Week of 07/26/2021

 

Space Billionaires Are In Space Because They Can
– by David Matthews

So the new “space race” in America is about billionaire boys and their Star Trek toys.

Jeff Bezos, Sir Richard Branson, and Elon Musk have been busy getting into space and becoming astronauts.

Bezos – the now-former CEO of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post – made a big to-do about getting into space with his Blue Origin ship on the anniversary of the original moon landing.  Of course, Sir Richard, of Virgin Group, beat Bezos into space by about a week with the debut of his own Virgin Galatic.  And Tesla owner Musk has been focused on the ships he’s been launching all this time as part of SpaceX instead of becoming an astronaut.

So, yes, the media has been busy talking about how great this is and how this could harken a new fixation on space travel and space exploration.  Get us to the stars!  Get us back to the Moon.  Get us to Mars so we can pick up all those drones we’ve been sending there.  Some idiot even went so far as to suggest that we were “meant” to be in space.  (Actually, no, our bodies were never physically designed to be anywhere other than on Earth.  Ask any real astronaut if you don’t believe me.)

And while this is going on, there are the grumblings of certain people and certain groups who say that we shouldn’t be wasting our time in space or that our billionaire astro-moguls should have been spending their billions on their own employees and on solving the problems of the planet instead of trying to escape it.  Endless grumbling and grips about Bezos acting more like Lex Luthor than Jean-Luc Picard, keeping his employees working overtime even during the pandemic while he parades about in his blue jumpsuit and goes off into space in his custom space capsule that looks like male genitalia.  Oh why couldn’t he just spend that money on his employees and give them stellar raises and bonuses for the work they’ve done?  Why can’t he give his money away to help the ills of the world instead of looking to the stars?

Well, I hate to break it to you, but that’s not what people like Bezos do.

Yes, American involvement in space has been a government effort.  Our astronauts that first went into space and went to the Moon didn’t represent corporations.  They didn’t go there for some tourism biz, although they were there to sightsee and collect some rocks and play some golf.  The American space program was created because we were in a race with the old Soviet Union.  They beat us into space in the 1950’s, first with Sputnik and then with Yuri Gagarin, and we did not want them to be the first on the Moon.  So, yeah, we rushed things a bit.  We went out there and we put the flag of the United States of America on the moon.  Our footprints are still there.  Our junk is still there.

But you look back at history and you see that it’s the private interests that take stuff and run with it.  Orville and Wilbur Wright may have made the plane, but it’s private business – with government investment that goes on even today – that turned it into commercial air travel.  Henry Ford didn’t invent the automobile.  He invented the assembly line that made cars consistently and effectively.  The railroads that connected the country over a century ago weren’t forged by some government agency.  Businessmen did that.  And they did it on the cheap with imported labor.  The government created the Internet, but it’s private business that runs it today, and we are reminded of it with every price spike and service outage.

Space is no different.

America was stupid when it came to space.  We were.  We put in a paper-pusher to run NASA and he turned around and retired our aged space shuttles with nothing to replace them.  Nothing!  There were no other ships ready to replace them.  Everything was still on paper.  So we either needed help from the European Space Union or the Russians... or eventually turn to Musk’s SpaceX.  Thank you President George W. Bush for that astro-blunder!

So, yeah, American space travel is private now. We’re not making shuttles anymore.  We’re really not making rockets.  We’re making drones and satellites that we contract to put up in space, if not by us then by foreign countries.  Our so-called “Space Force” still needs to bum a ride from someone to do its supposed job.  “Buy American”, right?  Or in the case of Sir Richard, better British than Russian.

Let’s get brutally honest here... Bezos and Musk are following a long American tradition of big money people putting that money into the future, even if it is at the cost of their employees and others.  They both have a stake in the future of space travel and space tourism, letting other rich people and influencers go on joy rides to the roof of the world so they can call themselves “astronauts”, and then looking to the Moon and the other planets for commercial ventures.

Yes, they “could” spend that money on raises and bonuses and better working conditions for all their employees instead of just the elites.  Then again, a lot of millionaires and billionaires “could” do that as well.  Corporate executives and bank elites and hedge fund owners “could” put their money into making life better for everyone.  Then, again, they could also spend that money on beanie babies, or tacky street art, or feed the starving, or house the homeless, or to buy billions of trees to reforest the world.  They “could” do all those things... but they don’t because that is not in their nature.

And if they don’t pay taxes, it’s usually not because of some criminal activity but because they seduced governments to give them those tax breaks.  Bezos knows that first-hand after the long-courtship of communities large and small in 2018.  How many cities and towns and counties and whole states offered obscene tax breaks just to get that “second corporate headquarters” that never happened?  Hell, one city here in Georgia offered to change their name to “Amazon”!  So if Bezos and Musk don’t pay taxes, don’t blame them.  Blame yourselves and the people you put in office.

Bezos and Musk are looking at space for business because that is what they do.  Just like what the railroad magnates did in the 19^th Century.  Just like what the automakers and the airline execs did in the 20^th Century.  And just like what the big telecom people are doing in the 21^st Century.  Their nature is to minimize worker pay and work conditions to maximize profit.  That is what they are told makes them successful businessmen.  You want that to change?  Cutting them off from space won’t do it.

