Thread by @doctorow

The #FightFor15 is back on the table, thanks to some canny procedural wrangling by @SenSchumer (it remains to be see whether ghouls like @JoeManchinWV and @kyrstensinema will sabotage it again).

theintercept.com/2021/03/29/min…

1/

The Fight for $15 started in 2012. The $15 figure represented the fair, inflation-adjusted minimum wage that Americans should have if minimum wage tracked the cost of living. By 2021, the inflation-adjusted minimum wage should have been $24/hour.

theintercept.com/2021/03/05/min…

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That means that even if we get around Manchin and Sinema to deliver a fair share to the country's worst-paid workers, we'll STILL be lagging a true, inflation-adjusted minimum wage.

3/

Now, if $24/hour gives you a little sticker shock, here's another number to think about:

$44 per hour.

That's the minimum wage we'd have today if the minimum had tracked the growth in Wall Street Bonuses.

inequality.org/great-divide/m…

4/

Wall Street bonuses have grown 1,217% since 1985 - in 2020, the finance sector handed out $31.7b in bonuses - enough to pay the full salaries of 1m workers earning $15/h.

5/

As Sarah Anderson writes in her @IPS_DC report, the beneficiaries of this massive bonus inflation are overwhelmingly white dudes. The targets of real-terms pay-cuts to the minimum wage are overwhelmingly not dudes, nor white.

6/

This increasing return to the finance sector is what we mean when we say "financialization." The workers who literally risked their lives to keep society from collapsing during the crisis face constant wage erosion, while the reckless gamblers cash out ever-larger jackpots.

7/

The finance sector has mastered the art of externalizing its risk and privatizing its gains. When they engineer a massive crash and an eviction crisis, they don't get punished - instead, they snap up all those houses and become mass-scale corporate landlords.

8/

Then they parlay the supernormal profits realized by gouging people to live in the houses they stole into legislation that makes it easier to raise rent, evict tenants, and neglect maintenance.

9/

Over the period in which finance sector bonuses climbed by 1,217%, the industry has repeatedly exacted enormous planetary-scale harms: bubble after bubble, predatory acquisitions, pandemic profiteering, and worse.

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The fact that we're fighting for $15 - and not $24, and CERTAINLY not real criminal and civil penalties for destructive, fraudulent financial engineering - means we're fighting a rear-guard action.

11/

The Archegos collapse isn't a one-off - it's the latest in a string of mass-scale frauds that made billionaires out of their perpetrators and left the rest of us holding the bag.

finance.yahoo.com/news/one-world…

12/

NFTs, Stonks, and other tulip-bulb eruptions are pure financialization. Like poulaines - pointed shoes whose toes grew so long they had to be anchored by chains to the wearer's knees (!) - they are the sign that the concerns of elites are totally unmoored from reality.

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An economy that is simultaneously capable of producing billions in wealth for pure speculation over symbolic, brittle ledger-entries, while catastrophically failing to pay a living minimum wage, is an economy whose priorities are wildly off-kilter.

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When unproductive number-shuffling produces billions, while back-breaking, civilization-saving work faces real-terms pay cuts every single year, something is terribly, awfully wrong.

eof/

ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/03/30/fig…