Back in 2008, Democratic Sen. Diane Feinstein declared: “There are parts of government that can be run like a business and should be run like a business.”
Thus, the chairwoman of the Senate committee overseeing Congressional facilities privatized the restaurants and other food services in the US Senate. Sure enough, those dining spots now turn a profit, because they are being “run like a business” – specifically a business like McDonald’s. Restaurant Associates, the New York outfit that got the House and Senate food contract, profits by paying poverty-level wages and generally mistreating the cooks, wait staff, and other people who put the “service” in food service.
Wages are less that $11 an hour, well below the very-expensive cost of living in the Washington area. “Everybody has second jobs,” says one weary worker. And when our $174,000-a-year members of Congress adjourn for the three months or so of vacations they take each year, the food service workers are sent away with no pay at all. In fairness, I should note that Restaurant Associates did give a pay raise to some workers not long ago – it was 3¢ an hour. That’s not a raise, it’s an insult!
“I serve food to some of the most powerful people on Earth,” says a Senate cook. “They often talk of expanded opportunity for workers, but most don’t seem to notice or care that workers in their own building are struggling to survive.”
Care? A key Republican committee chairman, Rep. Tom Graves, recently showed how much Congress cares about inequality by refusing even to consider requiring food service contractors to pay a living wage: “It’s really not within the scope of this committee to micromanage all contracts,” he sniffed.
Think of how that makes the Capitol dining staff feel. If I was ol’ Tom, from now on I wouldn’t eat anywhere in the Capitol without taking a food taster with me.
“In Congress, Income Inequality Fact of Life For Food Servers,” www.bigstory.ap.org, May 4, 2015.

Join the spreading rebellion against the Big Money political game

I think we can all agree that news stories about the ever-rising flood of big money in politics do not tend to have a lot of laughs in them.
But a recent item from the New York Times unintentionally got a good guffaw from me. It was a seriously serious piece about how Karl Rove’s Super-PAC of corporate political cash has been surpassed both in cash and clout by the billion-dollar electioneering network of the Koch brothers. The reporter stated that the Kochs have “leapfrogged” Rove. There’s nothing factually funny in that, but the image of the multibillionaire brothers, Charles and David, laughing and leaping over a bent over Karl Rove is the delightfully-ridiculous stuff of slapstick.
In fact, today’s whole political game, run by an absurdist’s nightmare of moneyed elites, is ridiculous – a game in which corporations are people and money is magically empowered to speak; candidates trek to the corporate suites and secret retreats of the rich, shamelessly selling their political souls; super-wealthy interests clandestinely pump unlimited sums of money into disgustingly-negative campaign ads that turn off most voters; candidates “win” with only a small minority of the electorate choosing them; winners then claim to have a democratic mandate to enact the plutocratic agenda.
This could be hilarious in a slapstick routine, but it’s tragic in a country with democratic aspirations. But don’t despair, for a backlash is building all across the country among voters who’re fed up with the money-rigged game that excludes them.
One group called the New Hampshire Rebellion is bird-dogging presidential candidates in that state to demand action to get Big Money out of politics. To help start your own rebellion, you can get a free, online toolkit from these modern-day Paul Revere’s by going to www.NHRebellion.org

Feingold to Snowden to Paul: Curtailing the Patriot Act

Let us now praise an odd bedfellow threesome: One Democratic ex-senator, an American citizen in exile, and a current Republican Senator. I don’t think they’ve ever met, yet their separate efforts over 14 years have now guided our ship of state away from some perilous authoritarian straits.
First came Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, a former Democratic senator who refused in October 2001 to sacrifice our fundamental liberties to the fears and rank political opportunism that followed the horrific 9/11 terrorist attack. The Bush-Cheney regime was using 9/11 as an excuse to hustle their liberty-busting “USA Patriot Act” into law. But Sen. Feingold dared to object, pointing out that it would impose a 1984-ish secret security state over our people’s freedoms. He was the lone senator to vote “no.”
Just as he warned, the act proved to be deeply unpatriotic. But Congress, the media, and We the People were kept in the dark about it – until 2013, when a young security analyst named Edward Snowden blew the whistle, revealing that cyber-snoops were collecting and storing all of our phone records. The spy establishment retaliated by forcing Snowden into Russian exile, but their dirty deeds were now exposed, roiling the public and increasing congressional opposition to this wholesale invasion of our privacy.
Enter Rand Paul, a Republican senator and longtime libertarian opponent of Patriot Act madness. That act had to be renewed by June 1, and the establishment assumed no lawmaker would dare block it. But Sen. Paul did, using 11th hour procedural moves to force a rewrite that ended some of its worst intrusions, including the government’s bulk collection your and my phone calls.
Liberty depends on true patriots like Feingold, Snowden, and Paul, who dare to put themselves on the line to steer America away from authoritarianism.
“After 9/11, Few Doubts on Surveillance; Now Congress Weighs Risks vs. Liberty,” The New York Times, June 2, 2015.
“Senate Approves Sharp Curtailing Of Surveillance,” The New York Times, June 3, 2014.
“NSA looks done with phone date collection,” Austin American Statesman, June 2, 2015.
“Bluff Called, McConnell Misplays His Hand in Phone Data Fight,” The New York Times, June 2, 2015.