U.S. Politics: Gar Nicht Trump's Traumschiff!

[ThinkerX]

probably not a good sign for Biden...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/elections-2020/bidens-senior-latina-adviser-quits-in-frustration/ar-BBXiYoL?ocid=msnclassic

 

Cárdenas did not return a call or text message, but two friends familiar with her thinking told POLITICO that she felt the campaign wasn’t heeding her advice on immigration as she tried to reach out to Latino groups that have had longstanding concerns with the former vice president’s rhetoric and record stemming from the Obama administration.

“The campaign is just hyper-focused on whites in Iowa and African-Americans and it placed less value on Latino outreach,” an immigration activist and friend who spoke with her told POLITICO.

“Vanessa kept banging her head against the wall trying to get them to take the community more seriously,” the friend, who wasn’t authorized to speak on her behalf, said. “And Biden just really won’t change when it comes to the way he talks about immigration. It became too much.”

The resignation of Cárdenas, an activist who has never worked on a political campaign before, does not leave Biden without a Latino outreach team. Cristóbal Alex, former president of the influential Latino Victory Fund, remains a senior adviser. And, though Cárdenas worked with coalition groups, Biden has a Latinx outreach director, Laura Jiménez.

Cárdenas’ departure is the latest in a string of troubles Biden’s campaign has had with Latino and Hispanic leaders and groups, a tension partly rooted in the fact that the candidate has held firmly to formerly centrist Democratic party positions on immigration even as activists have grown more vocal and progressive.

[The Anti-Targ]

4 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

What is the maximum wage you would allow?

10x the lowest paid employee / contractor (including cleaning contractors for the buildings you lease / own to run the business). That might help lift wages of the lowest paid people, because a $1 increase for them = a $10 increase for the CEO.

[TrueMetis]

5 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

What is the maximum wage you would allow?

Something like what The Anti-Targ said sounds good. You want exact numbers? I don't have them. Not willing at this point to put the time necessary to come up with some.

[Jace, Extat]

I was ready to pan that 10x number and insist on something higher being reasonable but... I actually think it's pretty good.

Lowest salary is 50 grand, highest is 500... that actually has a certain symmetry there that I find pleasing.

[Kalbear]

I would probably do something like either 10x min salary at the company or 100x minimum wage, whichever you prefer. 

[Zorral]

6 hours ago, ThinkerX said:

... it placed less value on Latino outreach,” an immigration activist and friend who spoke with her told POLITICO.

“Vanessa kept banging her head against the wall trying to get them to take the community more seriously,” the friend, who wasn’t authorized to speak on her behalf, said.

Hillary didn't bother at all with the very large communities of latin voters in swing states like PA.  They didn't even bother doing a voter registration -- and there are large numbers of Puerto Ricans living in PA, who are legally US citizens, and when living in the US, legitimately entitled to vote and have their votes counted.

Biden, like all those old estabishment, donor funders Dem candidates -- is determined to do things the way they used to do them.  That world is over.

 

[sologdin]

my suspicion is that a multiplier of 10 between minimum and maximum wages would re-orient distribution to reproduce the same inequalities within that bracket, as the underlying systems of exploitation and domination are not addressed.

[DMC]

44 minutes ago, sologdin said:

my suspicion is that a multiplier of 10 between minimum and maximum wages would re-orient distribution to reproduce the same inequalities within that bracket, as the underlying systems of exploitation and domination are not addressed.

I think you got the direction of causality backwards.  If any proposal like that was even remotely realistic, that's because the underlying systems are already being addressed.

[Raja]

Edit: Nevermind.

[Larry of the Lawn]

6 hours ago, DMC said:

I think you got the direction of causality backwards.  If any proposal like that was even remotely realistic, that's because the underlying systems are already being addressed.

No, it's a surface solution.  Are the lowest paid employees getting board seats?  Are they all shareholders in a significant way?  Does someone else still take the bulk of the results of their labor?

[sologdin]

i think DMC's point is salient, though--to get to maximum wage caps, we'd already be down the road of revolution quite a bit.  the political will to expropriate the expropriators will at that point have been in possession of the state apparatus and all waste of space rentiers will have been compelled to get real jobs.

[The Anti-Targ]

9 hours ago, Kalbear said:

I would probably do something like either 10x min salary at the company or 100x minimum wage, whichever you prefer. 

If you tagged all exec pay to lowest paid in the company you probably don't even need a minimum wage law. Though it might still be needed for small businesses where the owner couldn't afford to even pay themselves 10x minimum wage. My brother pays all his staff a minimum of the living wage, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't pay himself 10x minimum wage.

