Want a job?
by Dr. S.
Hand over your Facebook password.
Privacy rights and dignity are for rich folk. You don’t like it, you can sleep outside, peasant.
Gingrich: No pay for work
Editor’s note: This is fake. But, unfortunately, not fake enough.
DES MOINES, IOWA — In response to sagging poll numbers ahead of Tuesday’s caucuses, Republican presidential hopeful and former frontrunner Newt Gingrich unveiled a plan to decouple wages from jobs that he insists will bolster a struggling economy.
The plan, Gingrich’s first major policy announcement since unveiling his child labor initiative last month, would give businesses the option of paying employees in something other than money.
“In this time of economic crisis, we must re-examine this outmoded system of financial compensation for work performed,” Gingrich said in a speech before the Iowa Chamber of Commerce. “Government must free job creators from the burden of paying employees with currency. That’s currency businesses could use to expand and to create jobs — although they are under no obligation to do so. Actually, there’s nothing stopping them from simply pocketing this windfall.
“Nothing whatsoever,” Gingrich added.
Instead of money, the plan calls for businesses to pay employees in the form of tickets redeemable for merchandise at Dave and Buster’s Restaurant, Bar and Arcade.
Children enrolled in Gingrich’s child-labor initiative would receive tickets redeemable at Chuck E. Cheese’s.
Stopping short of abolishing payment in the form of money, the plan would simply reduce the federal minimum wage to zero.
“And we would let our partners in the business community do the rest,” Gingrich said.
The plan already has received a warm reception among congressional Republicans, with both House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., indicating that they would support such a plan, but only if it were accompanied by concessions from Democrats.
The announcement comes on the heels of Gingrich’s child labor initiative, which polled well among Republican voters.
Gingrich’s jobs plan for children, widely referred to as the “Clean the School You Once Attended” initiative, would teach financially disadvantaged children in poor school districts the value of underpaid menial labor through what Gingrich calls “little-hands-on” experience.
Gingrich campaign spokesman R.C. Hammond pointed out that the plan would free struggling school districts from the burden placed on them by “greedy janitors.” In addition, because the plan calls for pulling students away from classroom instruction for two thirds of every school week, the plan also addresses the potential problem of an educated lower class.
“I think the problems that would present are self-evident,” Hammond said.
Correction: A previous version of this story reported that Gingrich introduced this plan in a speech before a joint meeting of the Iowa Nazi Party and a local klavern of the Ku Klux Klan. Although the confusion is entirely understandable, we regret the error.
Cross-posted at Redsoxville.
One in two
That’s half, folks. Half of all Americans. So it ain’t just you.
Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.
The latest census data depict a middle class that’s shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government’s safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families.
“Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010, but for many low-income families with work-related and medical expenses, they are considered too ‘rich’ to qualify,” said Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty.
“The reality is that prospects for the poor and the near poor are dismal,” he said. “If Congress and the states make further cuts, we can expect the number of poor and low-income families to rise for the next several years.”Congressional Republicans and Democrats are sparring over legislation that would renew a Social Security payroll tax reduction, part of a year-end political showdown over economic priorities that could also trim unemployment benefits, freeze federal pay and reduce entitlement spending.
And in case you think establishment conservatives are unsympathetic to your plight, they are.
Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, questioned whether some people classified as poor or low-income actually suffer material hardship. He said that while safety-net programs have helped many Americans, they have gone too far. He said some people described as poor live in decent-size homes, drive cars and own wide-screen TVs.
What? Some poor people still have cars they aren’t living in? So much more work to do, eh Robbie?
In the meantime, you poor folk should stop complaining and watch that big-screen TV.
UPDATE: I have been kicking this story around in my head for a little while and I wondered why a quote from a Heritage Foundation douchebag is even in the story. I went back to the story and saw no corresponding quote from an advocate for the poor. The closest thing was the quote, included in the snippet above, from Sheldon Danziger, the poverty expert from the University of Michigan. Being an expert in poverty doesn’t necessarily mean he is an advocate for the poor, although he may be. It just means he knows what he is talking about.
It’s just another example of the MSM’s fetish with the bullshit idea of “balance,” which in this case apparently means that if you report that nearly half of all Americans are impoverished or low income, you have to find some asshole willing to say that poverty isn’t so bad.
I guess the next time the AP reports on a rape, it will have to find someone to say that rape isn’t so bad. You know, for balance.
Hey, if you are a reporter writing about a rape and need that “rape isn’t so bad” quote to ensure complete, balanced reportage, try this guy. One caveat: The victim has to be Latino.
Cross-posted at Redsoxville.
We don’t need no stinkin’ principles
I think pieces like this, which analyze the incoherent, inconsistent public positions of candidates, in this case Newt Gingrich (with an honorable mention to Mitt Romney’s “ever-changing stripes”), while valuable in calling bullshit in very specific terms on bullshit artists masquerading as public servants, miss the larger point.
If politicians’ words and deeds seem to be connected more to the prevailing political winds than to the deeply held beliefs of the speaker, maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe it’s time to abandon the notion that these politicians apply their deeply held principles and values to their public utterances and policy positions, or that such deeply held principles and values even exist. Rather than respond with shock and outrage every time a politician does or says something that contradicts what they have done and said in the past, we should look for a metric that more consistently explains (and could predict) what we see. Maybe the only underlying political philosophy at work here is winning, and the only relevant deeply held values are those of the wealthy individuals and institutions that can make or break the political ambitions of these aspiring lapdogs.
