The Background Reading: 'Michael C. Marino' is a tropical species of fish which swims inside of the Socialist Party USA.
It's good to be in a Party that squanders what money it has on publications which largely duplicate the material already out there, and I do mean that in the most sarcastic way that you can imagine, but we do so at the expense of ignoring the basics on which the Socialist Party was built: there is no economic analysis to be found.
The problem comes about that we have a periodical that pushes "women's issues" and a peridocial that pushes "youth issues" and a periodical that pushes a random hodgepodge of world peace and politically correct content, but there is no active Labour Commission or Committee, and no active or inactive Economics Commission or Committee. The lack of analytical background shows up from the Platform to the various "Statements" and such: no knowledge of the basics of economics leads to meaningless and/or random positions.
How's THIS for an article for a Labour-oriented Socialist publication: an article describing the minimum wage laws throughout the country, including the FLSA. Almost NOBODY seems to pay any attention to what workers, minimum wage and otherwise, actually make; they are all too busy looking into fairyland at how much they wish everybody could make.
The world output is known; by that, I do not mean the "World Gross International Product" or something -- that would just be legerdemain. I mean the total output of how much the world can generate in plants and animals, how much water and air it can clean using the processes already existing, how much of every metal, mineral, and oil can be extracted. All that there is -- if you take that amount and divide it by the world population, you get the theoretical maximum that the minimum wage could ever be. A more realistic minimum wage would be much lower, allowing the planet to be more than just a corpse upon which the human race feeds until it is nothing but skeleton.
Another method would be to work backwards from the current national budget for each repective country: take the national budget, divide it by the number of people in the workforce, and you get the amount in taxes that an individual should be paying. Look that up in a tax table and/or use a calculator, and you get the amount of money a common worker should make, per annum. In the United States, it comes out to about $67,000/year -- yes, minimum. An interesting side-effect of that computation is that it tells you which companies are a net loss to the economy: every business which pays less than that, per worker, represents a net loss to the American economy because that company is failing to pay for the amount of government services it and its employees use.
Ouch, hunh? Do the same arithmetic for Canada and see how far behind that country is, as compared to its Southern neighbor.
Other methods exist for generating meaningful wages; yet we remain in a Party that believes in grabbing a number out of thin air.
I suppose there would have to be a token "history of labour" column -- worthless stuff, but people like to read about things like that. For those who have seen Richard Winger's Ballot Access News, something like that, which covered the ongoing changes in law throughout the Fifty States, that would be a good start.
Here is another useful article: now that some cities have curbside recycling and such, where does that stuff go? What happens to #7 plastic? What do they do with paper that has acryllic adhesive stuck in it? How does one find a remotely safe way to get rid of a monitor?
It is easy to see the problem (no labour news) and the solution (make labour news). It's the implementation that gets me.
And, no, I am not volunteering to edit Yet Another Publication (Y.A.P.) -- I Y.A.P. quite enough, thank you.
Closed
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