Living large on the minimum wage

If, by some miracle, Democrats are able to get a minimum wage increase to $10.10 through Congress (right about the moment my lottery numbers finally come in), it would mean that, for those lucky few who can actually find a forty hour a week job, they would make just a hair over $21,000 a year.

Let me repeat that:  $21,000 a year.

Now I know that republicans think that people making that kind of money, after a day of flipping burgers or stocking shelves with green beans, drive home in their Rolls to eat filet mignon and lobster tails while they watch Hawaii Five-O on their 75" TV screen, but you'd think members of the party that actually fights for a living wage for working class men and women would know better.

Not so, Senators Mary Landrieu and Mark Pryor.  Nope, they think that maybe raising it to such great heights is bad for...oh, I don't know, the Walton family and Olive Garden shareholders, and that perhaps we should not raise it quite so much.  Because, you know, $17,500 a year is still a quite the cache of cash.

And those folks can just learn to do without the lobster tails.

Peace,
emaycee

Bottled Kochs

I've been pretty lukewarm on Michigan's Democratic candidate for Senator Carl Levin's seat, Gary Peters, because he seems to me to be a milquetoast candidate, i.e., he's always come across as republican lite.  When we run republican lite, we lose.  Guess what?  In what should be a safe seat for Democrats, the last few polls have shown Peters trailing.  His opponent, Terri Lynn Land, is your run of the mill republican toadie and despite millions being spent on her behalf by the Koch brothers it's still in a statistical dead heat.

Apparently Peters is having a come home to Jesus moment--this week he gave a big fuck you to the Koch brothers (a la the increasingly feisty Harry Reid) by reminding Michigan voters of their true agenda:  watching ordinary Americans live in a Road Warrior post-apocalyptic world while they sit around their four Olympic sized pools enjoying circle jerks while they count even more billions of dollars.

Peters is correct to point out to Michigan voters that the Kochs don't live here and are trying to buy our state's Senate seat to entrich themselves and themselves alone.  He would be wise to spend the next eight months hammering home how his opponent is leading their charge at every Michigander's expense.

Peace,
emaycee

Das Capitalism

Had to cut those food stamps--nope, that $8 billion was just too much.  Can't approve an extension for all those poor bastards out of work thanks to the foolhardiness of Wall Street--can't afford that.  Can't afford Obamacare, can't afford spending on our deteriorating infrastructure, can't afford to spend on universal pre-k, and definitely can't afford to give raises to teachers, firemen, and police officers.  Hell, we can't even afford to take care of those who selflessly served our country.

Know what we can afford?  $13.2 billion to Boeing.  $5.6 billion to Alcoa.  $3.9 billion to Intel.  $3.5 billion to GM.  $2.5 billion to Ford.  In all, over $110 billion dollars in our taxes for subsidies to business, with 3 out of four dollars going to less than 1000 large corporations.

I think very few of us mind having our taxes used to help start up companies or to give tax breaks to small businesses.  But billions of dollars to billion dollar entities?  Socialism, my ass--let these fuckers make it or break it on their own.

Frankly, I can think of many much better uses for my tax dollars than padding the bottom line so incompetent boobs can get bigger bonuses from their corporate boards.

Peace,
emaycee

What a Dick...Cheney

In many countries, a politician who did as piss poor of a job as Bush the Lesser's henchman Dick Cheney (collpapse of the American economy, asleep at the wheel on 9/11, two mismanaged wars, yawning while hundreds of Americans died in New Orleans) would be, rightfully, drawn and quartered.

In American, though, you get to go on TV and whine that the President would rather spend money on food stamps than spend even more in our morbidly obese defense budget.  Apparently the irony of more than $100 million in food stamps going to our military families is lost on Mr. Cheney--spending for a necessary evil trumping spending for the greater good and all that.  Fuck hungry children--what we need are more $435 hammers.

Frankly, Mr. Cheney and his ilk are enough to make a maggot puke.

Peace,
emaycee

How low can it go?

Rick Perry, one of many republicans with delusions of one day being President (and that's what it will always remain--a delusion), has taken a bold stance on the minimum wage saying that it should be left up to every business to decide for itself what to pay its workers.

While the statement's sheer cravenness is enough to conjure images of Perry on youtube kissing the lily white asses of the Koch brothers, the real world effect would be...even more Americans in poverty and even more children in hunger.

For fuck's sake--there's a reason we've set a minimum wage:  corporations can't be trusted.  Period.  If they could put us in slavery and pay us nothing, they would.

Letting companies decide what the minimum they'll pay is on par with letting prison inmates decide if they should have a gun.

Peace,
emaycee

An obscenity

"Hunger is not a problem.  It is an obscenity."--Anne Frank

The excerpt in this post by Digby shows the best and worst that is America.  The hungry mother forgoing eating so that her children could have more, her son saying he was full so that his mother could have some of the food that was on his plate--these are the best.  The worst...well when one in five Americans has been food insecure in the past year in the richest nation on the face of the earth, when we read of a family going hungry...it is an abomination.

While it's correct to point a finger at the callousness of republicans, many of whom couldn't care less that Americans are going hungry or think it's their own damn fault (never mind the utter void of moral leadership in corporate America or the Pyramind Scheme that is Wall Street), the Democrats share the blame.  Scenes of hungry families like those noted above are what Bill Clinton's disastrous welfare reform has wrought; the ninety dollars a month that 850,000 American familes won't have for food thanks to Debbie Stabenow's Farm Bill; the President's bowing to the Gods of Austerity rather than looking out for the best interests of the working class men and women on whose backs this country is carried.

Anne Frank was a teenager.  It's quite amazing how much better she understood the scourge that is hunger than do our so-called leaders in our nation's capital.

Peace,
emaycee

Their brother's keeper

A few days ago, I wrote about republican efforts in Columbia, South Carolina to keep charities from feeding the hungry.  Not content with just keeping children from eating, the state's Governor, Nikki Haley, this week noted that unions were not welcome in South Carolina in any shape or form, thus ensuring that her state's residents are paid less.

I can't imagine why Ford or GM or Chrysler would want to build a plant in South Carolina, but if they did, presumably Haley's statement means she would send them packing, thus costing South Carolinians thousands of jobs.

What do you suppose the state's motto is?  "We pay shit wages, and when you're hungry because you don't get paid enough to buy food, we won't feed you either"?

What the fuck do you suppose they put in the water in South Carolina that causes such callous disregard for their fellow man?

Peace,
emaycee