If the trainwreck George W. Bush administration was good for anything, it was for the development of a powerful sense of political cynicism. That administration’s polices were widely criticized as being dumb because they did nothing to help the vast majority of Americans (99 percent, according to some estimates), let alone mankind. But those policies appear dumb only if one assumes they are actually designed to help the vast majority of Americans and/or mankind. If one assumes that those same policies were designed to move vast amounts of money into the hands of the wealthiest humans on earth, then one can’t possibly argue with the ruthless effectiveness of those policies.
Here’s a handy rule of thumb: If politicians have to stop to think before discussing one of their “deeply held values,” it ain’t all that deeply held. Peoples’ principles don’t have to be written on note cards (or their palms) to be remembered. And unless you are very rich, stop assuming that politicians care about you. Their individual utterances might change, but the class of people that benefits from their actions doesn’t.
And those stories that call bullshit would be more valuable if they focused less on the bullshit and more on who benefits.
(Cross-posted at Redsoxville)
Newt Gingrich, scumbag
Not news, I know. Just another example of a Republican reaching into the past for “new” ideas. In this case, Newtie argues in favor of child labor.
Homes of the candidates
Makes you understand why these people think cutting taxes for the rich is a good idea.
Too bad the piece doesn’t mention that Michelle Bachmann used a government-backed loan to buy her new home right before calling for the dismantling of Freddie and Fannie.
How they voted
the House, on HR 358, aka the “Let Women Die Act.”
H.R. 358 overturns decades of precedent guaranteeing people access to lifesaving emergency care, including abortion care and says its ok that a pregnant woman fighting for her life be left to die. [...]
“This bill is a collection of dangerous ideas that will undermine women’s health,” said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “Most devastating, the bill eliminates protections for patients seeking care in emergency circumstances, and would allow a hospital to deny lifesaving abortion care to a woman, even if a doctor deems it necessary.”
Low funds fee
Mrs. S and I dipped into our meager retirement savings — again — in an effort to bridge the gap between now and whenever we can land jobs that will help us return to what historians refer to as the “middle class.”
As I am on the phone with the people who oversee our retirement fund, deciding how much we are going to need to survive in the near term and how many more years we are willing to work (assuming jobs exist then), the woman tells me that there is a low-funds fee of $35, to which they will be helping themselves before they send us a check.
Can someone tell me the purpose, or at least the rationale, for these fees, other than to set up a barrier for have-nots who are on the cusp of becoming have-somes, another hurdle for the poor who just don’t get it and insist on trying to live like the well-to-do, with accounts and savings and financial people and portfolios and such? I don’t see how accounts with less money cost a company more money or more time or more effort to maintain than those with more money in them. Seems to me that accounts with less money probably have less activity than larger ones and, therefore, should cost companies less to maintain. If that’s the case, shouldn’t they charge an “excess funds fee” for accounts with lots of money and lots of activity? I understand that companies don’t want to create a deterrent for people looking to open large accounts. But they don’t mind deterring poor people from having retirement accounts, mutual funds and other sources of capital gains. Fuck them, right?
Of course, these companies could charge fees based solely on the amount of account activity, without regard to the amount of money in the account.
Not discriminating against the poor? Gee, there’s a novel thought.
Scum
Hell is too good for some people.
Then a new father at the age of 19, Mr. Yuan was holding his 52-day-old daughter at a bus stop when a half-dozen men sprang from a white government van and demanded his marriage certificate.
He did not have one. Both he and his daughter’s mother were below the legal age for marriage.
Nor did he have 6,000 renminbi, then about $745, to pay the fine he said they demanded if he wanted to keep his child. He was left with a plastic bag holding her baby clothes and some powdered formula.
“They are pirates,” he said last month in an interview at his home, a half-hour trek up a narrow mountain path between terraced rice paddies.
Nearly six years later, he said, he still hopes to relay a message to his daughter: “Please come home as soon as possible.”
Mr. Yuan’s daughter was among at least 16 children who were seized by family planning officials between 1999 and late 2006 in Longhui County, an impoverished rural area in Hunan, a southern Chinese province, parents, grandparents and other residents said in interviews last month.
Discrimination
What millenium is this again?
A high school southeast of Little Rock would not let a black student be valedictorian though she had the highest grade-point average, and wouldn’t let her mom speak to the school board about it until graduation had passed, the graduate claims in Federal Court.
Kymberly Wimberly, 18, got only a single B in her 4 years at McGehee Secondary School, and loaded up on Honors and Advanced Placement classes. She had the highest G.P.A. and says the school’s refusal to let her be sole valedictorian was part of a pattern of discrimination against black students.
Wimberly says that despite earning the highest G.P.A. of the Class of 2011, and being informed of it by a school counselor, “school administrators and personnel treated two other white students as heir[s] apparent to the valedictorian and salutatorian spots.”
Wimberly’s mother is the school’s “certified media specialist.” She says in the federal discrimination complaint that after her daughter had been told she would be valedictorian, the mother heard “in the copy room that same day, other school personnel expressed concern that Wimberly’s status as valedictorian might cause a ‘big mess.’”
McGehee Secondary School is predominantly white, and 46 percent African-American, according to the complaint. Bratton says that the day after she heard the “big mess” comment, McGehee Principal Darrell Thompson, a defendant, told her “that he decided to name a white student as co-valedictorian,” although the white student had a lower G.P.A.
Bratton says she tried to protest the decision to the school board, but defendant Superintendent Thomas Gathen would not let her speak, because she allegedly had “filled out the wrong form. Instead of ‘public comments,’ Gather [sic] said Bratton should have asked for ‘public participation.’” The superintendent told her she could not appeal his decision until the June 28 school board meeting; graduation was May 13.
Colbert’s take
On our insightful media’s rush to judgment on the terrorism in Norway.
Recent Comments