Week of 07/19/2021

 

The Market Is Saying Something Loud And Clear
– by David Matthews 2

“Whatever the market will bear.”

That was my father’s universal answer when it came to prices and wages.

Why is the cost of living going up more than the workplace raises?  “Whatever the market will bear,” was his answer.

Why are workers getting paid less than their true worth?  “Whatever the market will bear.”

Why are prices going up but not wages?  “Whatever the market will bear.”

My father was not an idiot.  Nor was he simple-minded.  In his life he worked the spectrum of business positions from a pin-setter in a bowling alley to being a plant manager.  He was on both sides of a union strike.  He not only knew how to start a business, but was called in several times to help start new manufacturing plants.  And although he didn’t get a degree, he did take business management courses in college.

In his later years, though, he began to lean on the idea that businesses knew more than anyone and were even better than everyone.  More than politicians, more than civil leaders, even more than most hard-working Americans, of which he and I were a part of.

My father put his faith in “the market” to know what is best.  It didn’t matter how hard you worked or whether or not the cost of living was going up and you weren’t, it was always up to “the market”.  When gas prices reached gouging levels around 2005, my father said it was whatever “the market will bear”.  To that end, people were still paying for that expensive gas for trips when they should have stayed home.  Workers were still being short-changed, forced to work harder for less money, and that was “okay” because at least they were still working.

But what happens when “the market” is saying something that Big Business doesn’t want to hear?

So here we are in the middle of 2021, after a year of a global pandemic-forced shutdown, with businesses desperately trying to rebuild and come back from said catastrophic shutdown, and the big bitch from Big Business is that they can’t fill vacancies in certain places.  They need “workers” but they “can’t fill” those jobs.

Which jobs?  Well, some those happen to be the service jobs... fast food places and the like.  You know... the same folks who were declared “essential” during the pandemic but just weren’t worth paying extra for.  Those are the jobs you’re hearing about now with people “rage quitting”.

And it’s understandable.  After all, why should people work long hours for poverty wages when they could go work for Amazon, still put in the long stressful hours but get paid $15-20-an-hour?

Not too long ago, I passed by a Burger King that put up a huge banner that said that they were offering work starting at $12-an-hour, like that was something to be proud of.  Maybe that would be if the person applying was that classic high school student looking for some spending money, or maybe some retiree who doesn’t really need the money but still wants to feel useful.  But if you’re someone who is out of work from the pandemic, needs money to pay the bills and keep a roof over your head, $12-an-hour is poverty wage.  It sure as hell won’t cover the bills or the rent/mortgage.

There are explanations abound about why this is a thing.  Big Business is peddling their long-running Big Lie that it’s people who have been getting paid to not work... aka those who are on unemployment... that are rejecting these poverty-wage jobs.  Except they’re dead wrong about it.  It is a lie.  A bold-faced lie.  And the numbers are showing it.  But it is based off their old biases about people on unemployment as being “lazy”. 

Another excuse being peddled is that people have “tasted freedom” during the pandemic by being forced to stay at home and/or work from home, and they really don’t want to “go back”.  Must have been nice to be able to do that, but the people who still worked but from home still had a job, which meant they still had a paycheck.  That’s really a workplace issue, not an employment issue.  Unless they all quit.  But we’re not really seeing that yet.  And this whole business of “tasted freedom”?  It sounds like you’re actually admitting that your workplace is hell.

And there another issue to deal with... which is that many of the jobs that are not being filled require skills that your regular worker on unemployment just does not have and has no possibility of getting.  Like doctors, hospital workers, airline pilots, and truck drivers.  Jobs that require time, money, and training.  Jobs that cannot be filled overnight.

Oh, and did we forget about the price hikes and price spikes and inflation?  And with the obscene surge in real estate sales, housing and rental prices are going through the roof, which means it is costing more and more for people to live.  No, that $12-an-hour job at Burger King won’t let you rent an apartment anymore, even if you work 16 hours a day and live off nothing but water and cold ramen.

Let’s get brutally honest here... “the market” is sending a message loud and clear to Big Business.

Raise the wages.

You want people waiting tables and flipping burgers?  $12-an-hour will not do.  $15-an-hour may even be pushing it.  And, yes, that means raising wages on your current employees as well.  You can’t have people already working at $17-an-hour suddenly training some newbie getting paid $18-an-hour for the same job.

Some places are already starting to raise their wages.  McDonald’s recently announced raising wages and adding all sorts of other perks to get people to flip burgers.  “Too Big To Fail” Bank of America already announced back in May that they will gradually raise their starting wages to $25-an-hour.  That’s good news, but there needs to be more.

I know, I know... Big Biz don’t want to do that.  That would cut in on their precious profit margins.  And for the longest time, inflation has been kept low, which has allowed employers to keep wages obscenely low so they could maximize their profit potential.  This has literally been going on for decades.  But “the market” is telling you that isn’t acceptable anymore. 

Inflation is rising, prices are rising, it is getting harder and harder for people to just get by.  You can get your cronies in government to take away unemployment coverage completely and it still will not get those people to accept your poverty wages.  You’re seeing people rage quit now.  Do you really want to see them angry and broke?

“The market” is a nice little excuse to justify bad business behaviors.  But if you’re really putting value in it, then you need to pay attention when it also tells you something that you don’t want to hear.  Today is one of those instances.