Quiz: Poverty - $15 Minimum Wage - UN War on Modern Slavery

[johnkarls]

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Subject: YES Please Take A Bow For Our FIVE Recent E-mail Campaign Successes, BUT THEN Come Back To Work At Our Wed Feb 19 Mtg
From: ReadingLiberally-SaltLake@johnkarls.com
Date: To be sent pre-dawn on Sat, February 1, 2020
To: Each of Our 173 Members One-By-One
Attachment:
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To Each of Our 173 Members One-By-One – for reasons explained in the 4 postings in Sec. 2 of http://www.ReadingLiberally-SaltLake.org


Dear Friends,

Our next meeting is Wed evening - Feb 19 - 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm at the Salt Lake Public Library (210 East 400 South) in Conference Room A (Salt Lake nonresidents are invited to participate by Skype).

[Please RSVP by pressing “Reply” and typing “RSVP.”]

Our focus book is the “classic” in the field of poverty - “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” by Barbara Ehrenreich (Metropolitan Books 2001 – Paperback Version 2011 available from Amazon.com for $10.29 + shipping or $9.99 Kindle – 256 pages). [Salt Lake Library – 2 of 7 copies currently available; Salt Lake County Library – 3 of 4 copies currently available.]

The “classic” because, like “Black Like Me,” Barbara Ehrenreich decided despite having a PhD in Cellular Immunology that she would experience what it is like (despite remaining white) to be a waitress, hotel maid, cleaning woman, nursing-home aide and Wal-Mart sales clerk – just like John Howard Griffin darkened his skin sufficiently to experience what it is like to be black.


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ANOTHER E-MAIL CAMPAIGN SUCCESS – THANK YOU FOR PARTICIPATING – SO A SLIGHT SHIFT IN POVERTY FOCUS FOR FEB 19 MTG --

On Mon Jan 13, you received our e-mail entitled EMERGENCY – YOUR SIGNATURE NEEDED BY THURSDAY – UTAH TAXING GROCERIES OF OUR NEIGHBORS LIVING ON LESS THAN $2.00/DAY.

It contained a Heads Up that the Utah Legislature last December raised the sales tax on groceries from 1.75% to 4.85% as part of a massive state tax overhaul and Gov. Herbert signed it into law. And that pursuant to Utah Code Sec. 20A-7-301, NO LAW WILL TAKE EFFECT until the voters approve it by a referendum if a petition is promptly signed by 8% of the total voters in the state AND signed by 8% of the voters in each of 15 of Utah’s 29 counties.

Accordingly, our Mon Jan 13 e-mail requested each of you (1) to sign the petition, which could be done at Harmon’s Groceries which UNFORTUNATELY are only located in 5 of Utah’s 29 counties, AND (2) to forward our Mon Jan 13 e-mail to all of your friends IN AN UNENDING CHAIN to do the same CONSIDERING ESPECIALLY friends in the 24 Utah counties that have no Harmon’s Groceries.

On Jan 22, the organizers of the petition drive announced that they had obtained signatures of more than 8% of the total voters in the state AND more than 8% of the voters in each of 15 of Utah’s 29 counties - https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/20 ... -campaign/.

And on Jan 23, the Governor and Legislative Leaders announced that they will repeal the increase - https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/20 ... gislature/.


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SO YES Please Take A Bow For Our Recent E-mail Campaign Successes, BUT THEN Come Back To Work Wed Evening Feb 19 --

Although we can’t claim full credit for this success, it was our FOURTH e-mail campaign that met with success in the previous 5 weeks – the others are Andrew Yang embracing thorium fission, Bernie Sanders championing Medicare For All as a way to SAVE the U.S. Gov money (vs. Elizabeth Warren’s $52 TRillion COST estimate), and President Trump releasing the “Peace” portion of his “Peace to Prosperity” Plan for the Palestinians.

More information about these 4 recent successes PLUS OUR PIVOTAL (AND LONELY) ROLE IN AVERTING ANOTHER ECONOMIC MELTDOWN TWO YEARS AGO is available at http://discussingliberally-saltlake.org ... 576&t=1883.


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SLIGHT SHIFT IN FEB 19 POVERTY FOCUS

Although the success of the Jan 13 emergency e-mail campaign (though we can’t claim sole credit) means that the E-mail Campaign to the Mormon Church envisioned in our Jan 18 weekly e-mail is no longer necessary (for which we should be grateful to the Mormon Church!!!), THERE IS STILL MUCH THAT CAN BE ACCOMPLISHED IN THE ANTI-POVERTY FIELD!!!

