ALERT: Dems Try To Use War Supplemental To Exempt American Samoa From Minimum Wage
By Erick Posted in Congress — Comments (49) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
The Democrats using the war supplemental to push the minimum wage bill and, in the process, exempt American Samoa from the minimum wage.
So, as this thing drags out, maybe Delmonte should be held responsible for our troops running out of funding. It seems, yet again, the Speaker is trying to exempt American Samoa from the minimum wage to benefit Delmonte's Starkist subsidiary.
What in the name of God Almight does the minimum wage in American Samoa have to do with funding our troops?
Check out §8103 of the House Amendment.
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ALERT: Dems Try To Use War Supplemental To Exempt American Samoa From Minimum Wage 49 Comments (0 topical, 49 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
some part of a bill in one house or the other?
Romney or Fred.
Currently writing non-political stories over at first-cut-stories.blogspot.com
Is this a constitutional action, and if so, is it only because American Samoa is not a state? Exempting a territory from something like minimum wage is most unfair.
and exclusions in the Fair Labor Standards Act. The US has a long history of letting most anything that goes on in its territories and possessions just be an article in trade for the political class. Give enough money to the right politician and you got a monopoly on all the salmon in an Alaskan river back in territorial days. Have the right connections, your mining patent got approved and you got to rape a streambed with a dredge. Have the right friends and the US doesn't pass any troublesome laws about the way you treat your employees, or gives you an exemption.
One of the unique provisions of the Alaska Constitution is the provision that guarantees equal access to resources for all citizens of the State. This stems directly from the federal government's corrupt practices in giving fish trap monopolies to SEA and SFO business, using mining patent approval to reward friends and punish enemies, and the like. The US is NOT a good landlord.
In Vino Veritas
for all of the territories. Anyone living under our flag ought to enjoy the same benefits as the residents of sovereign states.
than make them states. There's little of it that we need for strategic purposes anymore and most are just holes in the water we pour money into, and which generate one Helluva bunch of graft and corruption.
In Vino Veritas
is make any of the territories states. If selling them on Ebay doesn't work for some reason, I'd opt to give their freedom. Free at last, free at last! The end of the US colonial empire.
____
CongressCritter™: Never have so few felt like they were owed so much by so many for so little.
Puerto Rico, American Samoa, all of them, I'd give them two choices: Full statehood with all its privileges, or complete independence. The Puerto Ricans in particular seem to want all the benefits of being American without having the disadvantages, and I don't think we should let that continue.
Run like Reagan!
They have little in common with the rest of the country as it is. They are effectively independent nations who get gobs of money from us with no recourse. Kinda like the mouse that roared.
At least we had a significant military presence in Hawaii prior to it's statehood, all we get from PR and AS is headaches and a bill.
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CongressCritter™: Never have so few felt like they were owed so much by so many for so little.
I don't think they'd take statehood, and the outrageous taxation and regulation that come with the post-New Deal US Government.
Run like Reagan!
...because she wants to exempt American Samoa, because she knows that minimum wage hurts businesses AND workers! Anyone that has taken a basic economics class in college knows that whenever you raise minimum wage, the market is distorted. There will be a bigger supply of workers than a demand for workers, and therefore, unemployment will increase. What makes Pelosi more disgusting is the fact that she obviously understands this fact of basic economics, and guess what? She doesn't care who it hurts. She just wants to score points with the people that will still have their jobs after minimum wage is increased.
as a businesswoman, I think her view is most probably one of condescension and contempt for the voters and anyone not working for her (or her husband's) own interests.
has got to get out in the press, news shows etc. The intent is to educate the public that minimum wage is bad business everywhere. Let's leave the Samoa exemption in as long as Peloozi agrees to begin phasing out minimum wage in the 50 States.
====
"Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm." -- James Madison
What's unfair is the rest of the US and her territories aren't exempted from a punitive, mandated minimum wage.
Even NPR mentioned recently that minimum wage goes farther in northern Louisiana than it does in midtown Manhattan.
to drive up the wages and purchasing power in the rural South, and to a lesser extent to tamp down competition from Southern contractors who could pay peon wages, though Davis-Bacon more directly addresses that.
In Vino Veritas
It also sounds like one more thing that's outlived its ostensible purpose and remains as something to secure votes. Most of those people stuck working for minimum wage in Manhattan will believe that the Democrats did something just for them because their misery has been softened somewhat.
agriculture and labor legislation was aimed at doing something about the appalling socio-economic conditions in The South. Everyone thinks in terms of the Dust Bowl mid-west and agricultural areas of the Plains, but FDR's "one third of a nation" was mostly in The South. As much as we may curse the socialistic, even totalitarian methods, it worked. The huge surplus of uneducated, unskilled agricultural workers in The South suppressed all wages and the general standard of living. The impetus of New Deal agricultural and labor legislation was to get as many Americans, especially Southerners, off the farm as possible and prop up prices so that those who stayed could have some semblance of a civilized standard of living. The FLSA unlinked service and manufacturing wages from agricultural wages, in fact it specifically doesn't cover ag workers, making ag work less attractive and encouraging automation. Since government policy was encourageing or forcing the children off the farm, somebody had to take care of the parents and grandparents, hence Social Security.
