy of spending and consumption, is the only way capitalism can work efficiently in a world that can no longer expand.

We’re living in a country that has been frantically creating frontiers for over a century to make up for the lack of one in the West. The American dream was born in the age of the possibilities nourished by frontier spaces where lack of money was less of an obstacle than tenacity and hard work. The dream continued as technologies created new frontiers where intelligence could contrive fortunes with only small amounts of money. Now, even though we have come to depend on the idea of constant innovation in technology to further our dream, we have come to a point where only rewarding the clever and the 1% is failing us on a national level. As long as the crush of uncontrolled and unintelligent capitalism, capitalism as primitive and brutish as a lust for efficiency can make it, continues to grind down the majority of our citizens, we can never realize the stability and prosperity these two Scandinavian countries have provided for their people, with far fewer resources. And no frontiers to speak of.

What we need is a Paycheck Party, a labor party for everyone who works, rather than a party for just those who join a union. Together, every worker, rich and poor, stupid or clever, can agree to start lurching towards a sensible economy that pumps money directly from the 1% and into our hot little hands.

Reich has some great glosses on this long-awaited speech from our President. It sounds like Obama is pinning his hopes of the Paycheck Party electing him President next term, instead of the Democrats or Republicans. This is the most pro-Paycheck Party speech he’s ever made, and if he has any sense, he’ll start hinting around about the power of the Minimum Laws to make these changes happen right here in America at last.

The Minimum Severance Pay law first, to keep them from firing us without consequences. The Minimum Wage hike, to make the jobs we take between jobs bring us enough money to survive. The Minimum Vacation Law, to make them hire more workers instantly, because they will need them whether they like it or not.

A guy could win an election by supporting the Minimum Vacation law alone. What else do we need done to make this happen in the next four years?

This article gives us all some small ray of hope about a citizenry standing up against the bosses. I don’t know pundit-speak well, but it seems as if the author of this article thinks that the philosophy of the bosses is called neo-liberal. Personally, I call the idea that the citizens of a country should pay the bosses for their shell-games with money fascism, not liberalism.

The complexity of these decisions can be reduced by looking at the very bottom of the pyramid of our society and looking at who the poorest workers are, what they want, what they are capable of, and what they can do for the rest of society as a whole that we are now overlooking.

This is why, I chose as the motto “Money doesn’t trickle down, it explodes up.”

The rich sit on their money, hoping to pass it down to the next generation. They sit on their money, knowing that having to pay to borrow money in any way that doesn’t decrease their tax burden is foolish. They sit on their money if they are corporations and when they are tax shelters and foundations created to maintain piles of money for future generations. When they spend it, it rarely gets below a certain class threshold, that of the upper middle class who work the service sectors catering to the wealthy. There are a few exceptions, like the dishwashers in fancy restaurants and the maids in four star hotels, but the bulk of the money trickles down only as far as the manufacturers of luxury goods and those who sell them.

The poor, on the other hand, spend every dime they get. They spend voraciously. When a poor person gets a windfall in a culture of universal consumerism, they spend it all, and the exceptions to this rule would be extremely difficult to find, much less count. The more money we, as a society, pump into the poorest of the poor, the more it benefits the entire economy.

Right now, the most urgent desire of the poorest worker would be a huge increase in the minimum wage. The beauty of increasing the minimum wage is that it is a tax-free gift to the poor. It would be paid for by businesses who have more money than they need on the most part, and would result in an almost immediate rise in the cost of anything, mostly services of course, that rely on minimum wage labor. It would cost the taxpayer nothing. And it would increase the attractiveness of jobs that right now are not attractive to even the poorest among us, since working for the current minimum wage is less likely to support yourself, much less a family, than out and out slavery.

The common objection to a hike in the minimum wage is that the bums who work such lowly jobs are so incompetent and untrustworthy that they don’t deserve any more money than they already get, if that. Of course, those most likely to make such a contemptuous assertion are the lower middle class folks who are in contact with them, and who know how much more deserving they are. The realization that a higher minimum wage would drive up the cost of all labor, decreasing gradually the farther up the income chain you go, is a hard one to come to after decades of wage deflation.

Not only would wage inflation benefit the bottom of the ladder, it would benefit everyone above by a huge increase in demand for consumer goods of all kinds. Even the bosses would benefit from it, though they are too short sighted to see it. For everyone in the mid to lower-income range, a huge increase in minimum wages would make getting another job a viable alternative to unemployment, and a social safety net that is less costly than unemployment insurance.

You can tell I’m talking about a huge increase, not some nickel and dime increase. Getting the minimum wage to a living wage is just the start of the whole Minimum Laws idea. This is a blueprint for bringing the United States up to the standard of living of the very best places in the world to work.

