You gotta go read this.
http://alternet.org/story/22163/Washington is a divided city -- not between north and south as in Lincoln's time, but between those who can buy all the government they want and those who can't even afford a seat in the bleachers.
…I begin with two families in Milwaukee. The breadwinners in both households lost their jobs in that great wave of downsizing in 1991 as corporations began moving jobs out of the city and out of the country. In a series of documentaries over the next decade my colleagues and I chronicled their efforts to cope with the wrenching changes in their lives and find a place for themselves in the new global economy. I grew up with people like them. They're the kind my mother called "the salt of the earth" (takes one to know one!) They love their children, care about their neighborhoods, go to church every Sunday, and work hard all week. But like millions of Americans, these two families in Milwaukee were playing by the rules and still losing. By the end of the decade they were running harder but slipping behind, and the gap between them and prosperous America had reached Grand Canyon proportions.
I want to show you a very brief excerpt from that first documentary. It aired on PBS in January 1992 with the title "Minimum Wages: The New Economy." You'll see the father of one family as he looks for work after losing his machinist's job at the big manufacturer, Briggs and Stratton. You'll meet his wife in their kitchen as they make a desperate call to the bank that is threatening to foreclose on their home after failing to meet their mortgage payments. During our filming the fathers in both families became seriously ill. One was hospitalized for two months, leaving the family $30,000 in debt. You'll hear the second family talk about what it's like when both parents lose their jobs, depriving them of health insurance and putting their children's education up for grabs. Take a look.
…Or this - courtesy of the columnist, Mark Shields. It seems workers in the American territory of the Northern Mariana Islands were being forced to labor under sweatshop conditions producing garments for Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Gap and Liz Claiborne. The garments were then shipped tariff-free and quota-free to the American market where they were entitled to display the coveted "Made in the USA" label. When Republican Senator Frank Murkowski of Alaska heard that these people were being paid barely half the U.S. minimum hourly wage and were forced to live behind barbed wire in squalid shacks without plumbing while working l2 hours a day, often seven days a week, with none of the legal protections U.S. workers are guaranteed, he became enraged. He got the Senate to pass a bill - unanimously - that would extend the protection of our laws to the U.S. territory of the Northern Marianas. But then the notorious lobbyist Jack Abramoff moved into action with an SOS to his good friend, Tom DeLay. The records show they met at least two dozen times. DeLay traveled to the Marianas with his family and staff - on a "scholarship" provided by Abramoff's clients -- where they played golf and went snorkeling not far the sweatshops (some scholarship!) Was Tom DeLay offended by what he saw? To the contrary. He told the Washington Post that the sweatshops were "a perfect petri dish of capitalism. ABC-TV News recorded him praising Abramoff's clients by saying: "You are a shining light for what is happening to the Republican Party, and you represent everything that is good about what we are trying to do in America and leading the world in the free-market system." And Tom Delay - the rightwing radicals' revisionist incarnation of Saint Francis of Assisi -- killed the Senate bill. (Mark Shields, CNN.com. 5/28/05.)
If that doesn't get your dander up, maybe this will: The minimum wage hasn't been raised since l997. After the Republicans recently defeated an effort to increase it, Rick Wilson wrote for CommonDreams.org about a single mother of two children working somewhere in his home state of West Virginia at $5.l5 an hour, 40 hours a week, or $5,378 below the federal poverty level of $l6,090 for a family that size. Put another way, "her earnings only reach two-thirds of the poverty level." Meanwhile, the base salary of the Members of Congress who voted down the wage increase is $l62, l00. That single mom would have to work about 3l, 476 hours to earn what those members of Congress get in a year. And remember -- the minimum wage she earns is actually worth less than it was 40 years ago (Rick Wilson, CommonDreams.org. 5/25/05.)