Republican Elitist Watch
I’ve written a few times about the arrogant, anti-worker subtext of the “jobs Americans won’t do” lie, but I never thought a Republican would be dumb enough to come out and say it. Cue the Republican party’s biggest panderer :
Sen. John McCain threatened on Tuesday to cut short a speech to union leaders who booed his immigration views and later challenged his statements on organized labor and the
Iraq war.“If you like, I will leave,” McCain told the AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Trades Department, pivoting briefly from the lectern. He returned to the microphone after the crowd quieted.
. . .
Later, the senator outlined his position on the Senate immigration debate, saying tougher border enforcement must be accompanied by guest-worker provisions that give illegal immigrants a legal path toward citizenship.Murmurs from the crowd turned to booing. “Pay a decent wage!” one audience member shouted.
“I’ve heard that statement before,” McCain said before threatening to leave.
. . .
But he took more questions, including a pointed one on his immigration plan.McCain responded by saying immigrants were taking jobs nobody else wanted. He offered anybody in the crowd $50 an hour to pick lettuce in Arizona.
Shouts of protest rose from the crowd, with some accepting McCain’s job offer.
“I’ll take it!” one man shouted.
McCain insisted none of them would do such menial labor for a complete season. “You can’t do it, my friends.”
Some in the crowd said they didn’t appreciate McCain questioning their work ethic.
“I was impressed with his comedy routine and ability to tap dance without music. But I was impressed with nothing else about him,” said John Wasniewski of Milwaukee. “He’s supposed to be Mr. Straight Talk?”
True, sounds a lot more like Mr. Condescending Asshole, but he’s always sounded like that to me so what do I know?
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McCain wants to be the new shepherd to Bush’s sheep.
Comment by Kamachanda — April 4, 2006 @ 4:26 pm
FELLOW POSTER IS RIGHT, Mr. John wants to be MASTER JOHN and he’ll sell you and me down the river for that White House Address. As Tirebiter sez ” It ain’t much, but it’s a government job”. Mike Meyer sex ” I’ll be smiling when I sign the Paycheck, cause it’ll bounce anyway.”
Comment by Mike Meyer — April 4, 2006 @ 5:03 pm
Dems should check out recent hearings in the Senate Indian Affairs Committee on changes in the IGRA – McCain has started to treat Indians so bad, his new nickname is “Great White Father”. He pretended to actually “seek out the truth” on the Abramoff hearings, yet all the documents are redacted when it comes to the names of implicated Congressmen and Senators. (Demand unredacted copies!)
Comment by MB — April 4, 2006 @ 6:40 pm
once went to small McCain event several years ago during the internet boom when he was shilling for Indians (South Asian not Native American) to get I-9 visas to come over here and take our computer jobs for half the wages. asked why he thought foreigners should be allowed to come here and undercut the laws of supply and demand. he told the same lies back then, that there were too many jobs and not enough people to fill them. I followed up by suggesting that maybe computer companies should go into the inner cities, recruit poor AMERICAN folks and train them for the jobs. he basically implied poor people weren’t smart enough. he’s a lying sack of crap who’s nothing more than a whore for his corporate pimps.
Comment by joker — April 4, 2006 @ 6:59 pm
Ole Johnny might shift gears into ‘straight talk’ if he wants votes from anybody other than 3rd commandment violators..
Might also quit telling us who we are and give us some “Straight Talk” on who he is….but we already know. He is a winger, not a moderate, a bull shit artist, not a straight talker and a GOP formula guy, not a maverick.
He is also a guy that hugs a man that called him insane, called his wife a lesbian drug addict and his adopted child the progeny of an extra-marital tryst with a prostitute.
Keep that photo handy Dems…
Why does John McShame make my ass hurt so much? Damn I have hated that muther phucker from day one.
Hey GOP’ers..please run this crank..
Richard
Comment by Richard — April 4, 2006 @ 7:07 pm
McCain’s ancestors had slaves and he feels bad about that, at least he did for a while.
