It's the Minimum All Right
Press Action
Saturday, June 26, 2004
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/beckman06262004/
By Scott Beckman
John Kerry has come out with a grand (also pronounced “granhd” or “grond") plan to serve the interests of the working poor: raise the minimum wage to $7.00 an hour by 2007. Here’s my response to that idea—“PATHETIC!”
I haven’t served in the Senate for twenty years, but even I know that our government’s official poverty standard says that a working head of household needs a wage of at least $8.78 an hour TODAY, not three years from now, to provide a family of four with the bare essentials necessary to sustain life.
By knowingly allowing U.S. companies to pay workers less money than what than is needed to live, Democrats and Republicans have over the last generation conspired to undermine one of the bedrock values upon which this great nation was founded: the right to life. While erudite politicians spend some more time arguing whether or not this fuzzy math needs more study, this straight-talking citizen will call it what it is—STATE-SPONSORED SLAVERY.
Kerry’s indifferent approach to the minimum wage tells me an awful lot about the man and the Democratic Party he is leading. All that talk about being a deep thinker with carefully nuanced positions is way too true. Man, this minimum wage turkey is basted in nuance. It is a carefully crafted half-measure full of cooking time for political maneuvering. If it weren’t so transparent, it would be a brilliant contribution to the long litany of ploys by Democrats to attract just enough progressive votes to win only to sell them out later with the old shake and bake.
And it tells me that at least some of that talk about this Democrat being a champion of progressive causes is a bunch of hooey. If Kerry were a real progressive champion, he’d raise the bar to $9.00 and make it a priority on January 20, 2005 because slavery is wrong and paying workers a living wage is the right thing to do. How’s that for some progressive nuance?
Oh, I can just see and hear the shiny-toed spin-meisters striking knowing poses and saying things like, “Oh, but you’d put America out of business,” and “Something’s better than nothing?” Well, they can make up their own arguments and you can make up your own minds about those, but here’s my answer. Yeah, and maybe we should have kept the plantations. It ain’t good enough. It’s not even close. Over the past generation, the richest folks in America have had an incredibly successful run at avoiding taxes, gutting the U.S. Treasury, and taking our tax dollars and jobs offshore while sticking the rest of us and our kids with an unmanageable load of their bad debts. Now, the richest one percent, many of who are financing Kerry’s campaign with record contributions (what ever happened to campaign reform?), are sitting on something like ninety percent of the nation’s wealth. Well, I’ll stand with Bishop Desmond Tutu who in opposing apartheid in South Africa said something to the effect, “I don’t want your table scraps. I want my full plates of rights.” I stand for the elimination of economic apartheid in America.
If I were Ralph Nader, I’d raise the ante to $9.00 and hour and make an unequivocal play for the millions of workers whose lives would be improved if a living wage law took affect across the land. If it’s true that people vote their pocketbooks, this is, how can I say it, the real deal. At least give folks an idea of what the power of their vote really is. And just to underline the point, raise corporate taxes to pay for a universal child-care system that’s needed in order to get to work on time on a regular basis.
If business doesn’t like those terms, let ‘em move to India. We’ll be better off without them if they leave sooner than later anyway. At least if they’re gone, their fingers will be out of what’s left of the American pie and we might be able to salvage a nation worth living in. Given the chance, they’ll just gut it and skin it altogether and leave us by the roadside later anyway. I personally like our chances better without ‘em.
If it’s a revelation that Kerry’s position on the minimum wage is nothing more than a promise waiting to be broken, then you really should take some time to check out the tortured thinking that went into his approach to repealing the “Bush tax cut.” Kerry likes to say that so he can sound like he’s going to get tough on the companies that have been ripping us off, but, presto, he’s creating enough “Kerry tax breaks” to keep things right where they are. Yup, the old bait and switch (W’s buds called it a “shell game") and I’ll bet you can figure out who are some of the con men drooling over that trough of new dough by looking into who’s making record contributions to his campaign. What a surprise, eh? This is, how can I say it, another one of the real laughers in his cynical “They’ll Fall for Anything” vision of America.
Oh, did you see Kerry’s deficit reduction plan? He says he’ll cut it in half in four years. Will this guy do ANYTHING full tilt? No, he is the Nuance Candidate, the stand for next to nothing until the last poll comes out closer, the reason most folks don’t get close to politics for fear something gooey will rub off on them, the reason the Democratic Party isn’t crushing the Republicans, and the perfect excuse for some progressives to steer a very wide path around the Democratic Party.
Scott Beckman, srbeckman@yahoo.com, is Development Director for the Northern Pueblos Housing Authority in Santa Fe, NM. He can’t believe how far we’ve let things go.