Depressed Wages?

I crack up when I hear people blaming illegal immigrants for depressed wages. What a crock. At the risk of sound partisian I usually hear this from the Republican side of the aisle, although there are a handful of gutless Democrats who worry more about the polls then following what they know in their heart to be right. Wages are shooting down faster than a greased fat guy going down a slide at Wild Rivers and Republicans are blaming immigrants for the problem. The last time I can think of Republicans siding with labor over management was when Lincoln sided with the slaves.

It rings hollow when I hear congressman bitch about how immigrants bring down the minimum wage when congress controls the minimum wage. Who do you think gets to make the decision? The cooks slinging burgers at McDonalds?

The federal minimum wage is $5.15 an hour, after taxes enough to buy maybe a couple loaves of day old bread. The citizens of the U.S. are spoiled. They aren't going to work for that. A lot of them would rather sell dope and rob people. People in minimum wage jobs don't work at these jobs long, not because they are promoted, but because they die. Nobody can live on $200.00 bucks a week. Congress hasn't raised the federal minimum wage since the late 1990's, when going to a movie wasn't an entire days wage. If Congress was serious about wages they would create a national living wage so everyone could at least afford to rent a movie once in a while or go take their family out for a lousy pizza. Is that asking too much?

I constantly hear people say that if only people worked harder they could reach the brass ring, they could fullfill their ambition of living the American Dream. That dream folks is a nightmare for too many people. It's a Catch-22 World out there. It reminds me of story where a guy with no front teeth couldn't get hired for a better job, yet couldn't afford new teeth because he couldn't get hired for a better job. Things aren't as pretty as people would like them to be, although this perception stems from a complete disengagement from the reality of the world around us. I guess when you have it all, you don't worry too much about the real world around your illusion of grandeur.

What I find disgusting is that nobody represents people like this, the poor, the homeless, the perpetually broke. Where the fuck is the Democratic Party in all this? Listen up troops, you are supposed to be the party of the poor. You haven't done dick since Lyndon Johnson's, War on Poverty, back in the early 1960's. You have as much in common with the poor and working people as the Republicans do. No wonder you can't hold onto Congress. Maybe they should make a law that only people who make less than $100.000 a year can run for Congress. I wonder how that would affect legislation and I wonder where our focus would be as a nation. It certainly won't be focused where it is now.

The immigration problem is too convoluted to string together any type of real policiy and everything is going to be based on how this might affect the parties politically. If either party had a crystal ball and saw that granting amnesty to the 12 million illegal aliens we have would gurarentee them control of Congress for the next ten years, they would be falling all over themselves, like a bunch of drunken sailors, to give every breathing person within our borders instant citizenship.

A Spanish Version American National Anthem? Stupid.

Although I am highly empathetic to the cause of immigrants, and support their using any form of protest to focus attention on their plight, I am extremely disappointed that someone in the Latino community chose to re-write America's national anthem, in Spanish - bad, but worst, changed around the lyrics.

Nothing gets a group of people more riled up, angry and hostile that when a treasured national symbol, such as our national anthem, is taken and manipulated and desecrated in a way it wasn't intended. We saw what happened when images of Mohammad were caricaturized in Europe and the violent fall out that resulted world wide. Any time a group uses a symbol in an inappropriate way it will lead to some repercussion in the future. In this case, we are going to wind up seeing a big backlash against immigrants, because although a non-Mexican wrote the Spanish version of our anthem, opponents of illegal immigration and those hard core individuals who abhor anybody who isn't white or can't speak English well, are going to lump all Latinos together and blame them collectively for this assault on one of our most potent symbols of national identity. They are also going to become that much more resistant, hostile, militant and violent towards immigrants and immigration policy. Nothing positive can come from this form of protest as it alienates those who natively live in the U.S. This act was short sighted and very poorly thought out. It is going to be the tipping point in the entire immigration controversy, and not towards the positive.