Today Not Even Partly The Party of Yesterday
Bill Sheehan has a great observation of today's Republican party, taken from a source even the Grand Old Partiers might very well renounce in the coming election, The 2012 Republican Party Platform. As Bill pointed out, the platform itself reads (on p. 29), "The Pacific territories should have flexibility to determine the minimum wage, which has seriously restricted progress in the private sector." Bill elucidates:
The Territory referred to is the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, located in the Western Pacific. Because it's an American territory, garment manufacturers can attach the prized "Made in USA" label to garments made for American retailers like Ralph Lauren, Ann Taylor, Liz Claiborne, and The Gap. But the garment workers were not until recently covered under U.S. minimum wage or immigration laws.
The workers are mostly poor rural Chinese women who have often paid thousands of dollars to obtain transportation and a year's work contract, renewable at the employer's discretion. Some have borrowed the money from Chinese loan sharks. They also must pay the company for their food and housing. A Department of the Interior report found that women were subject to forced abortions and women and children were forced into prostitution.
With me so far? In their defining document, today's GOP has renounced law (as Bill continues to point out in the comments) signed by George W. Bush, becoming in the process even more right-leaning than their last president. (I'm going to assume, simply for the sake of argument, that they did not attack the national minimum wage laws in this country simply because too many of their base probably still earn an amount equal to or uncomfortably close to that lowest of hourly amounts. One cannot alienate all the voters all the time, after all. Ah, but I digress.)
Getting back to the GOP, perhaps it would prove illustrative to show, by way of comparison, how far the present party has drifted from its best-known member and first President, Abraham Lincoln. Again from the comments to Bill's post, xiphias dredged up some great thought-provoking Lincoln quotation, the Annual Message to Congress of 1861, where Lincoln outlines a situation very near and dear the struggle presented by the US Civil War, the relationship between labor and capital. Concerning the Southern insurgents and the slavery they are with their insurgency attempting to preserve, the President notes:
It is not needed, nor fitting here, that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions; but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them, and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers, or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.
A conclusion which sounds disturbingly like the economic condition of laborers in the Pacific Territories before W. signed the 2006 minimum wage law, a law which, again, the GOP of today states in its platform the capital owners operating in said Pacific Territories should be able to rescind, an "effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government." Lincoln himself decried the conclusion, stating immediately after the blocked quote, "Now, there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed; nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless." (I emphasized.)
The image to the left continues a portion of his address, noting the most egregious abuse of logic to the President himself, the assumption that the concerns of capital trump those of labor. As powerful a quote as this might be, reading further into Mr. Lincoln's address I find detail that may very well help those of us today understand the president's position and how it came to be defined by his own personal experience, an experience fewer of us can personally attest to having ourselves, and one completely at odds with the past experiences of most in the GOP today, especially those on the party's presidential ticket.
Rather than simply declare the capital/labor dichotomy null and void, Mr. Lincoln describes what must have seemed fairly self-evident to the audience addressed in 1861, especially those familiar with the president's own humble beginnings:
The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This is the just and generous and prosperous system which opens the way to all-gives hope to all, and consequent energy and progress and improvement of condition to all. No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty-none less included to take, or touch, aught which they have not honestly earned. Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess, and which, if surrendered, will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they, and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them, till all of liberty shall be lost.
(I again emphasized.)
I personally feel that allowing laborers to save "a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself" is exactly what the minimum wage laws were crafted to allow. Without such a surplus, without excess savings beyond the cost of living that can be squirrelled away to provide for a future, laborers becomes slaves in all senses of the word save legal declaration. This is a truth lost, despite the protestations found in the 2012 Platform Preamble, on men like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, men born to wealth who failed, like Lincoln, to "toil up from poverty."
I leave the reader to conclude if they are also the kind of men "included to take, or touch, aught which they have not honestly earned." The antics I've heard of Bain Capital's private equity division and the platform note on the Pacific Territories leads me to believe they might very well be.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I might try to stomach reading the rest of the GOP platform. What better way to spend a Labor Day weekend than to go straight to the source material written by those who blatantly state they would act to remove any legal protections guarding laborers everywhere in this country, protections earned by those who are remembered on this holiday. I'll share any gems I find.
