2001-05-19 - 20:50 MDT

THE WONDERING JEW

Date Change

Looks like Deja Same-o from where I sit. Suicide bombers - Palestinian of course and their rock throwing cohorts against the Israelis with their fancy storebought stuff making blood and thunder in the bloodstained arena where much history has been screwed up for centuries. Nothing new here.

It sez here in the morning news that, "Energy groups to put muscle behind Bush plan." Yeah riiiight ! Sure the ones to benefit will be the big guys, Coal, Electric, Labor ? ? ? ? ?It would create more union jobs ? ? ? Hah in a pigs pocket ! Natural Gas, Nuclear,Petroleum. Of course the Great White B -- goes drill, drill, drill. Guess what he is saying is, "My way, or no way."

So much of what I read in the media is more or less a whitewashed redundancy that has brought us to grief before.

There is a book I am going to order from the Tattered Cover tomorrow, "Nickel and Dimed," by Barbara Ehrenreich. This lady went out and saw for herself, traveling from Maine to Milwaukee attempting to "make it on minimum wage." She, in a short form says, "Working minimum wage is a fast track to poverty." Then she brought up the bit of working two jobs to survive. Can't afford a security deposit for an apartment, get a room by the week. Outrageous rent, no kitchen, eat out. Dingy crummy rooms, motels or othewise, what a minimum wage earner can afford is purely second rate at the best. She lived it, she knows and I will bet that no fancy pants economist can snow her into believing that is all she is worth. The mop flops as the cookie crumbles for us peons -- no flopping or mopping in the upper echelons. They live well.

My last work was at a jouneyman's wage, but there were many working on lesser jobs there, harder and more difficult than what I was doing for 7 - 8 dollars an hour. One woman supported her husband and a child, he was physically unable to work and the kid was a teenager with teenager's needs. She was making top wages at about 8 dollars an hour.

There is always some "pusher" looking over your shoulder and telling you to get with it, faster, more, faster, more. Some sadistic means to put psychological fear into the heart of a minimum wage earner. A time or two while on layoff I had to work at what I could find, I know what this woman is saying. I'll bet she says it better than I do.

And the politicians are falling over each other's feet here, about growth control. The Political Cartoonist bar none in Denver -- Ed Stein had a neat cartoon, a rectangular area full of high rises and skyscrapers, with a freeway leading into it (Colorado) and the comment in the baloon, "Too late Governor."

guess the only really new thing around here is the Date Change . . . .

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