Posted on 06/27/2006 10:27:05 AM PDT by Chi-townChief
It's scoundrel time. Americans in large numbers are looking for change. Those in power are feeling threatened. So the leaders of Congress line up to appeal not to our better angels but to our foulest demons. Consider what the right-wing majority that controls the Congress has done in the last week.
First, they took care of themselves and tossed out the most vulnerable. They approved a congressional pay raise even as the leaders of the House of Representatives refused to allow a vote on raising the minimum wage for America's poorest workers. The minimum wage hasn't been raised in nine years. A full-time worker cannot lift a family of three out of poverty. The same majority that abolished welfare and required poor, single mothers to go to work now ensures that the pay they receive will condemn them to remain in poverty. They are full of pious righteousness, but they are deaf to the basic teachings of Jesus Christ. Scoundrel time.
And even as they were condemning minimum-wage workers to poverty, they were pushing to give the wealthiest handful of families a $1 trillion tax break. The House passed and the Senate is now considering a bill that would essentially gut the estate tax, a tax that applies to only the wealthiest 1 percent of families whose estates are worth millions. To protect this Paris Hilton tax break, and balance the budget, they have to cut services to poor, working- and middle-class Americans. Scoundrel time.
Then they shafted those left in the shadows. The extreme right in the House refused a compromise adopted by the Senate and endorsed by President Bush on immigration. The Senate plan would increase enforcement at the border and on employers, but give law-abiding immigrants without legal papers a path for citizenship.
Instead, Republicans decided to have show hearings across the nation this summer -- hoping to stoke sufficient anti-immigrant fury to gain votes in the fall. And then, in the lame-duck session already scheduled for AFTER the elections -- mark my word -- if the president stands firm, they will pass the same comprehensive compromise they refused last week. Scoundrel time.
But that wasn't enough. The same desperados then blocked renewal of the Voting Rights Act. They objected to provisions suggesting that ballots be printed in languages spoken by significant minorities in a district. Eager to posture about English only, they blocked renewal of the basic law protecting voting rights in districts with long histories of discrimination.
This is simple mindlessness. Legislators should be encouraging Americans to learn foreign languages, not posturing about an English-only country.
A renegade neo-Confederate fringe balked at federal government oversight of voting changes embodied in Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. All these Southern states have to do earn exemption from the Voting Rights Act is to stop the continuing discrimination in voting that we saw in Florida in 2000, in Ohio in 2004 and in Georgia today.
But none of this has been sufficient to calm the nightmares of the conservative majority, which fears that Americans may be catching on to their act. So . . . Sen. Bill Frist -- the multimillionaire leader of Republicans in the Senate who has voted regularly to benefit the stocks he holds in what he falsely claimed was a blind trust -- decided this week that the Senate should focus on an amendment to ban flag burning. Why? No good reason, other than to allow Republicans to show they are willing to trample the First Amendment in order to pontificate patriotic. Scoundrel time.
American soldiers are mired in a bloody occupation of Iraq amid a civil war of growing violence. And the DeLay-Frist Congress is committed to sustaining the occupation, fighting it with other people's children and the next generation's money, while blocking renewal of the Voting Rights Act, denying an increase in the minimum wage, locking law-abiding immigrants into second-class status, posturing about flag burning and marriage. Shame on them for going down in defeat so shabbily. And shame on us if by some chance these scoundrels can stoke enough hatred to save themselves from getting the boot in November.
mailto:jjackson@rainbowpush.org
It does irk me that these guys decide to vote themselves a raise.... for what?
Actually I believe they have a better scam than simply voting for a raise.
They have a set up where the raise is automatic if they don't vote it down. Somebody makes a halfhearted show of wanting to bring it for a vote, the vote fails and they get their raise.
Give JJ the Nobel prize for unecomomics.
The teaching of Jesus is personal responsibility for one's own salvation ... in any and all ways you want to interpret the word "salvation".
Jesus rebuked the disciples who complained that the oil was wasted on him and could have been sold and the money given to the poor.
Most notable is the small business tax. Our tax system is structured to favor the Fortune 500 and penalize small business. Yet it is consistently small business that provides new jobs for the unemployed and high wages. It is consistently the Fortune 500 who shiift jobs to the lowest wage worker in the Chinese prison camp or other slave labor shop.
So JJ wants to continue this penalizing of precisely that part of the economy that most benefits his "constituency".
Take the Chicago Defender newspaper as an example. When Sengstacke died, his heirs wanted to keep the paper in the family. But their death tax bill was so horrendous that they had to sell the millionaire business to others to pay the death tax and leave themselves, the heirs, to climb back to financial sufficiency all over again.
Wealth is built over generations. The parents of Bill Gates were the top lawyers in the Northwest. Bill built on their help out of the starting gate. But in too many cases, minorities for whom JJ speaks, such as Sengstacke, are held back by the unfair taxes that JJ hypocritically supports.
Is JJ really ignorant of economics? Or maybe he secretly wants to keep people oppressed so he can continue to be their white media appointed leader. It should be noted that Black media barons like Sengstacke and Johnson did not build JJ. It was the white media that built him into the leader that he became.
Good point, Jesus said, "Give to God what is God's and Caesar what is Caesar's" not "Give to Caesar what is God's and Caesar's" and certainly not what these religious "leaders" like Brother Jesse are saying, "Caesar, take what is God's from all and then dole it out as we see fit."
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