April 15: NYC took a bridge, Chicago & Seattle took the streets, Portland took Town Hall, and Denver took the cake

Photo by Laura Avant
DENVER, COLORADO- Yes, Denver’s FIGHT FOR FIFTEEN march kept to the sidewalks. When ISO members (organizing the local “15 NOW” group) pushed the boundaries, SEIU marshals criticized them not just for agitating, but for pushing their socialist agenda. Occupy Denver activists held a prominent banner which referenced reigning minimum wage champion Socialist Alternative. Most of the attendees were union members whose representatives have obviously failed to credit the SA party or Seattle Councilwoman Kshama Sawant for the nation’s first $15 minimum wage victory. We fielded questions all evening from marchers eager to know if an SA chapter was brewing in Colorado.

TO BE FAIR, Denver’s march did take an adventurous turn, by Denver standards, but the rally began as might be expected from an event dominated by the SEIU and other corporate unions and their immobile nonprofit cohorts. Denver’s 4-15 rally started in the middle of CU-Denver’s Auraria campus, invisible from any street and unseeable to even partipants arriving, until they turned the corner to find it, behind the Tivoli Center.

Then organizers had a lineup of speakers which stretched well past expectations, trimming the crowd by over a third as supporters opted to slip away due to the unexpected cold front. Next participants were admonished to stick to the sidewalk, even on campus grounds, and applaud the police who’d agreed to permit the march. We were heading to a neighboring McDonalds, at least we were taking the scenic route.

Throughout the rally and march, a brass band played, and members of the local band Flobots led chants and songs. This lent a fun energy but it did preclude ordinary marchers speaking out or centering the vocal messaging on anything more than the generic themes of financial discontent. Even as crowds lingered in front of McDonalds, the band played on, when poignant denunciations might have provided a suitable climax.

Fortunately, a “Silver Brigade” had been deployed to patronize the fast food monster beforehand, to prevent managers from being able to lock the doors when the marchers arrived. McDs managers did lock the doors and they discussed a number of interesting defensive tactics under the noses of our operatives, but the managers were ultimately unable to refuse senior citizens demanding they be allowed to exit. This exit was timed to allow the Fight-for-Fifteen procession to march straight up to the counter, demanding a living wage, etc. Their objections heard, the marchers left and eventually crossed the street and dissolved into shortcuts through the Auraria campus.

(Note: My account of our inside job may appear indiscrete, but I include it purposefully. One, because even with advance knowledge it’s a difficult tactic to prevent, and two, because organizers of successive protests of establishments such as McDs need to include this tactic if they don’t want to remain locked out.)

Photo by Laura Avant
The highlight for me was infusing the event theme with the S-word. Desperate as they were today to fight for a living wage, vowing “we’ll be back” or else to “shut it down”, these union adherants will shortly become the usual Democrats, waving the Hillary banners, as if there was no alternative.

Whose fault is it that America’s minimum wage has been allowed to lapse below the poverty level? Is the responsibility not in part that of the unions’? The SEIU is driving the official “Fight for Fifteen” campaign, but only after socialists have led the way, as they did whenever the labor movement made its gains.

WalMart Ticker…

Says they’ve saved Americans $37Billion+.

Of course that’s comparing themselves to “Major” retail outlets, people who routinely sell for less and offer better selection aren’t worthy of comparison, I guess.

And doesn’t take into account the notion that they “saved” their employees a Negative Few Billion by buying their labor from them at a MORE than inverse percentage amount

If Wally World sells, as they claim, at an average of 10% lower price, but pay their employees 30% less than Retail Industry Standard and not counting their employees in countries where the minimum wage is 40 cents a day or even no minimum wage at all.

I would have to learn actual Algebra to map out the equation.

All this from sitting looking at their Self-Adulatory home page waiting to sign in so I can check on a prescription.

Republicans admit! Not-Joe the Not-Plumber Welfare Fraud!!

They’re calling it persecution and retaliation for standing up and basically Lying His Ass Off for McCain…

But there is a closed investigation by the Ohio welfare officials. The only way there could be an investigation by the agency is the Not-Plumber, who says he makes more than three times Minimum Wage, $40K per year… was getting public assistance of some type.
And still not being able to pay his taxes.

The nature of the investigation is sealed, “privacy issues”, but the fact remains, if he hadn’t gotten Welfare the welfare officers couldn’t investigate.

Protective Services, say you? Not so, says I.

That would be something started by the Police, not the welfare folks.

Now, I know, somewhere deep in his nasty little heart, John McCain actually does care as much for the people who only earn Minimum Wage, as he does for somebody making what should be a comfortable living.

Just, you know, voting against raising Minimum Wage every time it comes up for a vote, spends more in a DAY to run the Straight Talk Express Bus than a minimum wage worker makes in ten months.

Never disagrees with the Repuke-lickin’ position that “Working Poor” is a contradiction in terms.

And that deregulation, lots of it, breaking unions, Tax breaks for the rich, all the goodies that would supposedly make a non-union non-certified non-plumber probably would, according to Repuke Propaganda, make him a successful businessman, right…

But he apparently not only couldn’t pay his very low taxes he also took Welfare.

Now, it’s not unusual for Republicans to lie.

In fact, they make a habit of it and they seem to be proud of how effectively they Lie.

Kind of like, a Young, healthy Not-Joe the Not-Plumber supposedly supports the war but ain’t over there fighting in it.

The Personal Cowardice inherent in it is deeply ingrained in the Republican Experience.

But if anything, the fact that Sam the Non-Plumber couldn’t make it in what the Repukes feel is the Ideal Business Environment, then blames it on somebody who was not in power and policies that are not even in place… and have never actually been in place in America.

That’s equally as Hypocritical as their positions on the war.

Verifying the Sarah Palin Chronicles

Verifying the Sarah Palin Chronicles

Palin family unwed mothersSarah Palin is probably like most people, she’d rather her medical records remain confidential. Most of us resist even the indignity of taking a drug test to qualify for a job. But executive level positions require the insurance of a bill of health, clean or not. Unfortunately for Sarah, the employers making the hiring decision for the Executive Branch are We the People.

I do hope there’s an Executive Privilege to invoke which can protect the details of some categories. If FDR could keep his wheelchair a secret, I don’t mind not knowing about mental health lapses, STDs, or conditions Palin had to invent to score antibiotics for a spouse’s infection. Sarah may not seem bright, or educated, but TV viewers can all attest she doesn’t lack sanity or stamina. I doubt a psychiatrist would consider her behavior to be in any way aberrant for a public figure.

What probably really chafes Sarah is that fewer of her viewers seem concerned for her health, than are eager to check out her strange pregnancy story. Ordinarily, I’d think reproductive health histories should be the last to merit scrutiny, but what if the details in question concern a politician who wants to make it her business to regulate the reproductive rights of others?

Should a daughter’s right to privacy supersede a policy maker’s family-values facade? If a politician wants to laud high fructose corn syrup as part of a child’s healthy diet, I’d like them to acknowledge if their children are obese. Don’t preach the practicality of abstinence if your children are reproducing out of bounds. Maybe your clan can afford unwanted pregnancies, at least admit it.

I don’t have a problem with Jamie Lynn Spears’ second teen pregnancy, she has the financial resources to have oodles of babies. Of what quality, I can’t judge. But I’m not much in favor of Disney holding her up as an example for teenagers who aren’t buffered from minimum wage jobs and no daycare.

More mothers than we could probably guess have raised a grandchild as their own, to save face for a daughter’s premarital accident. Nothing untoward about secret keeping, it’s just tragic that women are forced to hide. Perhaps we should wish that society be more accepting. Would Sarah Palin’s fundamentalism be taking us in that direction?

Baby TrigSarah Palin’s reproductive dogma would be hypocritical if it turns out that her fifth baby Trig was in reality her daughter Bristol’s. Why do we presume to judge unless we know for sure? Why does Palin refuse to release her health records? She’s told the media she will, but November 4th approaches…

It’s reported the Trig pregnancy went undetected by Sarah’s staff, while by coincidence, over the same period 16-year-old Bristol was kept out of school on account of “mono.” Sarah was on a business trip in Texas when she says her water broke. She boarded the plane to Alaska, still without anyone knowing about her condition, and gave birth later that evening. Who really cares if it happened that way or not, except that Palin is an outspoken puritan.

Who cares if Senator Larry Craig solicits illicit sex in public bathroom stalls? Except he’s a leading demagogue against gay equal rights.

And their denials would make them liars. Since when do we tolerate duplicity from public officials?

There’s a chance Sarah Palin has complicated her story with the public announcement of daughter Bristol’s unplanned pregnancy and intention to wed her unwitting teenage partner. It would appear this revelation was made primarily to deflect suspicions about which of them gave birth to the April baby. Sarah’s argument is that Bristol couldn’t be five months pregnant now if Bristol had been Trig’s real mother. Except the public will have little way to know how far along Bristol really is or was, if at all. Until well after the election.

All those facts will be very easy to contain after the election.

The American public needn’t know Bristol Palin’s private life. But we have every obligation to discover if Sarah Palin is the straight shooter she pretends.

$6.55 an hour? Oh, whoopee…

BonusNotice how all the big guys look out after themselves. They got themselves a ‘bailout’ of several tens of billions of dollars over at Fannie Mae’s and Freddie’s houses, and it will be paid to them from much of the work of all those who, today, will get a big boost up to $6.55 an hour! More than that would be socialism they say. Federal Minimum Wage to Increase to $6.55 on July 24

What cons these business men are, because people believe them with their idiotic nonsense justifying their own largess at others expense, too. Their looting of the National Treasury is never called socialism at all. And it’s not. It’s just pure thievery and real socialism is not thievery at all, like what the American business community practices daily. Real socialism is nothing more than helping out the less fortunate in society, instead of helping out the more fortunate in their robberies of the rest of us.

Bleeding Hearted Liberals running small check-list businesses make my heart bleed

All around America there are bleeding hearted liberals running small businesses… small social service businesses. As a general rule, too, liberals don’t run businesses very well. They’re too damn dumbly soft and sweet, that’s why. So we can begin to understand why all these ‘reform groups’ (like the local area’s Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission.. for just one example) don’t make much profit for the people they claim to be serving (even as they keep them out in droves from their social advocacy groups, run as small ‘businesses’).

Here is the type of thing I am talking about,

…from an article appearing in The Nation…
‘Check off the boxes, copy the paragraph from two years ago, mail it in. As an election year approaches, I again face the piles of questionnaires that progressive organizations use to evaluate public officials. Environmentalists, feminists, campaign finance reformers, housing advocates and labor unions have all come to rely on these lists of our positions–often on issues that never even come up for a vote. It should come as no surprise that, for the most part, all we get out of this cumbersome process is a long line of “checklist liberals” who answer correctly but do little to advance the progressive causes that underlie the questionnaires.’

The rest of this article can be found on the liberal’s very own Nation Magazine at Transforming the Liberal Checklist

OK, OK! So the rest of the article is not very good, much like the liberal organizations themselves, and The Nation Magazine is not very good, either. It was still a good and insightful first paragraph of an article at least!

And the commentary reminded me of all those fund raising letters, free stamps with animal pictures on them, and ‘surveys’ to find out my learned opinions, etc. Reminds me of all the wasted time sitting in meetings where bleeding hearted liberals talk about running THEIR small businesses. You see? The bleeding hearted liberals are most always the ‘owners’ of small socially aware businesses calling themselves community’ groups, which these groups having small office staffs then try to run the group like it was a church or tiny corner store of some sort.

Yes, the small office staff always begin to behave as if they were real owners of the store, much in the same way that some convenience store minimum wage workers will try to stop a robber of some sort or other, by risking their own lives over pennies that supposedly belong to the stock owners instead. These small would be owners can snarl and bite quite hard if given an opportunity to do so. They often overpower the petty ‘robbers’ of their unit with their forceful indignations than can border on madness of sorts. Some times they get popped for being so dimwitted, too.

