Oil barons Charles and David Koch held their annual billionaires' summit in Palm Springs on Sunday, Nancy Goldstein reports in The Nation. Every year, the Kochs gather with fellow plutocrats, prominent pundits, and Republican legislators to plan their assault on government regulation and the welfare state. This is the first year that the low-profile gathering has attracted protesters.
The federal minimum wage just increased to $6.55 / hour on Thursday. While this increase will make a big difference in the lives of millions of people, it still leaves the minimum wage far below where it was in 1968, when the minimum wage reached its peak value in real terms.
An excellent overview of the issue can be found online in the 2005 report, "A Just Minimum Wage: Good For Workers, Business and Our Future" [PDF] by Holly Sklar and The Rev. Dr. Paul H. Sherry. It was produced by the American Friends Service Committee and the National Council of Churches USA in support of the Let Justice Roll Living Wage Campaign, and combines a moral/religious perspective along with an empirical economic one that draws both on published data and on the views of enlightened business leaders.
This first chart from the report puts the current situation with the minimum wage in stark perspective:
The 1968 peak is not an accident, as I have written previously about how the 1968 election was a curious variant on the key phenomena of realigning elections. What made 1968 different was that, rather than creating a unified re-alignment of voting blocks, it produced something never seen before in American politics-- a de-alignment of voters that produced a predominant pattern of divided government. (See charts on flip). This pattern did not give outright power to the Republicans, but it did largely stymie the power of Democrats to make major improvements in power of government to make life better for the majority of Americans. And nothing showed this more clearly than the way that the minimum wage has stagnated since 1968.
*this is a cross post from my personal blog focusing on the mental illness stigma: www.invinciblesummers.com.
So, I probably shouldn't discuss politics here but I'm going to! The fact is, this year's election is the single most important election in my lifetime to date. I should note, I grew up in a small town and the majority of my family members are Republican. I have politically sat on the fence my entire adult life, mostly going with what my father believed. But there has always been, somewhere deep down in my heart and soul, a longing for a politician that I believed in and admired.
I longed for someone to run for President of the United States not for power but for the love of the people and our country. Today, I long for a leader that will bring people together and fight the real evil-doers...the corporations that are destroying our country. I long for someone that will not ignore the millions of uninsured. I long for someone who would've never ignored the thousands who lost homes and loved ones during Katrina. Someone who would've never ignored the thousands of soldiers returning home from war, like our current president has. More than anything, I long for change.
Today, the minimum wage goes up for the first time in a decade. As liberals, we're by our very nature concerned with what it means to live in a just and equitable society. As a Drinking Liberally host who has spent the last few days preparing to host a discussion with Jared Bernstein on his book All Together Now: Common Sense for a Fair Economy, I think Bernstein (of the Economic Policy Institute) largely hits the nail on the head on this point, and I'd like to discuss that here.
We're living in historical times, perhaps unprecedented in my lifetime. We're engaged in a terrible and unnecessary war in Iraq, the Executive Branch has evidently become severely politicized, and the compact that holds our society together economically has eroded.
I'd like to focus on that last point. There appears to be little dispute that a new social compact is needed. President Clinton used just those terms when he said, in a 1995 speech (Washington Post):
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