Wednesday, February 13, 2013

President Obama to Raise Minimum Wage?


President Obama to Raise Minimum Wage?

 President Barack Obama has declared in Tuesday night’s State of the Union Address that he shall be pushing for a significant increase in the federal minimum wage, a change which has long been overdue. Right now the minimum wage is not nearly a living wage, but a poverty wage. Congress has only approved a raise in the federal minimum wage three times in the last three decades. Now the federal minimum is stagnant at $7.25 an hour. That amounts to a grand total of $15,080 a year (about 1,256 a month) if you work 40 hours every week with no sick days or vacation time. That is not nearly enough for even one person to afford rent, food, utilities, gas, car insurance, and other necessary daily expenditures.

       In no state in the country is it possible to pay for a basic but safe two bedroom apartment and the utilities on a full time job at minimum wage. An individual trying to live off of minimum faces absolute destitution in the event of a broken car, missed work, an injury, or a health problem. This is one of the primary reasons why there are now over 45 million people in the United States who are living below the poverty line, and there are over 50 million people without any health insurance. Despite belief to the contrary, most people in poverty are either disabled or they work very hard and are known as the “working poor”.
        If minimum wage had increased at the same rate of economic inflation to keep up with the cost of living than it would be $10.58 an hour today, which is just over 22,000 dollars a year at 40 hours a week.  Almost two thousand dollars a month would make it possible for a single person on their own to budget very tightly and have enough to cover all their usual expenses without government assistance, except for particularly expensive places like New York City or Los Angeles.
         It is significant to note, however, that if minimum wage grew at the same rate that CEO salaries and profits have for the last forty years that our minimum wage would be closer to twenty three dollars an hour. In truth, that is what corporations, from all of their historically momentous growth of wealth over the decades, can really afford to pay their workers, but they choose not to. The profits from the one hundred richest people in this country are now enough to eliminate poverty worldwide, four times over. There is no genuine reason for minimum wage to not be far above even ten dollars an hour, except for the greed of our so called “job-creators” and their refusal to risk any decrease to their next billion dollar Christmas bonus.
       Tipped employees have a separate federal minimum, which is at $2.13 an hour and has remained unchanged for over twenty years. According to the Fair Labor Standards Act, an employer is exempt from having to pay the usual minimum wage if the employee makes thirty dollars or more a month in tips. It is also legal to pay someone who is under the age of twenty a starting wage of $4.24 an hour for the first three months they work for an employer. There are also exceptions allowing employers to pay less than minimum if the worker is a full time student, a student learner, or has a disability.
        The good news is that states do have the power to raise their state minimum wage through state legislation, and employers have to adhere to the higher standard in those states. In November of 2012, ten states voted to increase their minimum wage, including Washington, Vermont, Oregon, and Ohio. The state with the highest minimum wage in the country is the state of Washington with a rate of $9.19 an hour. Thirty one states, however, still cling to the federal minimum of $7.25. There are some states wherein certain occupations can legally get away with paying LESS than the federal minimum. In Arkansas they can pay their employees $6.25 an hour if the employer has four or more employees. Employers in Georgia sometimes pay $5.15 an hour if they have six or more workers. In 2011 there were 2.2 million workers making less than the federal minimum.
attribution: None Specified
       The Chamber of Commerce and the National Restaurant Association (of course) protest the very idea of raising minimum wage at all and insist that it will lead to employers cutting hours to make up for the difference. However, this would be foolish and counter-intuitive because businesses always maintain precisely the number of employees they need to keep up with demand, failing to do so would cut more deeply into profits than would raises for employees. There are no employers who are going to hire someone new when they do not need the extra help, even if they have the money to do so, and employers are certainly not going to fire people and cut hours, leaving them short-handed, as long as demand remains steady. So it is the level of demand (the customers) that enables a business to grow and keeps it lucrative and operating. Of course, the best way to maintain a stable customer base is to make sure that as many people as possible are receiving a living wage, which enables them to purchase this country’s endless array of goods and services and keeps our economy from collapsing.
         President Obama is hoping for a federal minimum wage hike to $9 an hour, which is down from the $9.50 he initially proposed, and much further down than the $10 minimum Clinton tried for in the 90’s. Of course a raise of $1.75 would be helpful, but it is still not going to get most people out of poverty, and may do us little good in the long run if we do not have an indexed minimum wage. An index rate is a minimum wage which automatically increases to keep up with the rising cost of living from inflation. Otherwise, we may find ourselves in this same position five or ten years from now, fighting to raise wages again because no one can make a living working full time. Obama said “If you work full time, you shouldn’t be in poverty”. It is hard to imagine someone disagreeing with that statement…but alas, they exist.
         The President stated that “[Raising minimum wage is] not a Democratic thing or a Republican thing”, and went on to say that it was the job of both sides to restore balance and security to the country. He received applause for his usual attempt at bipartisan peacemaking, but the reality is that no matter what Obama does to improve the country, Republicans are going to oppose it. President Obama’s desire to appease and win over the congressional republicans quickly became a tiresome failure, now it is a play at absurdity. It is time to end the game of bipartisan politics and take the path of progressive leadership for which we elected this president in the first place.
         Republican politicians have no stake in the struggling workers of the country, and they have no interest in improving their circumstances. It is against their interests to eliminate poverty for millions of people, thereby empowering those people to seek better opportunities. Republicans and their rich CEO overlords want to have a huge pool of oppressed, uneducated, desperate workers who are willing to do any job for as little pay as the employers can possibly manage. That way they always have a hefty pool of obedient workers who are less likely to complain or make demands. This pattern of thought is apparent in the less intellectually adept republicans who allow such intentions to become blatantly obvious, like Michelle Bachmann who said that we could practically end unemployment if we did away with minimum wage laws entirely so we could hire people at “whatever level”.
         If we want to avoid absolute economic destruction we have to invest in our workers. Employee’s clock out of work and immediately become consumers, and our country has a consumer based economy. It is time to strengthen our country by strengthening our people and raise the minimum wage to a living wage.  In the event that President Obama succeeds at raising the rate to nine dollars an hour, it must only serve as a starting point. It is only impossible to make a difference if we insist that failure is the only possibility. Obama is certainly right in that no one who works full time should have to wallow in poverty with little chance of getting ahead. 
“A market where chief executive officers make 262 times that of the average worker and 821 times that of the minimum-wage worker is not a market that is working well. And it is surely not working well enough to build a solid middle class.”       ~Marcy Kaptur


