Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Congress Raises Its Salary, But Not Our Wages

You know what's really fucking stupid? Especially in an election year in which your party--the one that has maintained a stranglehold on Congress for over a decade--stands to lose big in the face of lobbying scandals and indictments, scandals over warrantless wiretapping and unchecked abuses of executive power, the torture of prisoners and the massacres of civilians, and revelations of lies without end by the Bush regime about Iraq?

I'll tell you what's really fucking stupid. The U.S. House of Representatives voting to raise members' own salaries while the Senate denies an increase in the federal minimum wage.

Forget the utter bullshit naysayers of increasing the minimum wage try to pawn off on you. Contrary to the lies you've probably been told, raising wages for the poor and middle class will not result in layoffs and higher prices.

Think about the fallacy of what these naysayers are telling you for a moment; why, in what is allegedly a consumer economy, would you not want 95% of the population to be able to circulate more money back into the economy? The bottom and middle rungs of the income ladder are the ones that spend the money that circulates throughout the economy. We buy the products, which allows businesses to earn profit and keep prices down. If people living at or below the poverty line, or in the middle income level, have more money to spend why on Earth would anyone seriously expect us not to spend it on the things we need to get by?

According to CNN's Lou Dobbs:

Raising the minimum wage to $7.50 would positively affect the lives of more than 8 million workers, including an estimated 760,000 single mothers and 1.8 million parents with children under 18. But even this 46 percent increase would get them only to the poverty line. Don't you think these families just might need that cost-of-living increase a bit more than our elected officials who are paid nearly $170,000 a year?

With no Congressional action on raising the minimum wage since 1997, inflation has eroded wages. The minimum wage in the 21st century is $2 lower in real dollars than it was four decades ago and now stands at its lowest level since 1955, according to the Economic Policy Institute and Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Also, since the last time Congress increased the minimum wage for our lowest-paid workers, buying power has fallen by 25 percent. Yet over that time our elected representatives have given themselves eight pay raises totaling more than 23 percent.

Does that or does that not make sense?

In an election year in which the GOP's moral and ethical bankruptcy have never been clearer, in which the number of dead American soldiers in Bush's misadventure in Iraq has passed the 2,500 mark, and in which Bush's constant abuses of power become frighteningly more blatant every day, showing the party's utter contempt for the average American by denying us a wage increase while at the same time raising its own salaries is nothing short of complete and total arrogance.

This is why it is so vitally important for you to get your asses to the polls this November and vote Democrat, Green, Progressive, whatever it is as long as it's not Republican. When one-party rules goes uninterrupted for any length of time, corruption seeps in and becomes the norm. The people get left out of the equation, unless we rise up and demonstrate with our vote and our scrutiny that such crimes will not go unpunished.

Friday, June 23, 2006

SG Interview with Greg Palast

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Monday, June 12, 2006

His Rudeness Calls It Again

I have to admit, I get a huge kick out of reading the profane, prophetic Rude Pundit. Yes, he does say the word 'fuck' a little bit too much. And maybe his fixation on describing acts of sexual perversion so depraved they can only be applied to members of the Bush regime and their enablers in the right-wing press does wear a little thin sometimes.

But you've got to admit, he does know how to get a point across. Like imagining George Orwell laughing his ribcage apart in his grave at how the assholes running things at Gitmo have spun the suicides of three detainees as acts of psychological warfare, instead of the desperate escapes of men so worn out from torture and humiliation with no end in sight that they saw no other way of freeing themselves except to take their own lives.

Let me be abundantly clear: caging a human being up like an animal (regardless of what he has or hasn't done to deserve it), torturing him, depriving him of any and all contact with the outside world, and reducing him to the level of a mere beast does not induce him to kill himself as an act of warfare against his captors. It induces that human being to kill himself because he just cannot take it anymore.

Thanks once again to His Rudeness for telling it like it is.

Sunday, June 04, 2006

O'Lielly Once Again Dishonors American Troops

This made my blood boil when I viewed it. And it stands as but the latest example of why Bill O'Reilly is a worthless pile of shit.

Keith Olbermann once again exposed the Faux News star's lies, this time concerning the massacre of American soldiers by nazis at Malmedy.

What had actually happened was American prisoners of war were rounded up in the town of Malmedy and shot by their nazi captors.

However, in his usual attempts to justify the heinous acts committed at Abu Ghraib prison and at Haditha in Iraq to guest Wesley Clark--a former Army general and former commander of NATO forces in Kosovo, O'Reilly for the second time flipped it around to falsely accuse the Americans of having mercilessly shot nazi prisoners.

This shit is beyond the realm of indecency folks. It ventures into obscenity by spitting on the memory of American soldiers murdered by the nazis, in an attempt to justify crimes committed in an illegal war of choice. O'Reilly deliberately lied--twice--about our soldiers of more than sixty years ago, for the sake of pride and ratings.

Everyone who watches Faux News even casually ought to be offended. So much so, that they should call for the immediate termination of Bill O'Reilly's employment at the cable network and a full apology by Rupert Murdoch for having subjected viewers to his bile.

Not that Murdoch would ever listen much less comply with such demands. But still, it would at least have the benefit of letting him know what we the viewers think of the filth that is Bill O'Lielly.