Dear editor:
Detroit redux plus:
The recent tax bill that most Americans hate and the government shutdown are two results of union decimation, which created an out-of-control grab by right-wing billionaires to call most of the legislative shots and gain a huge share of profits. Today, CEOs of auto or other big companies earn about 300 times the amount of their average worker. Whereas, in the early days of Motown, CEOs of most corporations made 30 times the amount.
During the many years of recorded history, people who worked the hardest at backbreaking jobs for long hours received little or no reward (serfs and other coerced laborers). Those rulers who worked the least surrounded themselves and their aristocracies with all the gold, jewels and power possible. Lest the industrial revolution help workers, some establishment economists took a few ideas from Adam Smith and came up with a theory that protected the right of the rich to have much more than the workers (laissez faire capitalism or Scroogian capitalism). The New Deal reversed conditions by having white working-class men earn a reasonable share of the profits.
After World War II, under union negotiations, blue-collar workers making cars earned a good deal of money. So did other workers, union and nonunion, and were able to buy cars. Money was pouring in. But the one Republican mayor and Democratic mayors had little to do with the car manufacturers pulling back from Detroit. For example, Louis Miriani was the Republican mayor of Detroit from 1957-62, a critical period for Detroit's decline. Other mayors were white officials who catered to white ethnics of European origins. Like most mayors of Chicago and other cities, Detroit mayors worked with the establishment, but didn't have the money for poor area remedies.
Car CEOs began to play nasty games with their workers. With all the money coming in, auto heads gave whopping bonuses to themselves and other brass. Then union workers struck and fought for a share of the pie. The CEOs reluctantly gave raises and increased the prices of their products, while (shades of Republicans today) blaming the worker unions. Financialization added to the industry's problems. Finance CEOs were eventually hired, rather than engineers because high interest made more money than good autos.
Fred Koch, father of the infamous brothers, embraced an ideology worse than Scroogian capitalism and brought Frederich Hayek from Austria to the University of Chicago (alma mater of my late husband). His philosophy of extreme libertarianism was widely accepted by the 1970s and has resulted in the average Americans' having almost no control in their economic lives because group solutions to problems are seldom allowed. The Europeans call this neoliberalism and the French name it "savage capitalism."
To me, his ideology seems based on the Übermensch (superman) theory of Nietzsche -- a man who was anti-Christian and anti-democratic. (Economic Hitlerism!) Even though our government can be brought to a shutdown by the actions of a few billionaires, I hope we can once again see remedies for our problems.
Linda Woodbury
Hot Springs
Editorial on 01/27/2018