Bill Maher was on a roll last Friday with a “New Rules” rant about a—ahem—maximum wage. It’s an idea whose time has come.

Did you know that during World War II, FDR actually proposed a cap on income that in today’s dollars would mean that no person could ever take home more than about $300,000? OK, that is a little low. But wouldn’t it be great if there were Democrats out there like that now, who would say to billionaires, “Oh, you’re crying?  We’ll give you something to cry about. You don’t want a minimum wage?  How about we not only have a minimum wage, we have a maximum wage?”

That is not a new idea.  James Madison, who wrote our Constitution, said, “Government should prevent an immoderate accumulation of riches.”  Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, they all agreed that too much money in the hands of too few would destroy democracy.

Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison… those guys the Tea partiers are always (selectively) quoting…

This clip is not only worth watching, it’s worth sharing with other people and encouraging them to watch it and pass it on themselves if they deem it worthy. When “the situation” the United States finds itself in, at this point in history, can be summed up so succinctly and be understood so readily by the man on the street, real change is coming. Maher articulates this matter masterfully, indeed. A very few people at the top have engineered it so that the spoils of Wall Street and the capitalist system flow to THEM and ONLY TO THEM. These lucky, er, bastards then promptly kicked the ladder out from underneath the rest of us with the help of both political parties. (Clinton signed NAFTA, ‘nuff said.)

Writing at Daily Kos, Lawrence Lewis nicely summed up another facet of “the American predicament” which has become so incredibly obvious over the past few decades, the Republican Party’s transparent fealty to the wealthy to the detriment of the working man’s lot (mind you, not that the Democrats are all that much better. They’re just not Republicans.). It is an actual class war that they’re waging, and it’s becoming more and more difficult for them to deceive their base about what they’re up to with just the standard GOP tropes of pro-life, pro-gun, pro-Jesus and anti-gay, anti-immigrant rhetoric, when the lives of their constituents are crumbling:

The final piece of the puzzle is the Republican focus on making life more difficult for those who do have work. Republicans oppose increasing the minimum wage. They want even the employed to know economic want. Republicans oppose workplace safety regulations, and they want to destroy unions. They want workers completely subject to the whims of management, and unable to quit lousy jobs because there are no good alternatives and there is no social safety net to protect them. Under the Republican agenda, workers have to do what they’re told or suffer even worse consequences.

In short, the Republican agenda is to keep people desperate for work, with more people seeking jobs than can find them, with no laws or other forms of assistance or protection for those who can find jobs, and no safety net for those who can’t. Lack of opportunity ensures a glutted labor market, which drives down wages, forcing many of even those who do find work to seek more. Exhausting hours, inadequate pay, and broken unions ensure that workers are hungry and tired and incapable of defending themselves.

It could be called a new form of feudalism, but that feudalism actually made necessary more responsibility from the aristocracy toward the peasants and serfs than does unregulated bastard capitalism from owners and management toward labor. It is class warfare. Simple, straightforward, class warfare. For Republicans, poverty, hunger, and unemployment are not tributary outcomes of their economic model, they are deliberate means toward insidious ends. Make people hurt. Make them desperate. They will do what they are told. They will ask for no more than that they be allowed to survive another week.

Or so Republicans hope.

Everyone is starting to realize exactly—and if not exactly exactly, then CLOSE ENOUGH—what’s going down.

It simply can’t continue on like this. It’s not going to.

[And if you haven’t heard about this guy, he’ll blow your mind. Ladies and gentlemen, meet THE PERFECT Republican spokesperson, Josh Miller of Arkansas. Keep talking buddy, you are doin’ the Lord’s work…]
 

 
UPDATE: As posted on the Dangerous Minds Facebook page (thank you Eric Blahbson) Jello Biafra on the maximum wage: