I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
As we hold our noses this election season, wading through the stinking offal of robocalls, vile attack ads, and disgusting charges of un-Americanism, it’s sobering for us in New Mexico to realize that according to the AP our state has more working poor and more children living in low-income working families than any state in the union.
“Nationally, more than one in four working families – 42 million adults and children – were low income in 2006,” the Associated Press reports citing a U.S. Census Bureau report.
Megabillion bailouts won’t help them. Tax loop holes won’t help them either. It doesn’t matter to them that the FDIC has upped it’s coverage to $250,000 per depositor. That much money is only a fantasy to them.
Perhaps the most brutal reality of all, though, is that nearly 40 percent of New Mexico’s jobs pay below the federal poverty level for a family of four.
How can the well-off and rich talk blithely of meritocracy when honest work can’t make workers an honest living? High paid corporate leaders explain to us they need the incentive of a big salary and perks to do their work. But where are the incentives for the working poor?
There aren’t any. And some people care about that and some people don’t.
That’s really the dividing line in our society.
Francoise Sagan, the French novelist, put it clearly: “In the case of any given injustice, the man or woman of the right will say it’s inevitable. The man or woman of the left will say it’s intolerable.”
The rich see the working poor, if they look at them at all, as a sort of a slave class doing the nasty work that needs to be done. The working poor’s condition is inevitable according to conservative economic philosophy, be it that of Bush-McCain-Palin, or Clintonesque globalism.
Big money does not care about little money. It wages savage war against the only social pressures that little money has: a decent minimum wage and unions. It’s done that so successfully since the era of Regeanomics that some people are not only convinced that raising the minimum wage to $6.55 this year and $7.25 next year will hurt businesses but that it will actually amount to something they like to call “income redistribution.”
And you know what that means. Charges of socialism and communism. If you advocate for the real workers of America, you’re called an unpatriotic pinko.
At $7.25 an hour for 40 hours a week, a worker would earn $290. That’s slightly more than $15,000 a year. How big an incentive is that?
No wonder the working poor work harder than anyone. An 80 hour work week at minimum wage, might give you enough money to make payments on your bills, but how long can anyone sustain that kind of work load? And how can they possibly save? We’re forcing many people to work in almost Medieval conditions.
When mortgage bankers and tricky investors make huge bucks off high risk financial practices in the “ownership society,” who really suffers when they fail? The investors? The bankers?
No. In New Mexico, it’s a large part of the nearly 60,000 person work force in the construction industry that feels the bite the worst. If you have an overstocked inventory in houses, and no new houses being built, the $700 a week a construction worker might earn evaporates. What do the carpenters, tilers, drywallers, roofers, plumbers, electricians do?
Likely as not they’ll become a part of the working poor who have to resort to those minimum waged jobs no one but a hermit can live on.
And if you happen to be someone who’s retired from working 60 to 80 hours a week and trying to live on the fruits of your labors, harvesting pitiful social security checks that are actually taxed, and if the federal bailouts happen to bump up inflation two or three percent or more, the fruits of your labors wither on the vine. And low interest rates on your savings feeds your desperation.
And if you’re older and get sick and inflation and taxes are eating up your substance, tough. You’ve had no union to protect you, no champion in Congress to effectively look out for your interests because few are interested in micro economics, which is the level most of us live on.
Power brokers equate virtue with money not with hard work.
A living wage, good health care, a decent return on savings, and bringing jobs back home is not income redistribution.
People who say it is are willing to consign millions of Americans to the economic dumper. They are not patriots, they are political swindlers.