Comment by stepphie — April 4, 2006 @ 7:07 pm
“If you like, I will leave,”
man… i thought bush was petulant.
Comment by almostinfamous — April 4, 2006 @ 7:26 pm
Let him now be known as John “Lettucehead” McCain.
In the 2008 election this should be touted as much if not more commonly known as George H.W. Bush’s inability to correctly guess the price of milk.
The man has no idea what it is like for working families.
Comment by Jeff — April 4, 2006 @ 7:36 pm
“too many jobs and not enough people to fill them”
ECON 101: This means that the wage is too low to clear the market. What is needed to eliminate the shortage of workers is for the wage to increase to the market-clearing level. In competitive markets, competition for workers by the firms will bring this about. When the wage has risen to the market-clearing level, there will be enough workers to do the job.
McCain represents the economic interests of the employers who do not want to pay the higher wage.
Bringing in cheap illegal alien workers who will take the jobs at the low wage increases the supply of labor and prevents the market forces from forcing the wage up.
Comment by Captain Video — April 4, 2006 @ 7:56 pm
“McCain responded by saying immigrants were taking jobs nobody else wanted. He offered anybody in the crowd $50 an hour to pick lettuce in Arizona.”
Since he was talking to an audience of people who had better options, this was pure hypocritical sophistry.
There are many American workers who would be willing to take such jobs at that wage. Roofers, who engage in heavy physical labor while working exposed to cold in the Winter and the hot sun in the Summer come to mind. Coal miners would be another group. There are many Americans workers doing demanding physical labor who would love to take such a job if it pays that kind of wage.
McCain represents the economic interests of employers who want people to do difficult, back-breaking work for a pittance.
Comment by Captain Video — April 4, 2006 @ 8:05 pm
It sounds like a little of the infamous McCain temper flashed briefly. This is his Achilles heel and if we can get him to really lose it in public with the cameras rolling, he’ll be toast.
Comment by Ian S — April 4, 2006 @ 8:37 pm
$50/hour is $100,000/year. Even if it’s only seasonal employment, that’s a decent middle-class wage.
Comment by phil — April 4, 2006 @ 9:35 pm
How can the man spend 5 1/2 years in a POW camp with other Americans and then not think Americans are capable of picking lettuce for half a year? Did we suddenly become a nation of wussies (besides chickenhawks, I mean)?
Pay me $2,000 a week and I’ll pick your lettuce and your nose.
Comment by ChrisV82 — April 4, 2006 @ 11:12 pm
I’d do it for $20 an hour. Is that what they’re paying? What? $8.50? Fuck.
Comment by Joe — April 4, 2006 @ 11:23 pm
“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
Comment by dale — April 4, 2006 @ 11:38 pm
With all due respect guys, us wingers (I’m an independent does that count? :P) Hate this guy every bit as much as you do. And a whole lot of conservatives think these bullshit guest worker programs amount to amnesty and de facto slavery.
I say it on my blog over and over and I think it’s true. This is and should be the one true bipartisan issue because it affects all Americans.
I think it’s pretty cool actually how many lefty blogmeisters I’m working with these days to fight this issue.
This issue has the capacity to bite each party equally hard. It’s not like Democrats have any shining record on this either. Big corporations are running this show and there are very few good guys in sight.
So if you guys haven’t been doing so perhaps you could take a couple of minutes this week and call your senators to tell them that guest worker programs blow!
NumbersUSA is a pretty cool source too,
Jake
Comment by Jake Jacobsen — April 5, 2006 @ 12:18 am
McCain draws a mix of boos and laughs
Sen. John McCain threatened on Tuesday to cut short a speech to union leaders who booed his immigrat
Trackback by Unpartisan.com Political News and Blog Aggregator — April 5, 2006 @ 2:17 am
FIFTY DOLLARS??!? FIFTY FUCKING DOLLARS A FUCKING HOUR!?