Somehow, over the years, probably in the “greed is good” 1980s, the lunch hour became a reason for bosses to extend the work week by five hours a week. “We work a forty-hour work week here! Lunches don’t count as work hours.” the Bosses told us, “And if you really want to get ahead, I better see butts in seats well after 5!” And they began to change the work hours to 8 to 5, or 8:30 to 5:30, or something like that. The past, when everyone worked from 9 to 5, became a distant memory, and we all seemed to not even notice this huge transfer of time from us to the bosses.

We need to take that time back from the bosses and spread it around all the unemployed people out there who need jobs. Though it might not seem like much on a local scale, who wouldn’t like to have those five hours a week back? Why should we have to work five more hours a week now than we did back when the middle class actually had enough money to support a non-working spouse and buy a new car every year?

We need a law limiting the work week to 9 to five, or forty hours a week including an hour for lunch and two fifteen minute breaks. We all need it, not just union workers. Doing this would help unemployment in our country immediately, at no cost at all to our government.

Here’s a couple of ideas for a Paycheck Party Pledge for our politicians to make:

I, the undersigned politician, hereby agree to do everything in my power to help pass the Minimum Laws of the paycheck-earning majority who elected me.

I promise to support and fight for the passage of the Minimum Vacation Law, which will guarantee without exception or modification the right of every paycheck earning person to thirty days of paid vacation a year after the first year of employment and for every year thereafter until the termination of their employment. These days will be in addition to the standard holidays already paid for.

I promise to support and fight for the passage of the Minimum Severance Pay Law, which will provide every paycheck earning person the right to be paid one month’s salary, based on the highest monthly salary earned, for every year the employee has worked, upon termination of their employment, either voluntary or not.

Have any more ideas? Share them in the comments section.

Mexicans have guaranteed vacations. The Europeans have 30 days a year – that’s five weeks, people. The Japanese have tons of vacation guaranteed by law a year. Every first-world country in the world has a law that says if you work, you get so much vacation a year. But what about us, the Americans, the proud and patriotic citizens of the greatest country in the world? Nothing. Zip. Nada. Forget about it.

It’s not that lots of people aren’t grudgingly given a couple of weeks of vacation a year if they dare to keep it. Many of us who have decent jobs probably think it’s a law that we get vacation days. There is no law, only custom, and a particularly stale and outdated custom, if you think about it. We need 30 days of vacation a year for everyone who gets a paycheck in this country who works a full work week, currently meaning 40 hours.

I can hear the bosses and their little buddies screaming already. There is nobody who can whine and moan like a boss faced with the prospect of treating their wageslaves halfway decently. What scares them the most is how many of us there are and how few of them there are. We can out-vote them without even trying, even if only half of us go to the polls and half of them votes for the bosses, hoping for some kind of recognition from the boss for their loyalty. The lowest kind, these boss buddies. They’re so stupid they don’t even realize it’s supposed to be a secret ballot.

The funny thing about the minimum vacation law is that there isn’t anyone in the working majority who will ever completely hate the idea when you mention it to them. Of all the ideas I’ve had to make the world a better place and improve the economy, this is the one that everyone gets immediately. Try it out on anyone who works for a living and you will get a smile right away. Five weeks of vacation a year plus holidays? Oh, only if! They might hate the whole idea of being a wage slave, but they’ll love the idea of all that vacation no matter how much they like sucking up to any boss who happens by.

The most puzzling thing about this universally-beloved concept – 30 days of vacation a year for everyone who works guaranteed by law – is why no ambitious politician has ever seized upon the notion to get elected. It must be because the bosses have them so hypnotized by all the huge campaign contributions they fling at them that they can’t even conceive of doing anything good for us. If it doesn’t make a huge pile of money for the bosses with only the scraps and tiny pinches of taxes for the vast majority of us they can’t even imagine any need for it.

We have to rid ourselves of the illusion that any politician, right or left wing, centrist or populist, smart or stupid, has any idea of serving the working majority in any way. But if any politician gets up on the national stage and dares to promise us our guaranteed five weeks of vacation a year, I’ll hold my nose and vote for him.

Since the bosses will only give some of us some sick days, we need a law to make sure that we all get sick days to protect ourselves from infectious diseases entering the workplace from those who don’t have them. We need sick days because everybody needs a day off every now and then. We need them just from the stress of dealing these modern jobs that involve computers crashing, software upgrading, and technology always advancing. The stress of technology needs to be addressed by sick days for anyone who has to deal with a stupid computer ruining his life. And why? so that the IT department can protect their jobs by driving us crazy and then swooping in to save us from the problems they created in their obsession with constantly changing technology.