In Vino Veritas
forcibly relocating populations did work.
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling
forced a tremendous amount of relocation, ironically from the best farm land, the "bottom lands."
In Vino Veritas
wreaked havoc in the South during the 1920's while other parts of the nation were booming, so the damage was pretty much already done down here when the Great Depression hit. Where I live, there are very small towns nearby that had banks in them through the 1920's. Now they barely even have post offices anymore. That's not the only factor in their history since then, of course, but it was a critical influence.
in Southern intellectual history, no that isn't an oxymoron, from this period, Twelve Agrarians, "I'll Take My Stand" is a good place to begin. The writers are a Who's Who of Southern Arts and Letters of the day from the group commonly called the Nashville Agrarians. All are quite liberal in a uniquely Southern way, all generally supportive of the New Deal's objectives in The South, but all reacting regretfully to the loss of the old agrarian way of life. Good read. Then pile into Cash's "The Mind of the South" and take on some C. Vann Woodward starting with "The Strange Career of Jim Crow." Strange Career was politically motivated revisionist history that greatly effected the thinking of the Warren Court leading up to Brown v. The Board. Late in his life, even Woodward, who I admire, admitted that he'd pounded a square peg in a round hole. It went through many editions and Woodward kept up a running dialogue with his critics throughout. Good stuff!
In Vino Veritas
I'm from northeast Georgia so I have a good bit of anecdotal knowledge passed down from my elders but I haven't read any of those commentaries.
And I would hope nobody at RedState would call Southern intellectual history an oxymoron. Anti-Southern prejudice should belong entirely to the domain of the American Left along with all the other false premises they believe in.
Certainly not an appropriate comment to make regarding the South. I was raised and still live in Birmingham, Alabama, and I have a 4.0 in college majoring in Economics and Political Science. In two years (I have to go an extra year because of the additional major), I'm hoping to head off to get a PhD in Economics. Yes, a conservative is going to go place myself in the fire known as the ivory tower. I'm almost positive I'll never be tenured, but then again, conservative thought is much more acceptable in business and economics schools than other departments. If conservatives and Christians aren't willing to fight the fight in universities, we are surely cowardly. I hope to make a difference.
I d**m well please about The South; my family came to Virginia in 1640 and has been on the same piece of dirt in Georgia since the Creek Cession Lottery in 1795, and I can rattle off every regiment and its commanders in which my ancestors served in the Army of Northern Virginia, and for some of them in The Revolution as well. Enough bona fides?
In Vino Veritas
I threw the snarky "oxymoron" in there; you really have to look for this literature and it is a very robust canon. I was born, raised and mostly educated in Georgia and the only inkling I ever got of Southern literature was Faulkner and a smattering of Flannery O'Conner and Tom Wolfe.
I was taking directed study history classes here in Alaska working on a history of the ANV regiment most of my ancestors served in and having a great deal of difficulty developing an intellectual lens with which to look at those men. One of my professors, ironically a Canadian, got me into this literary canon and opened a whole new world for me.
If you really want a challenge, go read Sidney Lanier's one novel "The Tiger Lily." I have a 1941 Columbia University Press edition and even in '41 when people reading that sort of thing might be expected to be more familiar with the literary sources, it is filled with editor's notes explaining references to obscure 19th Century French and German writers. Lanier was a pretty erudite fellow for someone who dropped out of a Presbyterian academy in his second year to join the CS Cavalry. There's a lot more to him than "The Marshes of Glynn."
In Vino Veritas
Gamecock DeVine in
The Charlotte Observer
www.race42008.com
www.hinzsightreport.com
"One man with courage makes a majority" - Andrew Jackson
is a fine piece. I got in a huge beef with one of my Lit Profs over Wolfe's "Child by Tiger." He used it as an excuse for a rant about lynching. I just saw it as a lawfully deputized posse apprehending a fleeing felon who refused to surrender. We had to write reaction papers to it, so I just rewrote it with the main character as a white, ANV veteran rather than a Black buffalo soldier, and asked him where his outrage was now. Good fun!
In Vino Veritas
the South. He essentially ended reconstruction and brought the south into the modern world and made it part of america again. Thank God he needed baths in Warm Springs.
Gamecock DeVine in
The Charlotte Observer
www.race42008.com
www.hinzsightreport.com
"One man with courage makes a majority" - Andrew Jackson
remembered Georgia most for hot bread and greasy vegetables, but of course one look at his portrait explains why his memories were punctuated by food.
horseradish. Took ten years off my dad's life. Mrs.908 would allow cigars and scotch in the house before fatback.
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CongressCritter™: Never have so few felt like they were owed so much by so many for so little.
here, but wife uses bacon as a reasonable if more expensive substitute. She can't get past a Missouri mother teaching her to cook and cooks like we have a big family and are feeding the field hands as well. It's killing us, but we eat good.
Ample supplies of the other two on hand, I'm afraid.
