Letter from my local paper:
Bush has made U.S. laughingstock of the world



Sunday, October 9, 2005

To believe the latest nomination to the Supreme Court is anything less than cronyism, you must first believe all the spin that comes from this administration, a la Fox News. At every turn, there is someone willing to fall on the sword for this group of nincompoops.

How can you plausibly claim to be a compassionate conservative while running up the largest deficits in history, while cutting programs designed to help the downtrodden? Conversely, how can you claim to be building a democracy in a foreign land while doing everything possible to destroy your own? This joke of an administration insults our intelligence and makes us the laughingstock of the world.

Serious foreign policy questions deserve real answers, given by someone who actually can speak to the American people and the world without looking down at the work of a spin doctor, who has the ability to string five words together without getting tongue-tied. Throughout my lifetime, I've heard the warnings that big business would eventually control national politics, but I held hope that it wouldn't be allowed to happen.

If you believe one word this president says, you are an even bigger idiot than he is. Yours are the young people who should be sacrificed for his lies, but truth is, we will all pay, whether we like it or not.

Where is the call for impeachment? We no longer even have the election process as an avenue of change. Be very afraid.

**** ******

Vermont

http://www.pjstar.com/stories/100905/FOR_B7P1970T.059.shtml
[right][snapback]136016[/snapback][/right]

Everybody seems to discount Howard Dean and the job he's doing.  That's a mistake.

It's good that avowed socialists are taking over the Dem party?
[right][snapback]136085[/snapback][/right]

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 8 is a socialist group? 

  I wish you could tell them in person. 
[right][snapback]136111[/snapback][/right]

ROFLMFAO!!!!!!!!!!!!

Notice the origin of this letter? Christ, my local paper post these kind of letters on a daily basis. We certainly do have more than our share of 'loonies' up here. Must be the smell of cow shit effects a liberal's brain! 
[right][snapback]136108[/snapback][/right]

On CNN this morning they were discussing the rebuilding of New Orleans and the Act bush put in action to lower the wages.

  There is such a shortage of skilled labor the wages are way higher then ususal.  Supply and demand. 
[right][snapback]136112[/snapback][/right]

It's not possible to out-loonie Idaho.  Even Santa Monica can't manage it; they only have left-loonies.  We have the whole spectrum.
[right][snapback]136162[/snapback][/right]

Oh, NOW you believe in supply and demand. I think the point was to make it easier to hire non-skilled and starter labor easier. Give them experience and they can get jobs anywhere they're available.
[right][snapback]136217[/snapback][/right]

You have to have journeymen (4 years on the job, testing, to be a journeyman) in order to teach the unskilled the trade.

  They have to start somewhere, but with a teacher.

  The need is for the journeymen, plenty of unskilled Mexican labor being bussed in.

  Jesse Jackson is bringing 600 from New Orleans down there tomorrow to try and get jobs.
[right][snapback]136225[/snapback][/right]

Maybe Jesse can get a job too. Hasn't been productive since the old days when he was spitting in white people's food.
[right][snapback]136239[/snapback][/right]

Isn't the sub-average wage worker the non-skilled and first job laborer?  I don't see how anyone can know what will happen until more long term planning takes place. Hurricane season isn't even over yet.
[right][snapback]136238[/snapback][/right]

Even first time and non skilled workers were entitled to a minimum wage in this country. A minimum wage, I might add, that hasn't been adjusted since 1979.


[right][snapback]136243[/snapback][/right]

I thought they only lowered the federal contract wage rules.

Minimum wage rates are a different problem altogether.
[right][snapback]136248[/snapback][/right]

If you have a major disruption, you also have a disruption is what is prevailing. The old prevailing wage was based on a decent economy and infrastructure.

Katrina changed that.
[right][snapback]136258[/snapback][/right]

The Davis-Bacon Act of 1931

In 1931, laws were enacted both in Washington and in Wisconsin to guarantee fair competition on federal and state construction projects. Over the years these laws, the Davis-Bacon Act and the state Prevailing Wage law, have become recognized by workers both inside and outside the construction industry, as important milestones in the history of organized labor.

It is fitting that workers, particularly those in construction, understand the important role prevailing wage laws have played over the years in protecting workers on public works projects. It is equally important to remember the conditions and circumstances under which these laws got on the books.

Today, many people believe the Davis-Bacon Act was a product of the great depression. While it is true the Davis-Bacon Act was passed two years after the stock market crash of 1929, the fact is the Act had little to do with the so-called “pump-priming” policies of that era.

By the time the Davis-Bacon Act became law, seven states had already enacted prevailing wage statutes — most notably, Kansas, which passed the first state prevailing wage law in 1891.

New York also had a prevailing wage statute on the books before the turn of the century, nearly 30 years before the first version of the Act was introduce in Congress in 1926 — in the midst of the roaring twenties.

By the middle of the 1920s, the United States government was already greatly involved in heavy construction projects ranging from flood control and dam building to expanding and housing the institutions of government.

Federal and state governments were preparing to become even more active and sought to protect themselves from falling victim to “fly-by-night” “cut throat” contractors who performed “shoddy” work with “exploited”, “low-skilled” and “imported” workforce.

