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Bending Over Backwards While a half-dozen US soldiers get picked off in Iraq each week like balloons at a carnival, the Bush administration has successfully merged the war against the working poor with the war against the middle class, all without using ground troops. A bill pending in Congress would eliminate overtime pay for about six million American workers. Someone in the West Wing with a photo of Joseph Goebbles in his wallet named this bill the Family Time Flexibility Act, a move far more Orwellian than debating what the meaning of the word “is” is. The bigger the lie, the more they’ll believe it. Sounds like Ari Fleischer got out just in time. The Family Time Flexibility Act targets a variety of low-to-middle-income earners suddenly dubbed managers because someone else in the shop happens to be making even less. And that’s a good thing. These fat cats making 22, 23 Gs a year were getting too big for their britches and simply had to be reigned in. Once you’re six or seven K over the poverty line, you get a little cocky. But now, finally, these workers get to make important life choices. Put your twelve-year-old’s braces on VISA or Mastercard—your call. Pay the gas bill by hocking the GameCube or the DVD player—it’s up to you. Employees previously grossing 29 K instead of, say, 21 K, by putting in an extra 15 hours a week at the office will just have to cut back on luxury items—like the rent. But fear not--an office manager raking in 11.50 an hour can make up the lost income with the almost tax free dividends from her telecommunications portfolio and still have time left over to spend the night before Christmas with her eight-year-old daughter rummaging through a thrift shop. And if she doesn’t have a family, she’ll have more time to spend with her credit counselor. It’s a win-win. Like the Holy Roman Empire, which was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire, the Family Time Flexibility Act bill has little to do with helping families, making free time, or providing flexibility. Forget repealing the Great Society. GW and friends have gotten bored with that one and moved on to repealing the New Deal. The only thing that provides less flexibility than the Family Time Flexibility Act is unemployment itself, and the good people at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are doing their share to make that a reality too. They know that when you’re unemployed, you can watch that Buffy the Vampire Slayer rerun when it airs or tape it and watch it later. Either way. Sometimes, up late with the night birds chirping outside and FOX blaring in the background, you wonder how it all fits together. You call yourself a centrist, but then the shrill voice of cable news shills like Ann Coulter and mean-spirited legislation like this nudge you slowly leftward. You remember that virtually nothing is left of the left and nudge yourself back to the center. Still, the paradox persists. How do these hypocrites who call themselves Christians, born-agains, whatever, get so squarely behind the piece by piece destruction of the working class? It’s a long way from Luke 16.13 to decimation of federal overtime regulations. But then it all hits you like a Patriot missile. Bush has a plan for you. The administration is jumpstarting the economy using overworked white and blue collar workers as cables. Not to worry--that $400 tax rebate will negate the first ten days of overtime loss for fiscal year 2004. Meanwhile, that same $400 stimulates the economy when it is invested in skim milk, Q-Tips, and diapers. This, in turn, feeds the American Dream, which is to slow the rate at which your personal debt is increasing. Or to pay off your HFC credit line with a home equity loan. Still, you wonder when the chickenhawks will come home to roost. Any month now, we’ll be running out of Husseins to kill and finally have to deal with the economy. But the Roves and Cheneys already figured out that one, as well, many fiscal quarters ago over a game of three-card Monte. Here’s how it works: Those thriving citizens with second jobs at Home Depot and third jobs at OfficeMax will have to ask their angry, burned-out, underpaid supervisor--himself no longer eligible for overtime--if they can have an hour off to vote. What do you think the answer will be? As for the unemployed, the theory is these folks will be too busy taking deposit bottles back to the 7-Eleven to make it to the polls. Bling bling. There are no accidents here. As every fundamentalist, rightwing, reactionary flake economist knows, it is important that we have two distinct classes in America—the class of people looking at a 2004 Lexus as a third car and the class of people looking at a 21.4 percent interest Discover as a third credit card. Until recently, there had been entirely too much mixing of breeds. That made things hard on the Census Bureau, the networks, and the Bush twins checking out guys at spring break. As it turns out, the Bush administration is a friend of labor, though only when it involves giving birth to a Young Republican. Click here to rant back. |