In Vino Veritas
Gamecock DeVine in
The Charlotte Observer
www.race42008.com
www.hinzsightreport.com
"One man with courage makes a majority" - Andrew Jackson
"Reconstruction" ended in '76 followed by fifty years of complete neglect punctuated only by ruthless exploitation, e.g., clear cutting the Longleaf Pine, punitive N-S freight rates, wasteful, land-destroying commercial agriculture, punitive banking practices, slave-labor wages for the lint heads, child labor in the cotton mills, sweat shops in the textile industry. I can go on for a while.
In Vino Veritas
I speak of what you describe as effectively recon sans occupation
no quibble
Gamecock DeVine in
The Charlotte Observer
www.race42008.com
www.hinzsightreport.com
"One man with courage makes a majority" - Andrew Jackson
let us appreciate it from now until Nov 2008.
Another reason we want this to be passed- imagine the campaign commercials we can use in 08 when showing how the "most moral Congress in history" performed!
United States Air Force
http://airforcepundit.blogspot.com
I'd LOVE to see that brought up in a commercial. Let the Dems hang themselves with that "open and ethical Congress" line followed by... tuna, shady real estate deals, $$$ in Jefferson's freezer (is there ANYONE prosecuting this?!). I wonder what's coming next.
Sorry, Charlie- only our tuna get to work for peanuts!
And the culture of corruption continues. It seems like it has gotten quite a bit worse since January. Did anyone else read this story and think of the need for term limits???
What I was taught in economics about social security , and if you look at the presidential papers of that time, was that one of the main reasons for the monthly payout was that most of the wealth of the country was controlled by seniors. In order to have them spend some of their money the government realized that the seniors had to have the security of money coming into them. It was basically a supply side economic move to stimulate the economy. The democrats will always state that it was a humanitarian move, but economics was a primary force.
...a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right...
---Thomas Paine---
What we learn about government intervention into the economy in economics classes today is so flawed. In one instance, the government is allowed to intervene (in the case of social security), but in another instance, the government can't intervene (in the case of minimum wage or rent control). Then, there's the statement in most modern day econ. books that private property must be enforced. Yet, in some cases, economists support such ideas as "eminent domain" in terms of "public use" (ie Kelo v. New London). It all results from positivism, and clearly, with such a relativist philosophy, it is easy to have correct and wrong statements at the same time. Regardless of what the New Deal's goals were and whether some of the programs were "successful," they were clearly unconstitutional and anti-free market. They also worsened the depression. Read "FDR's Folly" for more information on that thesis. However, yes, you're right...it was about economics, not the whole idea of the "greater good" humanitarian garbage.
When Frist attached the UIGEA to the Port Authority Bill last year....
And you're right. I don't know when the habit of attaching bills to other bills that have nothing to do with each other started, however, this practice needs to stop.
NOW!!!
I don't understand this diary. Here's what the bill says:
(2) the minimum wage applicable to American
7 Samoa under section 6(a)(1) of the Fair Labor
8 Standards Act of 1938 (29 U.S.C. 206(a)(1)) shall
9 be—
10 (A) the applicable wage rate in effect for
11 each industry and classification under section
12 697 of title 29, Code of Federal Regulations, on
13 the date of enactment of this Act;
14 (B) increased by $0.50 an hour, beginning
15 on the 60th day after the date of enactment of
16 this Act; and
17 (C) increased by $0.50 an hour (or such
18 lesser amount as may be necessary to equal the
19 minimum wage under section 6(a)(1) of such
20 Act), beginning 1 year after the date of enact-
ment of this Act and each year thereafter until
22 the minimum wage applicable to American
23 Samoa under this paragraph is equal to the
24 minimum wage set forth in such section.
It references 29 CFR 697
...which shows the effective minium wages for various industries.
I see that a) the minumum wages are less than our minumum; b) the wages for some of the industries have been going up, at least a little, since 2001; c) fish canning & processing wage is $3.26.
If I understand the new bill, all these wages will increase by $0.50 sixty days after the law takes effect, and will increase again in a year.
So, actually, the fish canning business is not being exempted from paying more, right? I agree that they are not paying the full American minimum wage, but is it correct to say that Pelosi is somehow trying to protect a "pet industries" financial interests, when the law will make them increase the wages they pay?
This, of course, says nothing about the justice of the disparity between the Samoan minimum wage and the mainland wage...I'll grant you. Nor does it address the question of mixing non-related issues in legislation. But the attempt to blame the Speaker and Democrats for ignoring the Samoan worker, while protecting private business interests...that seems inaccurate. The Samoan worker will see an increase in their wage...the businesses are not being exempted from that increase.
But...I may not fully understand the bill and it complex relation to the current codes either...
There is no other way to explain it. At first Madam Speaker got caught with her hand in the cookie jar exempting American Samoa from the minimum wage, so now she has the arrogance to slip it in thinking that no one will oppose it because it is funding for the troops and the Democrats pulled the surrender time line.
It takes a very big ego, or a lot of stupidity to do this.
"Wubbies World" - MSgt, U.S. Air Force (Retired): "Call to Me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know." -Jer 33:3-