Interestingly enough, those were not the words of labor, but were the words of the bill’s primary sponsors, Congressman Robert Bacon and Pennsylvania Senator James Davis, who viewed their bill not so much as a means to protect workers, but more as a way of providing some market stability in what was, and still is, an inherently unstable construction industry.

Then as now, construction is a time and materials industry. Low bid requirements on public projects allowed contractors from outside an area to bid and win work based on substandard wages and helped create the situation where contractors literally “imported” low-wage workers from around the country rather than use the local labor force.

Abuses were wide spread in the years preceding the Acts passage. Bacon, a former Banker, explained the need for the law when he detailed for his colleagues during debate on the bill how a construction firm from Alabama transported thousands of unskilled workers to a public project in New York.

“They were herded onto this job, they were housed in shacks, they were paid a very low wage, and ... it seems to me that the federal government should not engage in construction work in any state and undermine the labor conditions and the labor wages paid in that state.”

Davis, the former Secretary of Labor under Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, went on to argue that “the least the Federal Government can do is comply with the local standards of wages and labor prevailing in the locality where the building construction is to take place.”

By establishing a local wage standard that contractors had to pay workers on public projects, the authors intended to provide a level playing field on which contractors could compete for work based on wages that “prevailed” in the area, rather than rewarding the practice of slashing worker’s wages in order to win work.

Laborers of the period, because so many were recent immigrants, because they performed “unskilled” work, and because they were easily replaced, were particularly vulnerable to these practices. Recognizing the direct impact of the Act of protecting Laborers, the General Executive Board of the Laborers International Union voted to endorse the Davis-Bacon Act in 1931.
http://www.solidarity.com/Davis-Bacon.htm

I could see your point if we were talking about a high wage area. But as Louisiana had one of the lowest, the only purpose I can see in suspending the law was to open up a rather large opportunity for abuse.
[right][snapback]136267[/snapback][/right]

1931?

Do we really need another depression? That's as silly as calling Sandy Berger as a character witness.

If it was such a good idea at the time you would think it would have helped avoid a deepening depression that didn't go away until after WWII.
[right][snapback]136268[/snapback][/right]

Or job creation. La has been run by democrats with leftist economic theories and you can see where it's gotten them.
[right][snapback]136278[/snapback][/right]

Davis-Bacon had nothing to do with any depression.
[right][snapback]136281[/snapback][/right]

It obviously had nothing to do with ending the depression.

The fact remains the "new deal" didn't end the depression and is bankrupting us with spiraling entitlements.
[right][snapback]136283[/snapback][/right]

Davis-Bacon had nothing to do with any depression. It was a brief summarization, I'm sorry it was too much trouble to read.

I understand it's the fashion now-a-days to bash the New Deal, but fashion isn't any substitute for fact. Those that studied that period, as well as those who survived it, are quite aware of the benefit to the average working man those policies provided. The rich, for all their complaining survived, as well.
[right][snapback]136281[/snapback][/right]

Politics: The art of association.
                              Aristotle

[right][snapback]136289[/snapback][/right]

I'm too young for you to be betting my ass on anything, 'less it's my horse picks.
[right][snapback]136292[/snapback][/right]

Yessiree. Hand-washing, coalition-making, butt-kissing, strange bedfellow-making.
[right][snapback]136293[/snapback][/right]

None of my elders say that they loved Roosevelt or his new deal... but they do say that he and it "saved our asses"... they were there... I wasn't... so I take their word for it. 
[right][snapback]136290[/snapback][/right]

Making it are you?  I thoroughly enjoyed hearing that Ben Stein gave his money where his mouth is to save animals in New Orleons.
Next.
[right][snapback]136303[/snapback][/right]

I'd be a lot more convinced if anything Roosevelt had done had ended the depression or was paying  for itself today.
[right][snapback]136304[/snapback][/right]

It obviously had nothing to do with ending the depression.

The fact remains the "new deal" didn't end the depression and is bankrupting us with spiraling entitlements.
[right][snapback]136283[/snapback][/right]

He ended abject poverty.

[right][snapback]136307[/snapback][/right]

Bull! Purest kind!

I've heard from you revisionist for years spewing your pig in a poke ideology that serves the richest of our citizens and screws the rest.

The jackals finally got control back in 82 and it's been going down hill for the vast majority of our citizenry since...

Talk to those working people who lived through the Great Depression, their experience is at odds with your line...Better yet, see what policies get us out of the one coming due to the imbalance of wealth away from the consumers, who are the real engine that make a market economy work.
[right][snapback]136309[/snapback][/right]

You spew the same bullshit post after post.
[right][snapback]136315[/snapback][/right]

He's right, you are wrong.
[right][snapback]136316[/snapback][/right]

Mundane details Davie, can’t be confusing the all knowing, all seeing crowd all seeing with facts…go sit in the corner…bad davie!   
[right][snapback]136319[/snapback][/right]

He's right, you are wrong.
[right][snapback]136316[/snapback][/right]

Or job creation. La has been run by democrats with leftist economic theories and you can see where it's gotten them.
[right][snapback]136278[/snapback][/right]