Yeah, I’ll pick your damn lettuce.
Comment by Michael — April 5, 2006 @ 2:57 am
Hehe, how much does double-posting pay nowadays? Oh, minimum wage? Shove it.
Comment by michael — April 5, 2006 @ 2:58 am
Jake:
Please tell us about how immigration dovetails with your Homeland Security fears what with al-Qaeda practically IN CHARGE of Northern Mexico and the border region.
Comment by The Liberal Avenger — April 5, 2006 @ 5:05 am
Uh, come on Liberal Avenger, the above conservative poster was civil enough.
“that’s a decent middle-class wage”
Decent Middle Class Wage? What planet are you on? I know they probably don’t get health insurance or anything, but College Professors start at $50,000. My fiance is an Editorial Analyst for a successful publishing company and makes $35,000. My mother, a COBAL programmer, makes $70,000 and that’s after twenty years in the indusrty. $50 an hour is like CEO territory.
Comment by Cato the Censor — April 5, 2006 @ 5:18 am
I’m glad somebody pointed out the glory of $50 an hour. Shit, I’d do that for half a year and then be in my woodshop until next season.
Comment by Heydave — April 5, 2006 @ 5:47 am
There are three reasons there can be “too many jobs and not enough people to fill them”:
1) an underpopulated country (hmm–Nunavut, maybe? The Orkneys?);
2) The jobs require training and the employers are too cheap to train for them;
3) The employers are too cheap to pay an attractive wage.
If the employers protest that they can’t either institute efficiencies, put more capital into automation, or raise their prices–then it’s a job that doesn’t need doing. Either that, or they’re too stupid to make the company work, and shut consider having Daddy buy them a baseball team.
The rich republican apologists seem to think that merely putting up capital entitles them to success and prosperity, when it’s only the intelligent use of capital that generates more wealth. They feel they can be idiots about running a company, and make up for it by grinding wages down–because those other folks, contributing their sweat and industry aren’t entitled to squat because–well, because they’re not rich.
I make fifty bucks and hour when I’m on double secret emergency overtime, and I’d sooner pick lettuce.
Comment by pbg — April 5, 2006 @ 6:31 am
“If you like, I will leave,”
We Like Mr. McCain, We Like!
Comment by Kamachanda — April 5, 2006 @ 6:32 am
“If you like, I will leave,”
We Like Mr. McCain, We Like!
Comment by Kamachanda — April 5, 2006 @ 6:32 am
$50 a friggin hour!! Twice my wage, and I only have to work half the year…FUCK YEAH, sign me up. In fact, just to show Father John up, I’ll pick it ALL FUCKING YEAR, assmonkey! How dare he question the American work ethic. What a tool McShame is, and obviously seriously out of touch.
Comment by Oaktree — April 5, 2006 @ 6:33 am
It’s a glitch michael, so save your breath.
Comment by Kamachanda — April 5, 2006 @ 6:35 am
John McCain, I’ve got news for you. I live in a very poor rural community in S.E. Colorado. My 18 year old son is a college student. Guess what he is doing parttime for MINIMUM wage? He is working in onion fields. When school’s out he will work for a Koi farm which is also menial labor.
He cannot get a job anywhere else in this very economically depressed area. There are no jobs. I don’t care what McCain says. The only two big employers in this valley both have shut down in the last three months.
I do not think it hurts my son to figure out what he does not want to do for the rest of his life. I do wish he got paid a decent wage.
But,also, my son is the only white kid I’ve seen picking onions and peppers. His legs are killing him. His back hurts. It is hard work.
He does it because I’ve got three other kids to support (alone) and he knows I cannot afford to take care of everything. His boss has been his baseball coach for years and he lets him work around his class schedule.
He is a good boy with a strong work ethic. And I get damned tired of hearing how American kids are not willing to work. Mine are.
Mr. McCain needs a few months in the real world and so do a lot of other people. I have a M.S. in Water Resources Engineering and I don’t make $50/ hour. I’d pick peppers for that.
