#143 AFL-CEO

The Marxist revolution never happened. Ordinary workers never rose up and overcame their capitalist masters, shook off their Walmart chains and took over the means of production. Why? Because they became consumers. Round about the thirties, when unions first came to full strength, the capitalist powers-that-be were forced to acknowledge a new paradigm. Hey, if we pay these guys more instead of keeping then hungry and poor, they might turn out to be consumers of the exact same widgets they’re making. Hungry and poor mean revolutionary. So the key capitalist survival adaptation—and that’s where Marx went way wrong, capitalism is nothing if not adaptable—was to make the worker the consumer and pay him or her enough so they felt they had a vested interest in the success of the capitalist economy as a whole. But just barely enough.
A well fed, mostly, and well-entertained populace is less likely to take to the streets in a we-got-nothing-left-to-lose general strike that could cripple the economy. Enter the next strokes of capitalist brilliance, the NFL and Hungry Man dinners. And beer. Lots of beer.
Somewhere along the way, the capitalist class, of which the worker was now a willing participant, also found a way to blame the Dominatrix Bureaucracy for everything cruel about life, and high taxes as her lashing whip. So it wasn’t pork barrel projects for their districts that congressmen could blame for high taxes but the evil bureaucracy, and it wasn’t gouging gas companies that were responsible for three dollar a gallon gas it was the gas tax. Witness the recent attempt to remove the tax to give the poor consumer relief at the pump and let the poor little old oil companies make their “tiny” dollop of obscene profit.
I recently got a mailer from my two local state legislators. Turns out every program they voted against that cost tax dollars was a bad, other party, tax-and-spend, unnecessary, business-killing act. Every program my legislators voted for that cost tax dollars was an economic stimulus act designed to build business so they could turn around and give poor people a hand, not a hand out. Politics is a very oral enterprise. High in the necessary skill set is the ability to toot your own horn. Right up there with blowing smoke.
Workers of the world unite, football’s back and so is Bud Light.
America, ya gotta love it.