Earning (and Trying to Live on) Minimum Wages in America Today, Part II
How 100% of the 47% breaks out
When I was young and impressionable
My parents told me that politics was a rather simple matter: Republicans favored business and the rich and Democrats tried to help the "little guys" (us, I suspected). But voting was not so clear and simple. They had voted for FDR early on but had no regrets about liking "Ike." Then with JFK in 1960, of course, as Catholics, was there another choice?
When I was finally eligible to vote I unenthusiastically cast my lot for LBJ and a host of Democrats since. I had not given policy differences much thought until Clinton, who struck me as more of a Republican than a Democrat. The 2000 election (can we really call it an election?) of Bush over Gore raised my consciousness. Bush's presidency raised my hackles and I realized that all along I was radically progressive.
It took Romney's 47% speech to nail the truth of what my parents related so simply years earlier. Now that Republicans are on the stump trying to forge new relations with the poor, it's time to remember just who is in whose corner. I often sympathize with those who feel there is only one ruling class in America despite the alternation of two parties who participate in a charade of democracy to keep the powerless citizenry deluded.
The op-ed linked below by Charles M. Blow of the New York Times exposes the undercurrent in Republican thinking that reveals their latest pandering to the poor as an exercise in hypocrisy obvious to everyone but them.
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