This blog is cross-posted at StewartAcuff.com
Firms and corporations are sitting on record amounts of unspent and non-invested cash.
More and more corporate leaders are illegally threatening their employees to get them to vote for Romney.
The financial elite has said very clearly that they will not invest in America and American jobs and families unless they get the policies and the president they want. Of course, the financial elite want job-killer Romney elected.
The financial elite are, in fact, extorting America to get the policies and president they want.
THAT IS EXTORTION.
The financial elite and the largest corporations in America are determined to get their way - DEMOCRACY BE DAMNED.
A lot of pundits have been talking about the fundamentals of the economy in the context of getting out of our economic crisis.
The simplest and most straightforward economic fact is that our country has had 35 years of working class and middle class wage stagnation. For 35 years wages have flatlined while productivity has shot up.
THAT FACT OF 35 YEARS OF STAGNANT WAGES IS THE BEST EXPLANATION FOR OUR CONTINUING ECONOMIC CRISIS. People have no money to spend in the economy. We have to generate consumer demand.
Those 35 years of flat wages are due primarily to a corresponding corporate assault on the freedom of workers to form unions and engage in collective bargaining - a nominal right in American law that is routinely violated making those workers who want to negotiate a wage that follows productivity, or secures their families' futures victims of thousands of ugly and routine acts of retaliation and intimidation.
The financial elite are convinced we live in an oligarchy or corporatocracy.
THE QUESTION IS WHETHER WE ARE WILLING TO TRADE DEMOCRACY FOR OLIGARCHY.
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Stewart Acuff is America’s best-known and foremost labor organizer. He is the former organizing Director of the AFL-CIO. Acuff has also written two books: Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life in Organizing, and Getting America Back to Work, coauthored by Dr. Richard Levins.