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CHINA'S GREAT LEAP BACKWARDS
Peter Kwong
gives us the "New China" without illusions: from the
"millionaires' fair" in Shanghai, with $60,000 diamond-studded dog leashes
to one
of the most savagely repressed working class and peasantry on
the planet. How China's
leaders swapped Marx and Mao for Milton Friedman. Alexander Cockburn
on What's wrong with the U.S. left.
They're sitting in darkened rooms weaving conspiracy fantasies
about 9/11; they're blogging; they're confusing a medium with
a movement; they're not doing enough to stop the war in Iraq.
John Ross
takes us along the stormy trail of the Mexican election. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers
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Whatever led to the metastasis of corporate
demons inside the brain of the Democratic Party over the last
thirty years, it has paid off the business establishment. The
cost of freezing the minimum wage has deprived millions of working
Americans of trillions of dollars for their necessities of life.
A few Democrats, most prominently
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, have championed keeping the minimum
wage up with inflation for years. But the Republicans and the
somnolent Democratic Party have combined to defeat Kennedy's
bills over and over again.
Last year the federal minimum
wage at $5.15 per hour was $3.50 below in purchasing power of
what it was in 1968. Today's minimum wage has the lowest purchasing
power since 1949 when economic productivity per worker was a
fraction of what it is today, when the super-rich corporate bosses
had not become hyper-rich averaging over $8000 an hour.
Add no health insurance for
the working poor and there are added pressures on livelihoods
for parents and children.
The last increase to $5.15
per hour was in 1997. Except for one year of restraint, members
of Congress have zipped their annual pay grab through the House
and Senate every year. Just the increases in that period amount
to about three times the annual minimum wage income for millions
of American laborers. No wonder poverty has been on the increase.
The abdication of the Congressional
Democrats, even when they were the majority and Clinton was President,
on the living wage matter has cost them as well. More than any
other single issue, save possibly health insurance for all, their
reluctance to boldly and visibly champion the living wage has
cost them the Presidential and Congressional elections.
People want politicians to
STAND FOR THE PEOPLE, not grovel beneath the corporations.
Mindful of the political appeal
of the living wage issue in our country since the onset of the
industrial age, I sent an open letter in May 2004 to the Democratic
leadership-Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Senator Tom Daschle, urging
them to pledge that members of their Party would resist all future
raises for the lawmakers until the federal minimum wage was restored
to its 1968 purchasing power. Hardly revolutionary.
But for Pelosi and Daschle
and their leadership circle, that was too much alienation of
the Wal-Marts, the McDonalds, other fast food and retail chains
and their allies. They never responded to my letter and, along
with John Kerry, plunged headlong to defeat in November. Meanwhile,
though opposed by Governor Jeb Bush and the fast food chains
with big television gadgets, a Florida referendum raising the
minimum wage by a dollar won with a 72% majority in November.
Twenty-one states lately have
raised their minimum wage above the federal minimum. None have
reached the 1968 purchasing power level yet.
The Democrats finally sense the minimum wage issue to be a bright
line position with the retrograde Republicans whose ideological
heads are in the sands. But look how long the Democrats took
to wake up their earlier political history.
At last, led by Senator Kennedy,
they are attaching amendments to legislation and two weeks ago
got 52 Senators to back raising the wage to $7.25 in three stages.
At that level, minimum wage workers would earn an additional
$4,370 a year to support their families.
However, the Republican filibuster
opposition can only be overcome by getting 60 votes, so Kennedy
has a ways to go. But the issue is getting hotter, though far
from being visible to most Americans, including poor families.
The best thing going for the
Democrats' November prospects is bonehead John Boehner, Republican
majority leader of the House who has dug in his heels. His spokesman,
Kevin Madden, said Congressman Boehner "remains convinced
that a minimum wage hike will destroy jobs." Rep. Ray Lahood
(R-IL) is trying to convince his leader, John Boehner, that raising
the minimum wage "is a no-brainer. It's just something that
we should do."
The loss of jobs argument is
the Republican fig leaf hiding added bundles of campaign dollars
that ooze intro the Party's pores when the minimum wage remains
frozen in time. As one wag put it, by that reasoning, the Republicans
should push down the minimum wage to add more jobs.
Princeton economists blew that
"job loss" claim out of the water after the 1997 increase.
In the four years after the last minimum wage increase, 11 million
new jobs were added including 600,000 restaurants jobs.
More to the point is the public
philosophy that working full-time should provide enough income
for your family's necessities. There is also the matter of simple
fairness. Wal-Mart's CEO made $12,000 an hour, plus perks, in
a recent year, while hundreds of thousands of his workers were
making between $6 and $9 per hour, with very few if any benefits.
Rest assured, neither the Democratic
nor the Republican leadership will stop their annual pay raise.
The House already has passed their pay grab.
Shame is a rare commodity when
it comes to the moral authority to govern.
Why do we let them get away
with such Marie Antoinette values?
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