You're Worked Up Over The Confederate Flag - What About Your $$$?

Ever since the tragic shooting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, the cry for the state to remove the Confederate flag from flying over a war memorial near the capitol building has intensified. Given the state law governing the flag is unnecessarily cumbersome, it is doubtful anything will be done to remove it, especially in an election cycle. But, our money? Nary a peep about that. Reach into your pocket and pull out your money and you will see the visages of many slave owners.

This hue and cry over taking down the Confederate flag is mere posturing to make one's self look good in the current politically heated climate if there is not an equal or even greater commitment to remove the faces of slave owning presidents and men from our money. Let's look at what we have for money; first the coins.

Ah, the nickel, and staring back at us is Thomas Jefferson. A lot of times on social media forums you will see people quoting Jefferson or offering up some meme, all the while ignoring the fact he owned slaves, and he owned them while he was president. The quarter, good ol' two bits, and looking sideways at us is the Father Of  Our Country, the first president, George Washington. He, too, owned slaves and did so while president. Now, the paper currency.

Appearing once more on the one dollar bill is that slave owning guy. Same story. Same with the two dollar bill, slave owning president making a second appearance. The ten dollar bill doesn't feature a president, but the father of our modern capitalistic society, Alexander Hamilton. There is no record he owned slaves, however, since he was an ardent property rights kinda guy, he did help broker deals for slaves. On the twenty we have Andrew Jackson who not only helped with the near genocide of Native Americans but also owned slaves while he was president. The fifty dollar bill features Ulysses Grant. As a Civil War hero on the winning side, you'd think that...well, you would be wrong. He owned slaves, but not while he was president. Last, but certainly not least as they say, on the one hundred dollar bill, there is Benjamin Franklin. And yes, he owned slaves as a young man.

Some might offer the argument that these were men of their times and shouldn't be held up to our more "enlightened" present standards. As Sherman Potter used to say on M*A*S*H, "bull hockey!". Removing these slave owning men will not dim their history from our country. If we truly feel it is time for America to get with fact it is 2015, and flags should be removed, then it is long past time to replace these men's visages from our money.

 

It's Not About "Burger Flippers" It's About The Devalued Dollar

I'm sure many of you have seen the memes (or variations thereof) shown below on social media over the past few months. The one on the top is more than a bit disingenuous because it presupposes that first responders only get minimum wage and that they do not complain. There's a similar one comparing "burger flippers" with United States soldiers which is also disingenuous because it ignores the fact that soldiers are grossly under paid and under benefited as well! The bottom meme is closer to what has actually happened - the decline of buying power by the U.S. dollar and the MSM ignoring inflation, the second great depression and the impact that this had on tens of millions of Americans.

 

 

 

 

Many moons ago when I was working a part-time minimum wage job for $3.10 an hour while in college I was able to afford to share a 2 bedroom apartment, had a savings account and didn't need food stamps. Six months later, I was out of college and bumped up the gravy train to $3.50 an hour and more than 30 hours a week. Then I was paying back my student loan and still had the savings account, paid rent, paid for my food, paid for clothes, et al. My point is that the buying power of the dollar has dramatically decreased over the years and inflation (which they used to report on the nightly news by the way) is going through the roof.

 

I noticed that almost no one was bitching and moaning when McDonald's CEO was given a 4+ times raise last year, but raise the minimum wage and howls are made mostly from the right-wing, economists and filthy rich people. So, with minimum wage workers on food stamps, child welfare, housing welfare etc., you'd rather argue that subsidizing these high-profit, low wage corporations is all right for American taxpayers? A $15 an hour wage would cut food stamps rolls and all the rest. It's that simple. This isn't about pimply faced teenagers or retirees, this is about corporate welfare at the expense of working Americans and the fact that the dollar doesn't buy nearly as much as it use to.

 

If you are still fixated on the "burger flipper" in spite of reading this far, consider this: the average fast food "value meal" costs about $7.50. It would take an employee at said fast food establishment one hour's worth of wages to afford that. Even the self-serving, bigoted car magnate Henry Ford understood he had to pay his employees enough of a wage to afford the cars they built.