Did you actually just compare the minimum wage to slavery?
Lieberman being for principle and truth; that’s interesting, seeing as how he’s now backed off from his campaign pledge of investigating Katrina and is as gung-ho as Bush is for escalating the war.
Let me try to phrase this in a way that you can understand: American Samoa is a U.S. possession. It has only 58,000 people (less than 18,000 workers), and thus the economy cannot be expected to react the same way that ours does. I couldn’t find any information about their wages, but there might just not be a need to increase their minimum wage.
Both **Bugles ** and **harveyc ** seem to be using the same stick to beat the Democrats – that they’re being insufficiently zealous. They’re holding hearings on Iraq … but they suck because they’re not defunding the Iraq war immediately. They raised the minimum wage for the first time in ten years … but they suck because they’re not extending it to include American Samoa.
This is supposed to demonstrate … something. That they’re dishonest hypocrites, I guess, only interested in playing politics … .
It’s like it doesn’t matter what laws are actually enacted. All that matters is how the two parties stack up on some abstract scoreboard of moral purity.
Screw that. I don’t care if the Democrats are perfect or not. I care if they get things done and move the country in the right direction. And right now they’re doing just that. They’re passing legislation I (a hard-core Democrat) mostly like. And, from what I read on the web, most of the other hard-core Democrats agree with me.
If anyone truly wishes to read a rather good explanatory article about the minimum wage issues as it relates to American Samoa and the Northern Marianas
As a comparison, government workers in American Samoa make $7.99/hr. The cannery workers make $3.60/hr on average.
Cannery workers are 40% of the Island’s workforce. If the canneries shut down, that would sure help their economy.
Hearings? That is saving our troops lives in Iraq, right? And there are many hard core and soft core Democrats now saying the only way to stop this failed war is to defund it.
If the Iraq supplemental is enacted next month, which is a vote to fund or defund, the President will have enough funding to last to the end of his term. So what good was it to change power in the Congress for, by far, the most important issue in the 2006 campaign?
I think you are trying to deflect the failure of those whom we elected to address the issue they were elected to address.
