Report cites taxpayer cost for low wages in fast food jobs

By Juan Castillo

American-Statesman Staff

“Bangerz” came out last week and is currently number one on iTunes in seventy countries. I realize I’m far from the kind of fan Miley Cyrus is courting, but I admit I started following her on Instagram after the VMA train wreck. I think it’s because she’s making choices that so perfectly reflect not just her youth, but the dominant values of our country. And on top of that she happens to be both brave and talented. I’m intrigued.

But it’s tiring, the response famous young female artists receive from the public. We scold them for shoving their bodies and manufactured sexuality in our faces, like that’s not sexist of us, or like we haven’t seen it before. Others of us rise to the artist’s defense: Leave her alone! She should be free to act and dress however she wants. Women should support one another, not tear each other down! We need more freedom, not less!

Well, of course we need more freedom. Of course we shouldn’t attack a twenty-year-old for taking her clothes off. We’ve had this conversation many times—it’s a relatively safe conversation that goes nowhere. It’s why Matt Lauer is asking Miley Cyrus about her sexuality instead of talking about race and what if anything she learned from the experience of using black women asobjectified props in her VMA performance.

We’re certainly not hurting for the freedom to ignore racism and pretend like the white-centered dialogue coming out of the larger culture is really meant for everyone. Nor is the freedom we need the freedom to entertain men by embodying the fantasies the porn industry has sold them. We’re good there, thanks. With the stories and products currently being marketed to our kids, our little girls should have the look down before they hit puberty. This dovetails nicely with the average age boys start seeing explicit, degrading images of women—around age eleven.

The freedom to use our bodies and sex to make ourselves heard, to sell records—to sell anything, really—is not high on my list of things we need to be defending right now. It doesn’t mean human beings shouldn’t have that right, but in the current structure of our society, that limited expression of freedom often comes at the expense of a far broader and more inclusive liberation.

This liberation—in essence a radical return to our humanity—is not just an abstract ideal or collection of ideals that activists from various groups insist on beating us over the heads with year after year to make us feel like a bunch of selfish losers. No, it turns out that our ecological survivalactually depends on these changes. It depends on our ability to imagine a different world and take that picture with us into our days, holding it up like a gauge, even if it seems as silly and impossible as a five-year-old’s drawing—a dolphin flying with birds through a sky full of moons. Maybe in your picture we aren’t divorced from the natural world or from each other. Maybe being a pop star doesn’t mean you pay a ransom with your body or look a certain way. Maybe in your drawing you aren’t invisible.

“You are perfection Miley. You inspire me soo much. You teach me to be myself and not give a fuck about what anyone thinks. Your [sic] beautiful. I love you Miley Cyrus. <3” This comment appeared last week from one of Miley’s 4.5 million Instagram followers. I’ve been trying to fit it into my own make-believe picture. It definitely does fit into one of the many windy paths around the picture’s periphery that all lead to the center. The question is whether enough of us manage to tear through the cultural labyrinth toward a more just and sustainable future. If we do, that force of change won’t have emerged from an amassing of wealth or technology or guns. It will have been because something inspired whole groups of us to wake up to the possibility and value our lives hold.

Heather McLeod is a freelance writer and editor who lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, two small children, and ridiculous dog.

http://www.hothousemagazine.org/2013/10/the-freedom-we-dont-need/#more-13220

“I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. 
I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. 
I'm a human being, first and foremost, 
and as such 
I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” 
― Malcolm X

“It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.” -Gandhi

The life long activists I have known understood Gandhi’s call to “renounce the fruit of our actions,” which means to base our lives on duty and not despair that the seeds we plant do not grow within our short life span. Nothing great is accomplished in one life time. Whoever rocked Martin Luther King in the cradle and taught him what it means to be a human being was an essential part of winning freedoms he or she never saw. That unknown hero simply did his or her duty.

At the foundational times of history, our words and actions may seem futile, but they are laying the ground work for those who will come afterward. The seed cannot blossom tomorrow, if someone does not break ground today.

“Why should we cherish “objectivity”, as if ideas were innocent, as if they don’t serve one interest or another? Surely, we want to be objective if that means telling the truth as we see it, not concealing information that may be embarrassing to our point of view. But we don’t want to be objective if it means pretending that ideas don’t play a part in the social struggles of our time, that we don’t take sides in those struggles.

Indeed, it is impossible to be neutral. In a world already moving in certain directions, where wealth and power are already distributed in certain ways, neutrality means accepting the way things are now. It is a world of clashing interests – war against peace, nationalism against internationalism, equality against greed, and democracy against elitism – and it seems to me both impossible and undesirable to be neutral in those conflicts.”
― Howard Zinn,

I knew our press conference on fair wages had made the news yesterday because I started getting ugly messages from Christians who believe the poor have no such right to a decent living. They believe there is nothing wrong with the person being poor who sweats all week at the grill, while the person sleeping at home gets rich because he owns it.

At times like this, late at night, I sometimes think the best thing that could happen to the church would be for all those Christians to stop speaking for Jesus who believe the Sermon on the Mount is a crock.

I almost want to say, “Take your mindless creeds and your cruel moralisms and give them to the God you are really worshipping- Mars or maybe Pluto, but leave Christianity to the one who said, “I have come to preach good news to the poor.””

My name is Jim Rigby. I minister at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church here in Austin. I used to believe that clergy shouldn’t speak at political events, but now I know that politcs is just how we treat one another, so we have a duty to speak out publicly when others are treated unfairly. As Cornel West put it, “justice is just what love looks like in public.”

Most of us would agree that it is wrong to rob a person at gun point but, for many, it is perfectly acceptable for businesses to regularly rob the poor in the form of wage theft.

In my religious tradition, there is a principle known as “jubilee” that says it is wrong to get rich by impoverishing another.In the biblical tradition, the obscenely rich were not seen as role models but as rather pathetic figures- hoarders- sort of like bag ladies with golden shopping carts

In our day, corporate profits have never been higher; but wages are stagnant or in decline. The principle of jubilee would not call that success, but wage theft.

3/5 of the new jobs created replacing middle income jobs lost in the recession, are now low wage jobs. The principle of jubilee would not call that a recovery, but wage theft.

2/3rds of public benefits are going to working families underpaid by their employers. The jubilee principle would not call that welfare, but wage theft.

Politics is not something we should avoid in polite conversations. We cannot avoid the topic of economic justice because politics is just how we treat each other. We are responsible for treating each other fairly. I hope you will join the fight for a livable wage for fast food workers. If it is wrong to rob an individual at gun point, it is also wrong to rob a hard working employee through wage theft. Please join the fight for a liveable wage for all of Austin’s hard working people.

The truths of religion are often false when it comes to our objective world, but true of the world as we subjectively experience it. I do not believe that anyone has ever walked on water, but I believe that image captures how it must feel to be in the presence of universal love. I do not believe that anyone’s body gets up again after they die, but I believe with my whole heart that, some how some way, love is eternal.

In some ways human beings are very smart, in other ways we are not very smart at all. For example, here in the States we have built an economic system that values property over human beings and rewards success over loyalty, and yet we cannot figure out why our marriages don’t work, why our businesses cheat their workers and why those who rise to the top in that system keep selling us out

The world needs each and every one of us to join the struggle for human happiness and survival. This is a children’s song which calls us from isolation and despair to activism and hope. If you’ve been discouraged into passivity, keep playing this song until you remember your courage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFy54NmYPyc