With a guaranteed amount of sick days for every member of the paycheck party you will be able to go buy a burger without worrying that the guy who flipped it for you might give you a disease. And they should accumulate year after year to reward the healthy and to give us plenty of days for those inevitable medical emergencies that tend to arise in our later years.

Once sick days worked much like the paycheck party is proposing here. If you ask your parents, or someone who works at a place that hasn’t quite switched over to the new, more efficient way of everyone working all the time no matter what, they will tell you. Of course, they’ll also tell you how afraid they are to actually take a sick day, too.

Many of us will wonder how on earth the poor bosses will cope if half of us are home in bed watching re-runs and soaps whenever we have a cold. Obviously, the bosses will have to staff up, which is always a sweet place to be if you’re in the paycheck party, because staffing up means salaries go up, too. All of the ideas of the paycheck party should be about figuring out how to make the bosses’ lives more difficult for them. Believe me, they can afford to hire the best minds in our country to figure out a way to cope with this, but in the end, it’s all going to boil down to one simple fact: They’re going to have to make less money and spend a lot more or else they will have nothing. And that will never happen. The bosses will never quit making money off us, no matter how hard we can make it for them, or else they’ll have no way to make money at all. Because he bosses would be strictly worthless as members of the paycheck party.

The 401k plan is something the bosses dreamed up for enriching themselves at our expense while pretending to give us a benefit. They thought of it because they love indulging in their favorite pastime, of gambling on the stock market, and they probably thought we’d like it too. So it became the preferred benefit offered in place of the pensions that they once offered our fathers. A pension is a guaranteed, inflation-adjusted salary for life that entails no work at all on our part other than cashing the checks. A 401k is an opportunity for us to put money in the stock market for our bosses to use to boost CEO and Board of Director’s salaries to ever-greater heights. And it either sinks into nothingness without a trace, or else we have to manage it, by trying to out-guess the stock market, which is the biggest racket the bosses ever dreamed up and completely unfair to the little guy, namely us. You might be able to win at it, but it will take a lot of work. And a lot of luck.

So it seems that our fathers were much smarter than we seem to be about getting their fair share of the value of the companies they helped grow and prosper their entire working lives. The 401k plan, for the information of those of us in the paycheck party who don’t have one, is a kind of a mutual fund or saving account that isn’t protected by any kind of guarantee at all. Most of them, it is true, offer some kind of semi-guaranteed savings account or money market account as part of the range of confusing options they offer, but they come with pages and pages of carefully-worded disclaimers so complicated and incomprehensible that any chance of them actually meaning anything in a court of law is probably a matter of who has the most expensive lawyers and the money to continue arguing it, which means, as usual, you, the normal paycheck party person, will totally get screwed if you dare to enforce it if the managers of the 401k so choose.

Here’s another chance for you to understand the power of the idea of the paycheck party, if we are able to spread it far and wide and get it into the hearts and minds of all of us who work for a living: looking at anything from the standpoint of how it will benefit the bosses will always reveal how they are screwing us if you don’t pay any attention to the endless stream of lies they have their public relations geniuses spin for them. Take, for example, the reaction of the paycheck party and most of the tiny segments of the American people to the recent escalation of the 401k scam to include our Social Security benefits. Everybody totally hated the idea of allowing them to make Social Security a little bit like a 401k, because we all know that the stock market is a big casino with the wheels all rigged to benefit the bosses and all their little buddies. The payouts can be nice when and if they happen, sure, but so are the payouts in the casinos. but that doesn’t mean anyone thinks it’s a good idea to bet the goddamned farm on the caprices of chance, either.

So it’s a safe bet that most of us already have a certain bias against the 401k plan, even as we anxiously watch it grow, far too slowly for most of us, hoping against hope that we will be able to actually cash out with enough money to live on when we reach retirement age. The 401k plan,like any other form of gambling, can consume us with stressful worrying. It can fool us into bad decisions, and give us sleepless nights and distract us from anything pleasant and dignified about working as we watch our worth sink and inch upward and sink again. Lots of us can laugh about it now, because we are young, but anyone getting within a decade or so of retiring isn’t laughing much at all.

So we need a nice Minimum Pension Plan law that gives every single member of the paycheck party a guaranteed pension that they can take from job to job without any particular dependence on any one company going under. Think of it like Social Security, except the bosses pay into it instead of us, as a way of rewarding us for doing all their work for them while they were out playing golf with their CEO buddies. And the bosses can’t touch this money, they can’t claim it as their own asset, they don’t get to do anything with it but pay into it, just like Social Security is for the rest of us. The monkey business that bosses got to do with their pension funds in the past is all we need to know to clinch this important part of the law. If a bunch of bosses get together and run your company into the ground, they won’t be ale to drain the pension fund while they’re doing it. Not any more.