Plus you could make exec bonuses permitted as long as the company makes a profit, and so long as the execs' bonuses are then summed and multiplied by x and this is distributed to non-exec employees as a profit share.

I think a cap like this is actually a stepping stone to greater economic justice rather than something that would only come along after economic justice has already been achieved.

[Maithanet]

So I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm getting plastered with Bloomberg ads in the past week.  What a waste of money.  He could have spent $100 million on voter registration to actually help Democrats and instead he's throwing it away on a vanity project. 

[Paladin of Ice]

17 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

10x the lowest paid employee / contractor (including cleaning contractors for the buildings you lease / own to run the business). That might help lift wages of the lowest paid people, because a $1 increase for them = a $10 increase for the CEO.

I thought I was going to be harsh for saying 30-40x, (with no more than 1% of wages being paid in stock, paying high level corporate officers in stock encourages bullshit tricks to inflate the stock price while neglecting the health of the company) but you guys are apparently tougher than I am.

I do think 10x may, in some cases, be somewhat underpaying the corporate officers, but it would certainly be a hell of a lot better than the runaway system we have now. And if they can't make ends meet on that salary, maybe they can make a handy little chart of how to get by like McDonald's made for its employees awhile back.

[Altherion]

1 hour ago, Maithanet said:

So I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm getting plastered with Bloomberg ads in the past week.  What a waste of money.  He could have spent $100 million on voter registration to actually help Democrats and instead he's throwing it away on a vanity project. 

It's only a vanity project if his goal is truly to win the Democratic nomination...

[sologdin]

My brother pays all his staff a minimum of the living wage, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't pay himself 10x minimum wage.

totally. small cappies would thus be pressed in a manner that large ones are not--this sort of regulation may accordingly be interpreted as an obstacle to competition and therefore run afoul of the sherman act.  some regulation in the US has exceptions for small capitals--no title VII liability if less than 15 employees, say.  a wage cap statute that permits this sort of exception will likely eat the rule, however, when large concerns generate byzantine corporate groups for every enterprise, limited each entity to 14 employees to evade the cap. 

so long as the execs' bonuses are then summed and multiplied by x and this is distributed to non-exec employees as a profit share

that's the old lincoln electric model, no?

[DMC]

4 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

No, it's a surface solution.  Are the lowest paid employees getting board seats?  Are they all shareholders in a significant way?  Does someone else still take the bulk of the results of their labor?

My focus there is on how much the conversation would have to change for a 10 to 1 split to be politically realistic, as sologdin explained.  I think it should be very clear by now I'm not very interested in policy, but I can do basic math (or at least I can try my best since I just woke up) to emphasize how much this would change things.

Total personal income is at about $17.5 trillion as of 2018.  The labor force is around 165 million.  That divides out to an average of $100,000 for each worker - with around a trillion to spare (albeit before taxes).  This is why we talk about median instead of mean income.  Now, there's many ways to fudge the numbers and still construct inequality, but the 10 to 1 range severely limits that ability.  If the minimum salary is $20k and the maximum is $200k, there's simply not that much of a difference in divvying up the total income, or in other words it'd necessarily be a very (very) radical change to how income is distributed today.

2 hours ago, Maithanet said:

So I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm getting plastered with Bloomberg ads in the past week.  What a waste of money.

I don't think I've seen a one - online or TV.  Which seems weird, geographically.  Pittsburgh is supposedly the type of market in a swing state he's aiming for.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

So, why y'all so focused on pay differentials?

The real money isn't in pay (it isn't, honestly it isn't), but rather in the return on "entrepreneurial" (in quotes for a reason) risk (i.e., returns on risk capital).  In putting this together in the real world, are you going to prohibit your CEO getting 10x from either receiving equity-linked compensation (btw, there is some merit in this - people are really divided on how the incentive structures play out) or from risk capital that the CEO previously invested?  Leaving aside the small cap example posed by Solo, what about the difference between a private business (which is most of them) and public business?  What about commission-type businesses?  IMO this is relatively impossible (except maybe for pubcos, but would just keep more businesses private) unless we basically completely trash our existing (global) economic, social and political system (for the avoidance of doubt, I completely understand this is the thing for which many of you are advocating).  But if you are going there, why are we talking about pay at all?  Seriously.  

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

5 hours ago, sologdin said:

i think DMC's point is salient, though--to get to maximum wage caps, we'd already be down the road of revolution quite a bit.  the political will to expropriate the expropriators will at that point have been in possession of the state apparatus and all waste of space rentiers will have been compelled to get real jobs.

Are you and I in “fake jobs” under the new regime?

[sologdin]

it's a rule of history that there's always a need for hemophagic barristers.