Comment by apishapa — April 5, 2006 @ 6:48 am
$100,000/year is nowhere near CEO territory. My father makes around that as a civil servant in the DC area, and while we were comfortably middle class, we were nowhere near rich. Obviously, the DC area is expensive, but the idea that barely making 6 figures is “CEO territory” is ridiculous. CEO’s make millions of dollars a year.
Additionally, the original poster was including the fact that lettuce picking is a seasonal job. Assuming that one only does it for about 6 months a year, that’s around $50,000, which is surely pretty solidly middle class.
Comment by John — April 5, 2006 @ 9:12 am
What jumped out at me was this remark:
>> McCain insisted none of them would do such menial labor for a complete season. “You can’t do it, my friends.”
Man, I know I’ve heard this somewhere before – oh, yeah:
“These products [e.g. cotton] are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun.”
– from “A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.”
Comment by Namdoog — April 5, 2006 @ 9:51 am
This just shows how out of touch he is. It sounds like he wanted to come up with a low hourly wage to quote to show how nobody in that room would want to do that backbreaking work for a pittance, and $50/hour was the smallest amount he could think of. For those of us in the real world, that’s crazy money. I’m a civil engineer with all the student loans that entails, and I’m not making anywhere near that.
Comment by James — April 5, 2006 @ 9:52 am
There is no real employer who will pay $50 an hour to pick lettuce. I call Bullshit.
I feel really sorry people, especially progressives, who buy the lie that immigrants take jobs from Americans. Credible studies show that immigrants, most of whom are far more entrepreneurial than natives, start many businesses and CREATE far more jobs than they take. If immigrants take so many jobs, why don’t we have double digit unemployment here in NYC?
Learn a lesson from 20th century Germany. Reject demagogues who say that America’s problems would be solved by the elimination of an unpopular minority population.
Comment by Peter James Bond — April 5, 2006 @ 11:10 am
I think he was trying to emphasize that the work is something no American would want to do, even at $50/hour. It doesn’t make his point any less ridiculous. Actually it underscores the fact that the wages for these jobs are not what they should be–the real reason why most would not want the job if another option were available.
Comment by alo — April 5, 2006 @ 5:21 pm
$50 an hour? Fuck, yeah I’ll take that job. That’s $400+ a day! Maybe to John McCain that isn’t real money, but to most of us out here in the real world, we’ve done jobs just as physically demanding for a hell of a lot less money than $400+ a day!
Work for a season and then go home to your family for 6 months of vacation. That’s what a lot of fishermen do in Alaska, and for less money. It is among the most deadly jobs on Earth, to boot — I don’t think many people die from lettuce picking.
Comment by Nathaniel — April 5, 2006 @ 7:08 pm
Actually Liberal Avenger I recently posted that we cannot be in a war on terror with a group that would do anything to kill us if our Southern border is hanging open like a cheap screen door.
It just doesn’t add up. I’m gonna see if I can dig up the link…
Here ya go
You might genuinely be surprised how many conservatives are upset with the president these days. I am along with most of the conservative bloggers I know.
One of the bloggers I work closely with is the Gun totin’ Liberal and on this issue we see eye to eye.
In fact a conservative blog ring I belong to is rewriting their bylaws to no longer support any individual (i.e. the president) and replace that language completely to general support of conservative principles.
And hell yeah, fifty bucks an hour? I’ve been a chef for over twenty years and I’m lucky to pull down $16 bucks an hour.
Comment by Jake Jacobsen — April 5, 2006 @ 8:23 pm
jeez guys. relax. he mispoke. he pulled a bush. he went nucular, ok? he MEANT fifty CENTS/hr. get it?
Comment by fred — April 10, 2006 @ 1:45 pm
What John McCain fails to realize is that we don’t need unskilled laborers from other countries, our government schools are insuring we will have unskilled workers in spades.