For details, please see the monthly SHORT QUIZ that follows immediately below including a new and different e-mail campaign.


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We hope to see/hear all of you Wed evening Feb 19 to discuss poverty in America.

[Please RSVP by pressing “reply” and typing RSVP.]

Your friend,
John K.

PS – To unsubscribe, please press “reply” and type “deletion requested.”


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Short Quiz: American Poverty, The $15 Minimum Wage & The UN’s War on Modern Slavery

1. Is Barbara Ehrenreich the author of our focus book for Feb 19?

2. Is her “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” the American-poverty “classic” counterpart to “Black Like Me” (Houghton Mifflin 1960) which chronicled the experiences 60 years ago of John Howard Griffin, a famous white journalist, who blackened his skin so that he could pass for black in America’s Deep South?

3. Although she did NOT blacken her skin to EXPERIENCE POVERTY the way Griffin had EXPERIENCED RACISM, did Ehrenreich have a PhD in Cellular Immunology before deciding on a career of writing more than a dozen public-policy bestsellers on healthcare, feminism and militarism before EXPERIENCING POVERTY?

4. Working from Florida to Maine to Minnesota as a waitress, hotel maid, cleaning woman, nursing-home aide and Wal-Mart sales clerk, did she learn while living in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels that one job is NOT enough if you want to live indoors?

5. Did Ehrenreich undertake her project to assess the damage done by President Bill Clinton’s campaign “to end welfare as we know it”?

6. Had Bill Clinton managed to sneak into office in 1992 with 43.0% of the popular vote (with 18.9% for Ross Perot) by campaigning against “welfare as we know it”?

7. And did he sneak back into office in 1996 with less than 50% of the popular vote by fulfilling his 1992 campaign promise by signing in the middle of his re-election campaign 8/22/1996 the repeal of the “Aid to Families With Dependent Children” Program (AFDC)?

8. Was AFDC a main pillar (if not THE PRINCIPAL pillar) of Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” when AFDC was enacted in 1935?

9. Was President Clinton’s AFDC repeal campaign passed in the House by a vote of only 256-170, which would have been sufficient to sustain a Presidential veto (a veto override requires a 2/3 vote)?

10. So did Ehrenreich’s UNDERCOVER RESEARCH take place in 1998, two years after the AFDC repeal?

11. For our 2/7/2018 meeting two years ago, was our focus book “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America” by Johns Hopkins Prof. Kathryn J. Edin and U/Mich Prof. H. Luke Shaefer (Houghton Mifflin 2015)?

12. Did Professors Edin and Shaefer document that there were 1.5 MILLION such households which included 3 MILLION CHILDREN??? And that such “households” reside in homeless shelters or out on the streets???

13. What is the source of the idea for a $15/hour minimum wage??? Do you think it might be Barbara Ehrenreich’s conclusion that MORE THAN ONE JOB is necessary for sleeping indoors??? Or that it might be the research of professors Edin and Shaefer that documented that 3 MILLION CHILDREN live in families surviving (OR NOT) on less than $2.00/day/person???

14. BTW, did Prof. Edin have a Christian religious background and did she report that most academics in the anti-poverty field view Christians as NOT ONLY FAILING “to love their neighbors as themselves” BUT ACTUALLY as bigots who hate the poor???

15. After all, didn’t Christ say that there are TWO COMMANDMENTS “to inherit eternal life -- (1) Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind, AND (2) thy neighbor as thyself” (!!!) [Luke 10: 25-28]???

16. And wasn’t Christ immediately asked “who is my neighbor” whereupon Christ told the Story of the Good Samaritan to drive home the point that EVERY HUMAN BEING IS YOUR NEIGHBOR!!! [Luke 10: 29-37]???

17. So in an age when Americans LIKE TO PRETEND that slavery no longer exists, would it be too much to ask that every worker be legally entitled to a minimum wage equal to the benchmark by which poverty is measured???

18. Shifting gears momentarily, was the focus of our 9/18/2019 meeting the UN’s 20-year (and counting) War on Modern Slavery?

19. Does the UN report that international trafficking in slaves by organized crime rivals in size organized crime’s illegal-drugs business and its illegal-arms business?