So what to do about all the PEACE and GREEN and SOCIAL JUSTICE groups’ ‘leaders’ acting in our name? They operate much as the Democratic Party does, which is to impede rather than progress the people forward.

The runners of these small businesses calling themselves ‘peace and justice’ outfits, most often see themselves not as an elected group of leaders for exploited workers struggling for justice and peace, but as a group of independent networkers and business operators, forcefully headed for making more profit for their own personal businesses, the social groups. They spend more time being angry at any of the lower levels of the ‘co-ops’ managed by themselves than at the power elites that cause the social injustice they are supposedly fighting against. When angered by the lower elements, their faces can become quite bulldog-like.

Recently a certain word has come into great popularity with this sort of manager owner of social cause… that word being the word SUSTAINABILITY. Why so popular this word, and with these people? It is because it strikes a chord with the small manager/owner and his small manager/owner mindset. They want to know if their small business is SUSTAINABLE and if their position as head of the operation is SUSTAINABLE most of all? SUSTAINABILITY is their biggest goal of them all. And now of course, corporate America wants to help them become SUSTAINABLE.

This sort of group run as a small business with paid staff who think themselves owners is a very huge impediment to any real social action taking place. The main technique of ‘the owners’ who are salaried is simply to eat up other people’s time. They know that they can out last them in energy by simply doing this, and can come out on top when actual decisions are to be made. In other words, they are well positioned to stifle.

Like owners of any corporation, ‘the owners’ of supposed social groups get paid real money for their time while the volunteers do not. Is this the model of a social action group that will get things done? Most certainly not. Unfortunately though, it is the model structure for liberals and their do-nothing liberalism everywhere today in America…. small groups with a paid ‘leader’ or two, spouting ‘good things’, and doing next to nothing besides appearing to be seeminglygood people.

At the recent meeting of the executive board of the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission, it was totally noticeable that nobody there had anything of a working class background. In fact, the idea of justice for workers is totally absent from this group with ‘justice’ in its name. Being so church-like, this group throws the word in as if it were a bone to the lower classes so next to being sweet dogs in the eyes of these nice people. They were about as working class in composition as the ACLU is!… to give an idea of what the meeting was actually like. Nobody was ‘angry’, just sad. Or happy when seemingly a crumb from real power is thrown in their direction. And at this meeting it had been.

The City of Colorado Springs was going to let the group march in the St Pat’s Day Parade! All Hallelujah, Jesus! But that is about more than this little essay can talk about for the time being. Just let it be said, that liberals running small businesses that should be action groups make my heart bleed. Bleeding hearted liberals make poor businessmen and the conservative business men will tear them to part. Antiwar groups should not be run like they are small businesses. Probably enough said at this point.

The Gazette defends the minimum wage earner yet again

OK, the title to this commentary is so ridiculous that it invites scorn from the word GO. And yet?… this is exactly the refrain that The Gazette seems to constantly revel in.

They like to preposterously present themselves and others in the most reactionary portions of the US business community as defenders of the low income population of our nation. And their absurd thesis is always that we should oppose an increase in the minimum wage because that increase would hurt those it the new legislation would intend to help!

It is such a comical argument and one that nobody with a low income will ever buy. Do they take this sector of the population to be as stupid as the business community is? They are not. So the argument is really intended to persuade the well-to-do themselves that they really are being noble by being the selfish and backward thugs they actually truly are.

The argument really is, that the rich by opposing the increase in minimum wage are not just hoods robbing the poor, but are actually wonderful and decent people trying to help the poor out instead. Don’t laugh, that’s truly how they try to convince themselves to see it! But it makes us in the ordinary population of wage earners roll over laughing in response to the self image that the well-off have of themselves. What a bunch of charlatan clowns, are they not? Taking from the bottom to give to the top is noble endeavor! It’s truly celebrating their supposed virtue in being selfish as their ideologue Queen, Ayn Rand, once proposed in her writings as being the psychological key to supposed capitalist liberty making.