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Sources:
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Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Gay Marriage: Common Sense is not so Common



Gay Marriage: 
Common Sense is not so Common


The LGBTQ community deserves absolute support in their pursuit for social and legal equality, and it is utterly ridiculous that we are still arguing about gay marriage, such a thing should be common sense. There is no logical reason why two consenting adults should not be able to do anything they like with each other, including get married. The gender or sex of the people involved is no one’s business and is of no consequence to anyone outside of that marriage. This is not just a matter of gay rights; it is a matter of civil rights and personal freedoms.

The illusion that gay marriage affects everyone, or anyone, is absurd. Gay marriage has never caused a heterosexual marriage to fail unless one of the people in the couple wasn’t really straight in the first place. Certainly infidelity and divorce are far greater threats to “the sanctity” of marriage than two gay individuals getting married, but there are no riots on the street to have cheating and divorce criminalized or banned. There is also no public outcry for an end to cousins marrying. It is legal in all fifty states to marry your second cousin and twenty states allow first cousins to marry ("National conference of," 2012).

Sometimes there are not two equally valid sides of an argument...sometimes there is right and sometimes there is wrong, these are called facts. Everyone is entitled to have opinions....but that "it’s just my opinion" nonsense, coming from those who regard homosexuality as evil, usually comes from someone who was caught in a logical corner and has nothing else to say. Your freedom of opinion ends when that opinion in action threatens to violate someone else’s freedoms and rights. Those that oppose gay marriage are not simply "stating their opinion", they are promoting a platform if hate, ignorance, and prejudice and they mean to use that platform to oppress certain people and force their own view of proper societal conformity.

Of course people can have their own opinions about movies, music, food, art, etc...but it is crossing the bounds of reason with the "right to your opinion" thing when your opinion is that it is okay to discriminate a particular group of people and deny them equal rights and protections under the law....these are not okay opinions to have, and certainly no opinion is beyond the realm of criticism. When I hear, “that is my opinion and it is my right to have it", my thoughts are, ‘Yes, maybe, and it is my right to call you on your opinions and criticize their logical and moral flaws, and I will fight your opinions tooth and nail if they at all threaten to affect anyone in a negative way.’