X-posted to talk_politics.
The Territory referred to is the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, located in the Western Pacific. Because it's an American territory, garment manufacturers can attach the prized "Made in USA" label to garments made for American retailers like Ralph Lauren, Ann Taylor, Liz Claiborne, and The Gap. But the garment workers were not until recently covered under U.S. minimum wage or immigration laws.
The workers are mostly poor rural Chinese women who have often paid thousands of dollars to obtain transportation and a year's work contract, renewable at the employer's discretion. Some have borrowed the money from Chinese loan sharks. They also must pay the company for their food and housing. A Department of the Interior report found that women were subject to forced abortions and women and children were forced into prostitution.
With me so far? In their defining document, today's GOP has renounced law (as Bill continues to point out in the comments) signed by George W. Bush, becoming in the process even more right-leaning than their last president. (I'm going to assume, simply for the sake of argument, that they did not attack the national minimum wage laws in this country simply because too many of their base probably still earn an amount equal to or uncomfortably close to that lowest of hourly amounts. One cannot alienate all the voters all the time, after all. Ah, but I digress.)
Getting back to the GOP, perhaps it would prove illustrative to show, by way of comparison, how far the present party has drifted from its best-known member and first President, Abraham Lincoln. Again from the comments to Bill's post, xiphias dredged up some great thought-provoking Lincoln quotation, the Annual Message to Congress of 1861, where Lincoln outlines a situation very near and dear the struggle presented by the US Civil War, the relationship between labor and capital. Concerning the Southern insurgents and the slavery they are with their insurgency attempting to preserve, the President notes:
It is not needed, nor fitting here, that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions; but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them, and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers, or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.
A conclusion which sounds disturbingly like the economic condition of laborers in the Pacific Territories before W. signed the 2006 minimum wage law, a law which, again, the GOP of today states in its platform the capital owners operating in said Pacific Territories should be able to rescind, an "effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government." Lincoln himself decried the conclusion, stating immediately after the blocked quote, "Now, there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed; nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless." (I emphasized.)
The image to the left continues a portion of his address, noting the most egregious abuse of logic to the President himself, the assumption that the concerns of capital trump those of labor. As powerful a quote as this might be, reading further into Mr. Lincoln's address I find detail that may very well help those of us today understand the president's position and how it came to be defined by his own personal experience, an experience fewer of us can personally attest to having ourselves, and one completely at odds with the past experiences of most in the GOP today, especially those on the party's presidential ticket.
Rather than simply declare the capital/labor dichotomy null and void, Mr. Lincoln describes what must have seemed fairly self-evident to the audience addressed in 1861, especially those familiar with the president's own humble beginnings:
The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This is the just and generous and prosperous system which opens the way to all-gives hope to all, and consequent energy and progress and improvement of condition to all. No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty-none less included to take, or touch, aught which they have not honestly earned. Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess, and which, if surrendered, will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they, and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them, till all of liberty shall be lost.
(I again emphasized.)
I personally feel that allowing laborers to save "a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself" is exactly what the minimum wage laws were crafted to allow. Without such a surplus, without excess savings beyond the cost of living that can be squirrelled away to provide for a future, laborers becomes slaves in all senses of the word save legal declaration. This is a truth lost, despite the protestations found in the 2012 Platform Preamble, on men like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, men born to wealth who failed, like Lincoln, to "toil up from poverty."
I leave the reader to conclude if they are also the kind of men "included to take, or touch, aught which they have not honestly earned." The antics I've heard of Bain Capital's private equity division and the platform note on the Pacific Territories leads me to believe they might very well be.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I might try to stomach reading the rest of the GOP platform. What better way to spend a Labor Day weekend than to go straight to the source material written by those who blatantly state they would act to remove any legal protections guarding laborers everywhere in this country, protections earned by those who are remembered on this holiday. I'll share any gems I find.
X-posted to talk_politics.