The argument that no minimum wage is freedom for the poor is once again raised as mantra in The Gazette on page 2 of the Business section of the Sunday paper in an article by Fred Crowley, a brainless professor over at the UCCS. He has a young, intense, and portly photo of himself there, too. No doubt that he is fully convinced of his arguments as week as silly as they actually are. No doubt that he also intensely and fully opposes the approach that Hugo Chavez is taking now in Venezuela in regards to increasing the minimum wage there. It just got increased 20%. Oh the horrors, he must be lamenting!

Yes, Dear Professor, the raise of the Venezuelan minimum wage violates all the supposed laws of economics that you and The Gazette preach so without end. How can Hugo Chavez not see that the economy must give profits to the rich and not to the poor? I guess such a nut deserves to be executed, does he not, Professor? He is a totalitarian trying to take liberty away!
Oh the humanity!

Instead of wishing well to Chavez and the poor of Venezuela, we should be listening to the concerns of The Gazette and Professor Crowley here at home. They just want to help the working poor out, by freezing their wages.

It’s nice to know that America is led by such an army of clowns like the editorial staff at The Gazette and the Economics Dept at UCCS when it comes to economic philosophy and economic planning. We should collect them all and shoot them out a giant cannon into areas where ‘The Terrorists’ are hiding! They would then roll over and die laughing. And then we could be nationally secure.

Another poverty study.

this one from Agencie France Presse.
I was going to cut and paste the story, but I noticed as I highlighted everything down at the bottom it says Copyright by Agencie France Presse.

and not to republish the information without the prior consent of AFP.

It says, (so not to step on their copyright) that the gap between rich and poor has grown. No surprise there.

also that since the small recession (!) (!!!) of 2001 productivity and profits have risen slowly but surely.

However, Corporate profits have far outstripped wages.
Nothing unusual there, but the rate of increase for Corporate profit is larger than the rate of increase for wages.

These are the ones who bitch whine and snivel about paying minimum wage to “their” work force.

And about being told to provide medical insurance to the workers as well.

Another group of people who just “don’t get it”…. that the workers are the ones earning the money, but the FatCats are the ones getting the money.

Is it Better without a bean than Green?

The hardcore American nut slogan of 40-50 years ago was “Better dead than Red”. Then they came up with “America, Love It or Leave It”. Dull. But now, the idiot American Right should have as their philosophical slogan, “Better without a bean than Green”!

That’s because their knee jerk support for a totally rapacious capitalism, will lead us into a world without even a tiny bean of anything left worth having. And they the Dittoheads truly do believe that it is Better to be Dead, than Green. Their theory is that Greens are like watermelons, with their concern about the environment only a thin green cover for their evil Red Marxist leanings.

The American Right is clueless about why others oppose capitalism, too. They see the entire Left part of the political spectrum as being equal to the thoughts and actions of Joe Stalin. MLK, Hillary Clinton, Mao, Trotsky, Al Gore, Jessie Jackson, Al Sharpton, Noam Chomsky, FDR all merge into one for them. They are pinko reds who hate the American way, and care more about owls and jumping mice than their fellow humankind. Global warming cannot be real, any more than the minimum wage should be allowed to exist. Both are socialism. Green is Red, and Red is Green. Simplicity for simpletons!

Let’s face it, the nutcase Right is right! Green is turning Red while many Reds iare now turning Green. It has to be, simply because capitalism destroys the environment. The evidence is now all in, and all pinkos do agree. Capitalism is bad for planetary health.

But Black is Green, too! Black being the color of Anarchism, which is another political ideology quite different than Marxism. And Social Democracy, too, is Green. In America, the Social Democrat is essentially a non European, Democratic Party liberal who wishes for trade unions and social programs to blunt the capitalism they still support, and add in the nationalism that is always the Social Democrat’s core belief. And we certainly cannot forget the religious anti-capitalists, too, whose belief is that socialism is best found through the teachings of Jesus. All these folk are Greens today, even as they stay on merely as dupes of the Red menace side of the political spectrum, at elast to O’Reilly, Pat Robertson, and Murdoch.

There is no way that the world’s ecological problems can even begin to be halted while the world economy remains capitalist. One should ask themselves, is it truly better to be drive toward humanity not having even a bean, than to become non-capitalist Green? Capitalism can yet come up with still more tech, but better tech will not solve any of the real problems. It’s what you do with your ‘tech’ that makes the difference. lol… Get sexy, get Green! Go Red! Better Green than deadhead.