20. Does the UN’s “Bible” on the subject report that there are at least TWICE AS MANY people CURRENTLY TRAPPED in some form of slavery as were traded throughout the 350-plus years of the transatlantic slavery industry?

21. Does the UN itself report that the most frequent form of slavery in North America is sexual exploitation (vs. such things as forced labor, organ removal, pornography, sham marriages and benefit fraud)?

22. And does the UN report that the source of virtually all international trafficking in human beings is refugee camps because the conditions are so abysmal that the inhabitants are willing to believe the lies of organized crime about “a better life”?

23. Does the UN’s “Bible” on the subject report that the average retail price of a “sex slave” in the U.S. (whom you can also require to clean your home, mow your lawn, work your farm/vineyard, etc., since they are “slaves” in every sense of the word) is only $5,250 – yielding an average profit to the trafficker of $2,400 – because organized crime’s supply of human beings from the refugee camps is so large?

[You can NOT YET order your own personal “sex slave” on Amazon.com – instead, you must still contact your local “sex slave” dealer.]

24. Does the UN’s “Bible” on the subject report that because of the incredibly-large supply of human beings from the refugee camps, the average price of a sex act in North America is only $27.50 (which low price, itself, unleashes an incredibly-large demand for the low-priced sex)? And that the annual revenue per sex slave in North America is $90,648 of which the annual net profit, after deducting costs of only $32,633, is $58,015 (an annual net profit of more than 10 times the initial investment with no other up-front costs such as workforce training)?

[These figures are only for “sex slaves” of brothels, sex clubs, massage parlors, etc. They do NOT, of course, include the “sex slave” of the “pedophile next door.” Or the forced laborers on farms/vineyards who are also subject to sexual predators.]

25. Does the UN’s “Bible” report that the “sex slave” of a brothel, etc., performs an average of 3,296 sex acts/year (or 20 sex acts/day for the actual number of days/year the average “sex slave” is able to work) SO SURPRISE, SURPRISE, THE AVERAGE LIFE EXPECTANCY OF A “SEX SLAVE” MEANS DEATH BY AGE 35?

26. Does the UN’s “Bible” report that “sex slaves” do not try to escape because (A) they have no money, (B) they typically do not speak English, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY (C) “OWNERS” INTIMIDATE THEIR “SLAVES” BY PERIODICALLY MURDERING ONE OF THEM AS AN EXAMPLE (TYPICALLY BY SLASHING THEIR THROATS IN FRONT OF THE OTHERS)???!!!

27. Does either the UN or the author of the UN’s “Bible” (Harvard Prof. Siddharth Kara) have any real idea how many “sex slaves” there are in the U.S. -- because the only statistics available relate to criminal convictions of traffickers (between 150 and 200 per year) -- with no idea how many victims there were per convicted trafficker over how many years, much less how many traffickers are NOT detected/convicted?

[NB: It is A MIRACLE that there are any criminal convictions in the U.S. because the U.S. Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (originally enacted 10/18/2000 and renewed periodically ever since) -- (A) provides victims as the only incentive for testifying a T-Visa which is worthless because any illegal-alien can just disappear into the general population anyway, BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY (B) BECAUSE THE “OWNERS” HAVE INTIMIDATED THEIR “SLAVES” WITH PERIODIC BRUTAL MURDERS AS EXAMPLES OF WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THEM AND THEIR LOVED ONES BACK IN THE REFUGEE CAMPS IF THEY MISBEHAVE.]

28. So back to American poverty, if America is going to espouse/tolerate a policy of “open borders,” doesn’t America have the same “love your neighbor as yourself” obligation regarding the plight of immigrants that it has regarding its impoverished citizens???

29. BTW, isn’t the problem of the poverty of the illegal immigrants compounded by the fact that their “slave owners” (United Nations terminology) can report them to ICE if they complain about intolerable conditions???

30. And isn’t the problem of poverty of illegal immigrants that toil on American farms/vineyards compounded by the fact that even if they had the gall to complain about their working conditions, “minimum wage laws” do NOT apply as a practical matter because their “slave owners” (United Nations terminology) can deduct from the “minimum wage” whatever price they concoct for the squalid living quarters and abominable food that they provide???

31. Is there anything we should do such as advocating an increase in the national minimum wage??? AND ADVOCATING NO OFFSETS (OR MAXIMUM-ALLOWABLE OFFSETS) IN THE NATIONAL MINIMUM-WAGE REQUIREMENT FOR FOOD & BOARD???