Christians always point to the bible to justify their hatred of homosexuals, but the religious often nitpick through their scriptures looking for passages that justify their desired actions and ignore the passages that are an inconvenience to them. Christians typically ignore the passages condemning tattoos, mixed cloth, shellfish, and women talking ("I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man. She must be quiet." -God (1 Timothy 2:12)) and go right to the passages about stoning homosexuals to death. It is also true that Jesus is not known to have ever said anything about homosexuality, even the orators that told his story never claimed he said anything about it, but even if he had….so what? The bible, and supposedly god, condones slavery ("Slaves, be subject to your masters with all reverence, not only to those who are good and equitable but also to those who are perverse." (1 Peter 2:18)), rampant misogyny, polygamy, killing innocent children, massacring entire cities, flooding the whole world, and a myriad of violence in its entire splendor, "Go, now, attack Amalek, and deal with him and all that he has under the ban. Do not spare him, but kill men and women, children and infants, oxen and sheep, camels and asses." -God (1 Samuel 15:3). The bible is not personally where I would go to find perfect moral guidance.

If you still believe that being gay is evil I cannot stop you from thinking that way, but it really should not be a concern of yours (if you are not gay) so why interfere in the lives of others? There are couples BEGGING to be allowed to marry their loved one and not have to move to another state away from their friends and family to do it. You can live your own life by whatever code you choose, but if they want to rot in hell for all eternity, let them do it, it is their choice. No one should have the right to force their faith and beliefs on other people, especially by passing or supporting legislation that would restrict the freedoms of others.

Let’s suppose for a moment that gay marriage was bringing forth this change in the definition of marriage. I consider that to be a good thing, as marriage was traditionally intended to be a contract of an exchange of ownership. Men have, through most of history, legally OWNED their daughter’s and wives and could sell off their daughters like slaves. In many cases it was the prospective husband who had to procure a sum of money or goods to trade for a bride, but in some cultures, like parts of Europe, a “dowry” was required of the father to give to the husband upon a marriage agreement, making females a lowly burden to families; further ingraining the cultural understanding that females are inferior. In many cultures all around the world marriage is still pretty much the same. Marriage has been about ownership, status, politics, and business…but not love. Love is a very new understanding as a purpose or requirement for marriage, and the fact that it is at all means that we have already redefined marriage. So I am exceedingly relieved, that if marriage is to exist at all that, in this country at least, it is being redefined, as a union of mutual love and partnership between two consenting adults, no matter their sex/gender.  

It has been said a million times by all those who are rational, but it is still true, that it really shouldn’t matter who you love. The political right screams about small government and freedoms, but they ignore those words when it comes to dictating who you can marry, a woman’s reproductive rights, or the substances you can consume. The hypocritical right wing is fed by the fears and prejudices of an ignorant populace fooled by lunacy that is ages old, and in almost all the social problems I come across I see the same core issue…lack of education. I do not just mean school; I speak of a general lack of understanding and working knowledge of the world and a failure to see past one’s own limited experience. Knowledge is the finest cure against any prejudice. If only knowing were valued more than following, if only questioning were more valued than obeying. Hate is taught; it is not innate, whereas the inclination to explore is perfectly natural and should be nourished. So parents, please teach your children to appreciate the variety of life and seek a deeper understanding in all things and people, so that we may create a future where bigotry and prejudice is a thing of the past. Now is the time to give justice to the homosexual community and give them the same rights and legal protection that heterosexuals have always had. 



