12.11.13

Blessed are the job creators …

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 10:06 am by George Smith

At 2:11 — Blessed are the job creators, they can always hire way more waiters…

From economic tax expert and Pulitzer winner David Cay Johnston at al Jazeera:

Prosperous American families have adopted the same approach to wages for servants as big successful companies, hiring freelance outside contractors for all sorts of functions — from child care and handyman chores to gardening and cleaning work — to reduce costs.

Instead of live-in servants, who were common in prosperous U.S. households before World War II, better-off families now outsource the family cook, maid and nanny. It is part of a problem in developed countries around the globe that is getting more attention worldwide than in the U.S.

We are falling backward in America, back to the Gilded Age conditions of a century and more ago when a few fortunate souls grew fabulously rich while a quarter of families had to take in boarders to make ends meet. Only back then, elites gave their servants a better deal …

That is just what the United States has today — a top 10 percent doing well (the top 1/10th of 1 percent exceptionally so), while the bottom third remains desperate for work. But outsourcing has changed circumstances for the worse for those who would do a servant’s work today …

More than half of fast-food workers are on some form of welfare …

Johnston runs the numbers and goes on to write that America’s servant class has a worse deal because it has to pay for its own transportation and living space, which eats up much of what it earns. In the Gilded Age, the country’s families provided housing for its servant class.

This is much like the arrangement found on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

The jobs pay so little — one example being the eight tenths of cent per pool to count swimming pools in Los Angeles by Benedikt Gross and Joseph Lee — that electricity costs to run the PC (if the work was done in the US) ate up anywhere from more than half to all of the profit earned doing the work.

All are immoral systems which have been normalized as acceptable in present day America.


You can have an MP3 of Rich Man’s Burden and its “Blessed are the job creators …” bit for your devices. Click here.

Please help it along. A great song for our time, it deserves a good audience.

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