Tireless, under-appreciated
Anita Beaty, executive director of Atlanta’s Task Force for the Homeless, had a
spirit-lifting column in the Journal-Constitution
yesterday morning. Anonymous donors had come up with the half-million dollars to
pay the water bill run up by the Task Force’s shelter at Peachtree and Pine,
and the city’s unrelenting effort to close down the facility had been thwarted once
again. Celebrating this “miracle,” Beaty invited the folks of Atlanta to come
downtown to take a look at the many programs and servie shelter
offers—the rooftop garden, the computer lab, GED classes, the art studio and
gallery, food service training, along with the basic counseling and recovery programs.
She ends with “Please come and see!”
I’m guessing that one of those who won’t be showing up
for a visit is John Albers, the Republican state senator from Roswell, who
wrote the rejoinder beneath Beaty’s column, predictably entitled “America should
promote hard work, not welfare.” No Reaganesque cliché is too insipid for
Albers: “a hand-up, not a hand-out,” “but teach
a person a fish,” blah, blah, blah. Believe me, it’s not easy reading. Surprise:
Albers and his wife worked seven jobs
when they were first married, many of them minimum-wage, and it’s Albers’
opinion that “minimum-wage jobs are critical to provide stepping stones for
career growth.”
Albers does not fail to chant the great Republican
mantra: “Some have called for dramatically increasing the minimum wage, but
this argument is flawed and will decrease available jobs while increasing costs
for working families.” You know what? The minimum-wage earners who, according
to Albers’ theory, might lose their jobs if the wage were raised are not out
there protesting against the pay hike. Who is? I think it’s reasonable to assume
that the people who don’t want to see the minimum wage go up are the business
leaders who don’t mind increasing profits by exploiting workers and who—just
being frank here—don’t give a rat’s ass if their employees live in poverty.
They are certainly the people who could raise wages if they wanted to.
The “jobs” argument is a blunt tool, but widely popular, and
used for much more than defending indefensibly low wages. The idea is that you’re either a job creator
(a heroic American, free and unregulated), or a job killer (a big-government liberal).
To be pro-earth, for example, is to be anti-jobs. Consider mountaintop removal
mining, which has become the preferred way to mine coal in the Appalachians.
Over and beyond permanently disfiguring a majestic landscape, MTR pollutes and
defiles the land, water, and air in surrounding communities, to the point that mining
ghost towns now dot the West Virginia mountains. But what are you going to do?
Gotta have those jobs. (The truth is that MTR, because it requires far fewer
miners than underground mining, has killed thousands of jobs in the industry, and
the jobs it saves happen to be those of non-union heavy-machinery operators.)
Or take logging in the old-growth forests of the Pacific
Northwest. Or drilling for oil off the Atlantic Coast (which our
“environmental” president recently approved). Or draining the Everglades, or
developing fragile coastal lands. Just think of all those jobs. Or take the
Keystone XL Pipeline, the fate of which our president will probably decide
after the mid-term elections. He might be tempted to kill the pernicious pipe,
but, wow, imagine the jobs clamor. (The many reasons President Obama can and
should say no to KXL will have to be our topic another day.)
It would be great if everybody who wanted one had a job
that could pay the bills. But let’s not be deceived. The captains of global
capitalism want profit, and they pay their peons in high office and low to
blather on about jobs.
When her West Virginia town of Marfork Hollow was
rendered uninhabitable by MTR giant Massey Energy in the 1990s, Judy Bonds
became an anti-MTR activist and ultimately the executive director of Coal River
Mountain Watch, the preeminent environmental organization in the coal mountains
of Appalachia. Her family had mined coal for six generations, but Bonds had no
truck with the “jobs” shibboleth. As she put it, “If coal is so good for us
hillbillies, then why are we so poor?” 
Preach!
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