Yes folks, the man Obama is about to nominate for Commerce Secretary, the guy who is about to become the liason between our new "progressive" President and the business community wants to abolish one of the last remaining threads of the tattered social safety net that his draconian Party has destroyed over the last 30 years.
What the fuck?
UPDATE: He also voted against emergency heating oil assistance for low income folks. That was classy, especially since he did it on the same day he won a powerball jackpot (h/t to Dean Barker).
Here's the list of Senators that voted in favor of an amendment to the '07 bill (HR 2) that the newly elected Democratic-controlled Congress introduced to increase the woefully inadequate national minimum wage. That amendment would have given the states the ability to decide for themselves what each of their minimum wages would be. In other words, it would have instituted a race to the bottom, with many deeply red states abolishing it altogether, attracting blood-sucking corporations to set up shop where they could legally hire desperate workers for as little as they felt like. Even the blue states would be drawn into the downward spiral as corporations migrated toward the new pools of third-world priced labor. $5, $4, $3, even $2/hr rates would have been legal again for the lowest rungs of the wage scale. Virtual slavery would have become the logical outcome of that amendment.
Here's what the AFL-CIO and Ted Kennedy had to say about the insanity that Judd Gregg signed onto just two short years ago:
As if speaking to reluctant Depression-era lawmakers wary of federal intrusion on the states, Kennedy explained the reason for a minimum wage floor:
The concept of the minimum wage was that it was going to be a minimum payment, a minimum standard. What was accepted at the time of the minimum wage is that in this country, we didn’t want to accelerate a rush to the bottom so that we would have competition in the various states to pay the lowest possible wages–sweat labor–in order to try to attract industries into those particular States, but to provide a minimum standard.
Here in the 21st century, that simple reasoning just didn’t penetrate the skulls of 28 U.S. senators—who by the way make $165,200 a year and almost annually vote to give themselves a pay raise.
So where are the unions today? Obama is poised to nominate the asshole tomorrow (I'm a blue collar worker so I have the right to call anyone who wants to abolish the minimum wage an asshole) and I haven't heard word one from any union about this.
What the fuck?