The minimum wage and Colo Spgs establishment.

You know those signs all over downtown and every park in the city, that say not to give money to panhandlers? Written by people who are supposedly Experts in the area of homelessness.
 
I personally have had people approach me and hand me money. I couldn’t work out a mechanism within my psyche to go up to strangers and ask for any kind of help. But the money came in handy. I bought food with it mostly, fuel for my camp stove, feed the machines at the laundromat to have clean clothes and bedding. I believe that even for the most addicted amongst the homeless, at least some of the money actually goes on their needs and not just cigarettes, whiskey and wild wild women.

So here’s my theory, to have posted around downtown, and maybe even use their fonts and printing style, (not to deliberately mislead them, you understand) but since these posters they have put up are subsidized by the City meaning everybody who has bought non-food items anywhere in the confines of the City, they are legitimately as much our property as the Fascists, right?

Just don’t put anywhere in there that these suggestions, to quickly follow, don’t actually physically originate in their tiny little brains.

Bring their logic forward a few steps, and expose it for what it is.

If somebody is homeless, the consensus is that it is because of mental, emotional or substance problems. The only solution for these problems are for the “outpatients” to seek professional help and counseling. Giving them money or feeding them outside of that sphere of treatment would only enable them to continue in poverty.

So giving them a job, for instance, would give them more money to waste on their habits. So employers who hire them, and don’t insist that they have a permanent address, and don’t insist on screening any and all of their employees for personality disorders, substance abuse and so forth, are harming them rather than helping them.

So the logical conclusion: Hire the homeless, but don’t pay them anything until they get help. That last would seem to be in contradiction of Jesus and Moses said about “If you owe your worker his wages, and you have the pay in hand, you should not let the sun set without paying him” and “a workman is worthy of his hire”.

Which you might think would cause a problem in the “Faith Based Initiative” crowd, but apparently hasn’t made any trouble in their souls yet.

The Marion House soup kitchen is remarkably, in light of the recent condemnation for the Catholic church, one of the least restrictive aid agencies in the city.

Also by publishing my intent to do this before starting, I have a legitimate defense if they come with their “conservative” legalistic whining that it is deceptive and a violation of their intellectual property.

Fat Cats and the minimum wage

The fat cats are all upset again! They just can’t tolerate the thought of even having a minmum wage, let alone raising it. Our local daily rag, The Colorado Springs Fat Cats, fatcopycatted from George Will’s recent Washington Post column and urged that no raise be given to the poor. Let the ‘free market’ do it, or let them starve if not. In fact, as far as the local CS Blue Bloods are concerned, if the ‘free market was to provide no employment to people at all, well the devil be damned for all they would care.

It is a true indicator of our paltry national political culture, that the national debate on minimum wage rates hinges on whether for the billionaires to throw a few pennies the way of the peasantry, or to just let them starve. Those who favor tossing the few pennies get to pose as the DP humanitarians vs those against, the RP scrooges.

Oh, I’m sorry. That’s not fair. Our local daily rag says that they are actually advocating tough love for the poor, and therefore have to oppose the raise in order to help the near destitute keep working at the current minimum wage. They say if there was an increase that the whole American economy would collapse, and that the poor would all lose their jobs at Walmart, Manpower, and McDonalds. Such compassion for the poor! That’s what it is, of course.

That’s the real reason the fat cats oppose the minimum wage, this they say. Yes, and Iraq had WOMD, too. These folk are so sincere in all their concerns they have for the rest of us!

Can you imagine the fat cats actually giving a damn about anything other than their stock portfolios? Oh Yes. Maybe they care some about their Lexuses and country club memberships. too. Let’s be fair.

Harry Reid underlines again that Democratic Party is not an opposition party

Harry Reid, Democratic Party senator from Nevada and Senate Majority Leader, gave his approval in an interview this Sunday, to Bush’s plan to increase US troops in Iraq.

