Long Live Labor, Up Rise the Peasants

Peasant revolts against corporate greed are coming.

I wasn’t able to get The Daily Doom out on Friday due to the orientation at work that I mentioned earlier, so I am making up for it by issuing a Saturday edition.

Labor is getting bold with the UAW authorizing a strike for a 46% wage increase and a cut in hours to a 32-hour workweek. Strikes like this and the big Teamsters success against UPS are made possible by what is still reported in today’s headlines as a 4,000,000 labor shortage. Since I’ve talked about the 4-million shortfall for nearly two years, I won’t go again right now into why this is so critical and so misunderstood by the Fed.

Imported peasants

For corporations, this is a labor crisis. For labor it is a rare opportunity of strength, afforded by diminished competition between laborers due to the huge undersupply of workers. The economists in today’s news seek to solve the shortage by importing people into the US peasant pool, instead of increasing wages at the expense of rich shareholders to attract more laborers from within the nation.

Of course they do! That is typically how this is solved in America. In the modern world, expansion of the peasant class means allowing in a steady and even growing stream of immigrants. Next these corporate apologists will be advocating a return to child labor to produce for the aging population and save the tycoons. After all, the immigrants arrive with a lot of children who are used to working hard in the fields, mills and mines of their homelands. These economists already have no problem with foisting all the costs of our economic stimulus and rescue plans on the children as something they can be burdened with paying for us when they grow up. There is no need for us to pay for what we do as we go!

I recently wrote that, now that labor is gaining strength, we’d see a quickly growing effort to clip that strength being waged by corporations through articles talking up the need for expanding immigration. (Never mind we are full up now with more population than our water systems and electrical grid can handle.) The best solution from the perspective of corporate elites is actually illegal immigrants (and this is why politicians make immigration illegal then perennially turn a blind eye to enforcing their own laws). As I argued the first time this argument broke out a week or two ago, illegal aliens typically own no land, have no voting rights, and have to keep their heads low toward bad working conditions, lest they be fired and deported; so, they are certainly not going to strike.

China peasants

China has a long history of peasant labor, and it looks everyday like it is making moves back in that direction. Political unrest among the working class grew during Xi’s zero-Covid lockdowns. With so many mouths to feed in China, avoiding civil unrest in the form of a peasant revolt has always been a front concern for the communist government.

I believe China is very likely moving toward a time of upheaval as the news keeps getting worse. One article today makes the argument that the Chinese economy is worse than it was in the 1970s prior to all of China’s recent moderation and capitalization. Another points out, as I have been doing for the past month, how nothing China is doing to try to help itself is working. The latest stimulus-driven Chinese stock rally, it notes, lasted all of thirty minutes. Following the Law of Diminishing Returns, each Chinese stimulus measure has given poorer results than the stimulus just before it, and the stimulus and yuan interventions keep coming on a daily basis.

In talking about this in the past, I’ve noted how back in the 70s and early 80s, one big concern in the US was that that Japanese were buying up US corporations and US land, so they would gain undue ownership and control of the US, itself. That fear never materialized, and I extrapolated the same would prove true for concerns about China buying up America. Today, I caught an argument among my headlines that lays out just how overblown that same fear really is in the last couple of years with China. Chinese ownership of US land is minuscule, and with Chinese muscle shrinking everyday, the concern is likely to abate on its own with no government intervention.

The real risk for Xi’s communist government is that, as China’s economy becomes more desperate looking by the day, the party will find it hard to hold down a citizen’s revolt. I suspect we’ll start to see that kind of unrest breaking out in big ways within a year, and the Chinese threat to Amerika will start to fade to black as China will have too many of its own troubles to handle.

American peasants

In my next “Deeper Dive” this weekend, I’ll go over the declining US economic conditions in the headlines today, which leave us with little room to gloat over China’s economic downturn. We may have our own peasant’s revolt before long as the songwriter I covered earlier, who soared to success with his song “Rich Men North of Richmond,” is striking a cord with the working class and playing to the possibilities of revolt. He had plenty to say about that in stories today and yesterday.

He laughed at how the GOP debaters tried to co-opt his song to claim Biden was the cause of the working class demise, saying they just don’t get it — that the song is about THEM. It is about both parties in Washington, DC, perpetuating the problems of the working class who never get anywhere because of their policies that serve only the rich. One of the ways they perpetuate the struggle of Amerika’s working class, of course, is through years of immigration policy that have used cheap immigrant labor insourcing into the country to suppress wages and outsourcing of work to cheap labor in other nations to suppress wages.

But that, of course, is just one way the rich men north of Richlmond have done nothing for the working guy or gal but make his or her life tougher. Our outspoken songwriter, Oliver Anthony, says they can co-op his message all they want, but he’ll fight back by making it clear his lyrics are not in support of the GOP or the Democrats and by writing a lot more songs about the dying state of the middle-class worker. He says the solutions will never come from government but from ourselves and the strengthening of our families and friendships. Commitment to one party or the other is exactly what perpetuates the problem as both parties serve the rich men and use each other to blame for the problems they both create. They are a distraction like rodeo clowns, not a solution.