“Whenever the people are for gay marriage or medical marijuana or assisted suicide, suddenly the "will of the people" goes out the window.”   ~Bill Maher




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Saturday, February 2, 2013

Europe Bans Cosmetic Tests on Animals



VICTORY! Europe Marks the End of Cosmetic Tests on Animals

By The Lady Rhiannon


         There is great news for animal advocates out there. The European Union has announced that they have passed legislation that will effectively ban of the sale, import, or manufacture of any and all cosmetics that have been tested on animals. The ban is set to take effect starting March 11 of 2013. Anyone who wants to sell cosmetics, including toiletries such as toothpaste, deodorant, and soap, in Europe must ensure that there are no ingredients anywhere in the product that have been tested on animals. This is a HUGE breakthrough for animal rights activists and, of course, the animals we fight to protect.
        This victory has been the culmination of a two decade long effort by the “Cruelty Free International” charity foundation and the cruelty-free retailer “The Body Shop”. Together they have launched an international campaign to end animal testing and promote cruelty-free products. So far 55 countries have signed a pledge in support of the ban. The organization has indicated that one of their next main targets is China, which still requires such animal tests for cosmetic products. Of course, there is still a large amount of testing in America as well. However, there is a lot of hope for the United States because the Food and Drug Administration does not require product testing on animals.

        It is difficult to get a clear answer as to how many animals are used in cosmetic tests each year because there is very little regulation of such things and most countries do not have laws requiring corporations or experimenters to keep track of the number of animals used. Modest estimates are in the hundreds of thousands worldwide every year; thousands die a year in the United States alone. The clearest estimates I could find were for all lab animals used for cosmetics, medicine, and all other products, which is between 14 and 70 million animals worldwide in any given year. Cats, dogs, mice, rats, and rabbits are often used to test the irritancy and toxicity of cosmetic products through painful exposure experiments.

         All of the experiments are cruel, painful, and unnecessary. For example, they typically drip chemicals into the eyes of rabbits to test a product’s sensitivity. This can cause soreness, swelling, bleeding from the eyes, and blindness. It is also common practice to manually pump substances into the lungs or stomachs of dogs, cats, rats, and other animals until the animals die or the experimenters are otherwise satisfied with the experiment. That test is called “Acute oral toxicity” testing, and the animals in this experiment who do not die often suffer from seizures, paralysis, diarrhea, and/or bleeding from the mouth or throat. The “Acute dermal toxicity” test is when they apply a substance to the shaved skin of a rat, guinea pig, or rabbit, and cover it to prevent the animal from licking the chemicals off. Both the Acute oral and the acute dermal tests are designed to figure out the amount of substance needed to kill at least half of the exposed animals within two weeks’ time. Over 50% of all animals used in cosmetic tests die within three weeks.

         If the animals do not die in any given experiment, they are either euthanized or reused in the next experiment. The list of experiments (usually involving forced inhalation or consumption of dangerous substances) goes on and on. They even expose pregnant animals to various chemicals to test for birth defect. These are pointless, unnecessary tests that really prove nothing about the effect a product will have on a person. Animals are simply too different than humans for animal tests to be practically applicable. There is no logical reason for these animals to suffer for our vanity and I am so glad that Europe has made this leap in their part to end the madness and I too hope the world will follow suit.

        There are literally dozens of tests now available that can usually cheaper and always more dependable than the results of animal tests. Companies like EpiSkin, EpiDerm, and SkinEThic have developed the technology of artificial human skin. We can test substances on human blood given by volunteers for also. “The Bovine Corneal Opacity and Permeability Test” and “Isolated Chicken Eye Test” use eyes of slaughtered animals from the meat industry to test the potential irritation a product could cause to eyes. This not only saves countless rats, rabbits, and guinea pigs, but also makes good use of what otherwise would go to waste.

        The Chief Executive of Cruelty Free International, Michelle Thew, said of the European animal testing ban, “This is truly an historic event and the culmination of over 20 years of campaigning. Now we will apply our determination and vision on a global stage to ensure that the rest of the world follows this lead.” This is a controversial topic, but one that does not get a lot of attention in the news. Animals are easy to ignore because they do not talk, but they matter. Many people cannot bear to face the reality because it is so ugly, but that means that you care enough to do something about it.         
        You can get involved with the fight in many ways; sign petitions and pledges, email your congressmen for stricter animal protection legislation, and make sure to buy cruelty free products. Many products say “cruelty free” on the back, but you can also visit the Human Society website to get a free list of animal safe products as well as brands of which to stay clear. These companies will reject animal testing if we genuinely reject THEM for it. Remember, you vote with your money, so please be mindful of your choices. These animals cannot fight for themselves; we are the only ones who can make this vital change…a necessary change, a worthy change, and relatively easy change to make.



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