This comes just days after Nancy Pelosi appointed the utterly ignorant Silvestre Reyes to head up the House Intelligence Committee, where he promptly stated that he also supported a troop increase, and not withdrawal. The Democrats as a whole are utterly enthusiastic about continuing this war, even as they in the same breath blame Bush and the neocons for it. Can it be underlined any more, that the Democratic Party is not an oppositional party to the Republicans? Only their powerless rank and file voters are against the Iraq occupation to some degree or other. But so what? These people most often act as if paralyzed beyond being able to vote. Otherwise, they go about their business as if it didn’t much matter at all to them.

The Democrats are not just a non-oppositional party in regards to the Republican plan to continue the occupation of Iraq. Harry Reid is great case in point. His pretense of being something different than a Republican in donkey suit is rather ludicrous. An example is him stating strongly that the Democrats are going for an increase in the US minimum wage. How? He is going to try tying getting the increase to legislation giving members of the Congress yet another pay raise! Pay raises they don’t deserve and shouldn’t get.

Reid is a Mormon. That being said, can any even mildly liberal person actually think that he represents possible progressive change because he is a Democrat too? Any visit to his Senate website shows nothing but the most mealy mouthed rhetoric on other issues such as immigration, women’s rights, labor, environment, etc. Cases in point, he is opposed to radioactive waste being dumped in Nevada at Yucca Mountain, yet supports nuclear reactors. He wants to grab more of the boondoggle ‘Homeland Security’ funds for Nevada. He supports building a giant Border wall while talking of ‘reform’. He is for better medical care for people, yet can’t voice support for universal coverage. Wants to help women out, yet can’t support abortion rights for them. No opposition to the use of torture, etc. No defense of habeus corpus. He supports phoney ‘war on terror’ that actually makes us more endangered by it.

In short, he is a mealy mouthed, fork tongued Democratic Party hack, who is planning to do absolutely nothing to block the Republican assault on the American and Iraqi people. The Democratic Party is not an oppositional party, and Reid is what you get, Liberals, when you continue to cast your votes for these asses. Get out of the Democratic Party and demonstrate if you want change. You have to spend more time in opposing the corporate hacks that run this country, than by just going out and voting for one of them or the other.

The majority of Democratic Party politicians are not going to oppose this war in any meaningful way.

Your own private post office

Have you seen the postal contract service centers cropping up at suburban strip malls? This is part of an ongoing congressional effort to privatize the entire USPS and divest it of the Postal Service Union. The Republicans want to convert the USPS civil service jobs into minimum wage jobs so that Republican contractors can pocket the savings. The new privatized post office jobs will provide no benefits, no security, no skills, and no upward mobility.

The national postal workers union has just signed a four year contract for its members, but feels their future is uncertain after that. Meanwhile it is responding to urban growth with outsourced contracts.

Do you think your experience at the post office will change if it’s staffed by unskilled workers watched over fast food restaurant type supervisors? The whole city loses with inferior services, but that’s not the worst of it. Fewer dollars into the labor pool means workers who have less to spend around town. A community of poverty wage workers can’t support anything more than cable, pizza and Lotto tickets. It perpetuates poverty which means less education, less productivity, lower expectations, more crime and richer Republicans in their gated communities.

Justice for Janitors- was getting a Houston contract really a victory?

The SEIU is hailing itself as being victorious in its struggle in Houston, after getting major janitorial services for downtown buildings to sign a union contract. The strike was noted for Houston police using their horses to push strikers around. Houston janitors only get paid minimum wages to clean out the office buildings of some of the richest corporations in the world. With their new contract, the wage will be bumped up to $6.25 this Jan. 1, and then held there for 2 years and then bumped up another whole dollar!

How the union can call such a ratty contract a victory is beside me? PLus, the strike left countless union members facing various charges and a bail of over $39,000,000 in total! The US courts definitely favor the rich, no doubt about that. To see some intersting videos about the strike, go to Houston Janitors Got to like the juxtaposition of opera with Houston cops on horses in the top video. And the other videos are of interest, too. SEIU can’t win decent contracts for its membership, but certainly is good in the video production department.