Comment by Trevor Barr — April 10, 2006 @ 11:18 pm
He’s as bad as Hillary looking into the crowd of illegal immigrants at the protests and saying “Your faces are the faces of America.”
Translation: Vote for me because payback will be sweet!!
Comment by Susan — April 13, 2006 @ 2:11 pm
Go to Hell, Senator McCain. Stop pandering to the 3% hispanic vote and start considering what the other 97% want. You have been elected by us to represent us. If that’s too much to ask maybe you should step aside to let someone with a spine in there. For $50 an hour I would shovel shit for entire season. I could do it, “my friend.”
Comment by Higgy — April 13, 2006 @ 3:26 pm
This comment will help Peter James Bond:
“There is no real employer who will pay $50 an hour to pick lettuce. I call Bullshit.”
Quite right, Mr. Bond. No employer would. WE know that, but does Senator McCain? That’s the point.
“I feel really sorry people, especially progressives, who buy the lie that immigrants take jobs from Americans. Credible studies show that immigrants, most of whom are far more entrepreneurial than natives, start many businesses and CREATE far more jobs than they take. If immigrants take so many jobs, why don’t we have double digit unemployment here in NYC?”
First of all, *legal* immigrants can create some jobs, using the legal and financial infrastructure that the natives created and maintain. By no means do they all, and *illegal* immigrants cost *natives* $6000 a year per family in social services. Can you name the *Credible studies* that show are “far more entrepreneurial” than Americans?
Secondly, we do have double digit unemployment in New York, if we are honest about the way we measure it. Right now, if someone has been out of work six months they are no longer counted in the unemployment statistics. The national unemployment rate is now really something like 12%.
“Learn a lesson from 20th century Germany. Reject demagogues who say that America’s problems would be solved by the elimination of an unpopular minority population.”
Um, which third world minority population are you talking about? There were no significant “third world” minority populations in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. The concept of the “Third World” is a post-war academic construction. Get your facts right, Mr. Bond.
Comment by alcrand — April 21, 2006 @ 2:04 pm
WE DIDNT LIKE PAYING OVER 3 DOLLARS FOR CIGARETTES BUT WE DID
WE DONT LIKE WHAT WE ARE PAYING FOR GAS BUT WE ARE DOING IT
WELL THAT IS WHAT I THINK NEEDS TO BE RETHOUGHT – YOU HAVE WAKENED A SLEEPING GIANT – YOU PRIVATE BUSINESS PAY THE LEGAL CITIZEN A FAIR PRICE AND WITH THE TECHNOLOGY THERE HAS TO BE A WAY TO GET RID OF THE REALLY UGLY JOBS – BUT ARM THOSE BORDERS AND GET RID OF THE ILLEGAS – HOW DARE THEY FLY THEIR FLAG HERE – LET THEM DEMONSTRATE THEIR OWN COUNTRY AND LEAVE HERE ON THEIR OWN BEFORE UGLY REALLY RAISES ITS UGLY HEAD
Comment by ROSEMARY RIDDLE — May 12, 2006 @ 6:01 pm
Dems should check out recent hearings in the Senate Indian Affairs Committee on changes in the IGRA
posted by: MB at April 4, 2006 06:40 PM
Speaking of which scandal, did y’all catch the anti-Native American prejudice involved in bashing Democrats for taking money from Jack Abramoff’s clients by the media which just had to make sure the Abramoff scandal was bipartisan? Last I checked, Abramoff’s clients, largely Native Tribes, had not been charged with anything or are guilty of anything worse than trying to play the political game like everyone else (including, e.g., churches, which are, pardon the pun, sancrosanct in American political discourse, dispite the degree to which some protest otherwise), and the degree to which the media is ready to tarnish their money is indicative, or maybe I’m being overly paranoid?, of prejudice.
Comment by DAS — May 22, 2006 @ 11:08 am
You can’t be serious?!?
Comment by Max Ballstein — June 14, 2006 @ 8:21 pm