Voodoo and the Businessman Sleight of Hand

President Petulant likes to crow about his roaring economy, even though it has its origins in Barack Obama's first term. Confronted with this fact, the Trump-whore would no doubt maintain he was in fact Obama's economic advisor.

Or something like that.

Has Hollywood has ever imagined a reboot of Forrest Gump, with dick-swinging Donald as the driving force of virtually every important moment in (revisionist) American history? You know, composing his own take on the Gettysburg Address ("A country of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy..."), leading the Confederacy to victory in the Civil War and subduing Hitler and Tojo via Twitter taunts? 

Okay. So I keep my ears peeled for the roar, but I'm having trouble hearing it. Oh, I know the one-percent are gobbling up historic amounts of global and domestic wealth, aided and abetted by the Trump-whore's tax-cut-slash-bribe.

But what of the 99%?

I'll admit we're a bunch of lazy, shiftless slobs unworthy of anything but the barest solvency, but where's the roar in our economy?

The gig economy, in which people work several jobs to make ends meet, is alive and well. Contract employee by day, Lyft operator by night. While the stagnant wages that earmarked the days of the early-recovery have technically disappeared, increases are curiously low for an economy reportedly firing on all cylinders.

In a report recently released by the Associated Press, raises for executives at Fortune 500 companies averaged seven-percent, as opposed to just three-percent for rank and file employees. Elsewhere, raises for wee folk were a bit higher—3.4%—still low for an economy with record-low levels of unemployment.

During the boom of the nineteen-nineties, desperate employers were offering raises of up to 5% (not to mention signing bonuses and other incentives) to retain and hire badly-needed employees.

Something has changed.

The business class likes to cite the incredible pressure wrought by online and international competition as the reason for these smaller raises. Strangely, those stressors don't seem to have the same effect on executive compensation.

I wonder why?

Another curious aspect of our roaring economy is that a record seven-million Americans are more than three months behind on their car payments. That is more than were behind in the dark days of 2009 and 2010.

Republicans would no doubt explain this as the unfortunate result of stupid, ignorant minorities unable to budget their money. But think about it: how critical is your car to your job? Are you telling me people voluntarily put their jobs at risk in favor of a new plasma TV?

Or is there something else going on?

With employers picking up less and less of their employee's health care costs, paychecks are stretched further still. Add the skyrocketing cost of even garden-variety prescription drugs and you can practically see them evaporate.

And if you're a contract employee, well, you don't have any healthcare benefits, do you? 

But not to worry, because Big Pharma assures us very few consumers pay list price for their prescriptions drugs, and low-cost alternatives are available everywhere. Plus Republicans continue to maintain they're working on the best healthcare package ever!

We at The Square Peg have made this point before, but none of this just "happened”. It is deliberate. On purpose. And by design. It is the result of decades of business-inspired, Republican-enabled greed.

Furious with the mounting power of labor unions and the minimum wages of American workers, business sought cheaper sources of labor. Ever-cheaper raw materials and methods of production and distribution. They wanted to make more money.

You and your job? They were standing in their way.

Did you even say you were sorry?

While we might be guilty of over-simplification, America essentially sold its soul to China in exchange for bigger profits. Our Republican-enabled corporate behemoths gave away our nation's manufacturing base so that its executives could receive bigger bonuses.

So much of what you see around you is the fallout from that shift. And now in the midst of his re-election campaign, the Trump-whore wants to put the genie back in the bottle. 

Ha. Ha.

So yes. We have a roaring economy. Sad thing is, ninety-nine percent of us have been fitted with noise-cancelling headphones.