Labor Day: Is It A Crime?

 

The $7.25 minimum wage can’t pay all the bills in any state https://t.co/wTk5JHdYNQ

— Vixen Strangely (@VixenStrangely) September 7, 2021

We talk sometimes about "working for a living", so I just want to interject that working doesn't always provide a living. It provides the barebones of existing, maybe feeding oneself and ones' kids, inadequately, going into soul-disrupting debt at times, relying on various kinds of assistance at others.

See What Obama Has Meant?

So, here are some news stories that matter a lot, and in the course of the 2016 election stuff, I might not have given them each the attention they deserve--but here goes:

Eric Fanning, a gay man, has been confirmed by the US Senate for the position of Secretary of the Army.  DADT was only ended in President Obama's first term. His hold for several months was not due to his orientation, but because a Republican Senator wanted assurances that Guantanamo prisoners would not be transferred to a certain US facility. In other news, the GOP is really the reason why we never closed GITMO. We would have GITMO squared under any GOP president.

Obamacare has been a success, reducing the percentage of US uninsured to single digits.  We could do better, especially if states (all with Republican governors, by the way) all accepted the Medicare expansion to cover some of the poorest and sickest. Obamacare would be under the gun in the first term of a Republican President.  Hillary Clinton would like to build on this success with a Medicare buy-in program.  This is a really great idea.

The Obama Administration has doubled the salary threshold of workers who benefit from the overtime rule, meaning more middle/working class people get compensated for the hours they work. The Obama Administration has supported fair pay, higher minimum wage, and decent working conditions. Hillary Clinton will do the same. You are not getting that assurance from Donald "wages are too high" Trump no matter what the hell he says.

In just a day, the news stories remind us of what significant things President Obama has been doing, and still does, even in what should be considered the "lame duck" period of his administration. These are meaningful things to real people. They aren't "paper" signifiers.

Voting matters, and who gets hold of an office matters. And a President needs a sympathetic Congress to get his larger agenda through. It bears repeating and rinsing and repeating. It really matters. A lot. There is no "principle" respected by sitting the election out that compares to the damage that gets done when people don't aim to at least prevent harm, if not root for an active good. So that's where I stand.

The Wages are Too Damn High

I couldn't blog last night about the debates because they literally took a melon-baller to my cranium. Two GOP debates is a kind of brutality. Things like listening to Chris Christie's baseless assertion that Hillary Clinton was coming for anyone's wallet or just pretending that Ben Carson can make any statement regarding foreign policy that actually makes sense in any world whatsoever are patience-exhausting.

But check the tone right from the top of the main card debate--Trump on the minimum wage. Wages are too high. He would not raise the minimum wage. Just last debate, Carly Fiorina said that she believed that a minimum wage was actually unconstitutional. Donald Trump reiterated his position earlier today regarding wages being too high.

This is bullshit. This is the ugliest and dumbest level of bullshit and anyone who thinks America can be great when we are actually bidding to lower the standard of living for American workers is foolish. We want to compete with third-world nations in providing low-income workers?

Let me restate that--we want our elites to sell our labor to corporations for bottom-dollar prices?

Hey rubes! The Donald wants to lower your salary to make the rich people in America great again, get it?

Know Your Class War: Your Brain on Poverty

A recent study has found that children in poverty have smaller brains than children raised in better economic circumstances. I think we can be fairly certain that malnutrition plays a big role in the underdevelopment of brain function and size in children, and that epigenetic factors like the stresses of poverty (and the stress of a child's parents), factor into this dismaying discovery. 

This is why I border on fury with these debates on food assistance in a country where one in five kids last year were on food assistance. (I touched briefly on how almost Puritanical new Kansas welfare regs seem to be in my last post near the end). People who are against government food assistance seem to think that going to bed hungry builds character and turns people into go-getters. What it actually does is cause developmental delays in children and set them up for continued set-backs as an adult, if not encourage generation to generation poverty. When I see a scheme to restrict the kinds of food purchased with food stamps by eliminating classes of healthful proteins like fish and steak (like cans of tuna? skirts steaks? those aren't luxury items), I simply imagine an actual hostility towards the people on this kind of assistance. There is actually little abuse in these programs at all, and if a parent wants to treat their toddler to fishsticks, some high and mighty state legislator shouldn't considering it a sumptuary violation.

Also consider, a lot of people receiving food assistance do work, they just don't make enough to make rent, utilities, and still feed themselves. Is anyone at all confused about food being the fuel humans need to work? So if there really is a bias against food handouts, wouldn't the proper solution be making work pay enough that people could eat decently on their wages?

But it is something to think about. It makes you wonder--or it doesn't--when people who rail against the unfairness of something like the estate tax to the children of the wealthy on one hand, want to cut back on the food going into the mouths of the poor on the other. And that is why I call these blog posts: "Know Your Class War".

Bedbugs and Bread Bags

Sometimes I think us East Coasters are a little sort-changed when it comes to the SOTU speech and the rebuttals--it's late by the time all the coverage is done. I have to get up for my paying gig the next day, and I usually have to get to bed before I've been able to properly ruminate on the President's speech, let alone the rebuttal. Especially not if there are five rebuttals.

What is a blogger to make of five rebuttals from the opposition party? Given that there's an "official" GOP response, I have to guess that the "takes" from different "rebuttals" have to be taken individually, on their own merits, and not view them cumulatively. I mean--would that be fair--five against one? (Well, yeah. I did think Obama did a heckuva job. Easily worth about five of those other speeches.)

See, I'm not what you'd call a pro, like Ron "No 'I' in Leadership, well, except that one" Fournier. And the benefit of blogging for seven years is that my regulars pretty much know where I stand on the major points President Obama brought up (raising the minimum wage--for it, equal pay for women--for it, addressing climate change--for it, land wars in the middle east--against'em), so I just feel like a point by point of the SOTU itself is pointless. In general, he looked more at home giving the speech this year and his zinger about winning two elections himself took some of that expectation that Dems losing the midterms overall would leave him "checked out" and lame-ducking it until January 2017 away. He's still "all in" as far as I can tell. But that's just my opinion.

Minimum Wage: The Huey Lewis Rebuttal

I've started blog posts a handful of times this week regarding things Republicans are saying about the minimum wage versus things that are, well, so. I keep jettisoning those posts because it's intricate, and repeats things I've said in my "Know Your Class War" posts anyway.  So when FL Gov. Rick Scott indicates that wages are set by the private sector (which as a businessman, he knows nothing about, hmm?), or WI Gov. Scott Walker indicates he doesn't know what the minimum wage is for (and how low should it be set, dear--room and board? There's a name for that set-up) they get my hollow, jaded laughter. Sure, NJ Gov. Christie is tired of hearing about the minimum wage; he knows what the Republican governors whose races he's supporting have said on the record about it--and it's kind of not-so-good.

But even in campaigns for other state positions, GOP candidates have said some interesting things--like minimum wage jobs aren't "real jobs".  If you get out of your comfy bed, put on some dress-code duds--especially if it's a uniform, and punch a time clock to do something you're scheduled to do, that sounds like a real job to me. The idea that the realness of a job is based on what it pays and not on the employee being a real person with expenses and basic needs, is a big part of the problem. Sure, maybe parents might prefer their kids get better jobs than minimum wage ones, but if minimum wage jobs are what they can get, maybe they'd like it to be enough to actually live on--to say nothing of what minimum wage earners' kids might feel about their household security.

Sure, people take jobs that offer lower wages than they can live on--half a loaf is better than none, right? They are basically taking what they are given because they are working for a living.