Same crap… different speaker…
House Democrats, in their first 100 hours push have passed a minimum wage increase to $7.25 over the next two years. Of note, is the continued exemption from the act of American Samoa, a US territory, where the current minimum wage of $2.63 remains unchanged.
Now follow me here a bit… American Samoa’s largest private employer is the canned tuna industry. A large portion of the remainder of private employment supplies goods related to the tuna industry.
The two largest producers of tuna in American Samoa are Chicken of the Sea and Starkist. Starkist is a Del Monte Foods product. Del Monte is headquartered in… wait for it… San Fransicso. Home to current House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi.
So… American Samoans working for Del Monte can be paid two-thirds less than their counterparts in San Fransico!
Rich Galen, a conservative talking head, puts it best. “Exempting Del Monte from the minimum wage is just as much an earmark as anything pushed through by Randy “Duke” Cunningham.”
January 16th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
Glad to see you revamping your 2012 Presidential bid with commentary on pressing issues. Hypocrisy and corruption does not know any single political party. What is comical and sad is the lack of media attention this story has received. If Denny Hastert pulled the same rabbit out of his hat, Chris Matthews and his Sunday morning hate America gang wouldn’t shut up about it. The New York Times would be running it on the front page, but Pelosi is a Democrat so she is exempt from criticism.
Democrat or Republican Tom Delay or Nancy Pelosi, most of them care about re-election money before they care about the good of the people. Here tenure as Speaker has failure written all over it. Monday I was at work and she was speaking on the boob tube and immediately the people in the room where ripping her apart. The iroony is that I was the only conservative in the room.