minimum wage

DAY 77

For nearly 20 years, Elizabeth Dole refused to see the value of raising the minimum wage, choosing instead to shield herself from the plight of every day workers who depend on the minimum wage to make ends meet and accepting pay raises for herself. Dole was ready to once again prove her anti-worker stance today when she agreed to speak at a rally to oppose legislation protecting workers’ rights.

Read the entire post to read more on today's reason on why Elizabeth Dole is wrong for North Carolina and check back for updates over the next 77 days.

An oranges to oranges comparison of the cost of living in 1978 versus 2008

City Council Considers Validity of Petition

On Monday, December 3, the Greensboro Minimum Wage Committee (of which I am a member) presented a petition to the Greensboro city clerk asking that, in accordance with the City Charter, the City Council adopt an ordinance raising the minimum wage for all employees in the city to $9.36 per hour or submit it to the voters in the next citywide election. $9.36 is the equivalent, in today's dollars, of the purchasing power of the federal minimum wage in 1968, which is the highest purchasing power the minimum wage has had in US history.

43 Senate Republicans, including the extraordinarily weak Elizabeth Dole, voted against cloture - effectively filibustering the proposed minimum wage hike that sailed through the House two weeks ago. Senate Republicans want to attach tax cuts to the rise in minimum wage. However, "any tax breaks in the bill would put the Senate on a collision course with the House, which is required by the Constitution to initiate tax measures." In otherwords, Senate Republicans are asking for a tax cut that they are Constitutionally not allowed to initiate.

Looks like our favorite Senator from NC just sent a big fat message to American workers during today's Senate session.

Liddy's message:

If you work for minimum wage, I don't care about you.

Apparently, Liddy and our new Republican Minority don't believe in the upperdownvote. The Party of Greed (as our friend Anglico loves to call them) has filibustered the Minimum Wage vote because it does not include an accompanying tax break.

I'll leave it to Senator Kennedy to ask the obvious:

Why can't we do just one thing for minimum wage workers, no strings attached, no giveaways for the powerful?

Well, Liddy? Liddy....?

Crossposted from Town Called Dobson


click to enlarge

I set out this morning to tackle one of the creepiest things ever produced by the John Locke Foundation . . . a wide-ranging treatise on the glory of price gouging. But before I could dig in to dismantle it, I found that NC Policy Watch had already shredded the Puppetshow "report." In what appears to be a new enthusiasm for smacking down the wackos on the right, NCPW has a column entitled Radical Right Reality Check which really looks promising.

This week, our market fundamentalist friends have saved us the trouble of digging beneath the surface by putting the pro-price gouging, pro-usury spiel right up front in the press release that accompanies their new “Macon Series Report” ... North Carolina’s Price-Control Laws: Harming Those They’re Meant to Help. Here are some zingers from the report:

Charles Taylor, Robin Hayes, and the Republican Party (along with 34 unprincipled Democrats) skulked into the chamber last night, well after every decent American had gone to bed, and offered up an immense tax cut to the wealthiest people in the nation. The vote was 230 - 180.

"H.R. 5970: to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to increase the unified credit against the estate tax to an exclusion equivalent of $5,000,000, to repeal the sunset provision for the estate and generation-skipping taxes, and to extend expiring provisions, and for other purposes

first posted at Scrutiny Hooligans

The Asheville Citizen-Times, playing johnny-come-lately behind we Hooligans in reporting the DCCC's NC-11 ad buy, has this quote from Charles Taylor's camp:

"Taylor, in a statement released Sunday, said the DCCC was resorting to “outright lies” in its ads.

Update from Working Families Win
Here's the entire text of Becky's latest email. She says it much better than I could...

HELLO WORKING FAMILY FRIENDS!

Concerned citizens all over North Carolina have responded to our request that they contact their legislators about minimum wage, and YOUR CALLS ARE WORKING!! Senators that have heard from constituents have begun calling on their leadership to ensure the passage of the minimum wage increase this year!!

Here are some stats:
Just on Wednesday, 855 emails were sent to legislators from all over the state! This may be a one day record for our coalition partners! Over 900 e-mails have been sent this week alone!
Every legislator - except two newly appointed legislators - has gotten at least one constituent email!