Obama Will Tyrannize America Tonight By Raising The Federal Contract Minimum Wage

You already know that we are hoping HARD for some State of the Union drama tonight, but we were figuring that it would come from Michelle throat-ramming America with gay sportsthugs. That's a fine start, but we are your fucking base, Obama. Give us some red meat we can tear apart and devour and come up with a bloodstained toothy grin as right-wingers threaten to storm the barricades because socialism's a-comin' just like they always toldja. We should not have counted Obama out, because it looks like he is going to pound his executive order fascist hammer all over America's face tonight by forcing America's job creators to pay lazy takers with federal job contracts a higher minimum wage. 

President Barack Obama will announce during Tuesday night’s State of the Union address that he's raising the minimum wage for workers under federal contracts to $10.10 per hour, an administration official told The Huffington Post.

The new policy, to be instituted via executive order, may affect hundreds of thousands of workers whose jobs are supported by federal dollars. The move is designed in part to ratchet up pressure on Congress to pass legislation raising the minimum wage for all workers. The current federal minimum wage stands at $7.25 per hour, and hasn't been raised since 2009, after the last of a series of increases signed into law by then-President George W. Bush.

BOOM.

The only thing that would make this better is if it really had stayed secret until the speech, so that we could have been joyfully surprised by the announcement and even more joyfully surprised to watch wingnuts freak the fuck out and take to their keyboards mid-speech, for freedom. With this premature ejaculation speech spoiler, there's a full 10 hours or so that the Ben Shapiros of the world can write pretend-thoughtful thinkpieces about this, the David Brookses can do a counterintuitive "but what if we paid people nothing, hmmmm? Interesting, isn't it?" type of thing, and the Ted Nugents of the world can obliquely threaten to kill Bamz before he can sign the order. Well, at least that gives us plenty of things to write about today.

Sure to provide more grist for right-wingers to choke down: the entire initiative is thanks to people like Barack Obama's Muslin jihad socialist union thug blood brother, Representative Keith Ellison (D-Awesome).

The move marks a significant victory for labor unions and a handful of progressive Democrats who pressed the president to issue the order, including Reps. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Ellison personally handed the president a letter on the matter last month. [...]

"We feel the federal government has a responsibility to set good labor conditions. We're not talking about anything outrageous," Ellison told HuffPost last week. "If you look at the economics here, corporate profitability is very high now. They can afford it."

Expect so very much posturing from wingnut welfare writers about how this will destroy the economy because all these corporations will just pack up and go overseas and blahbity blah blah rage gurgle blah. That might work with widgets, because you can always make small children in some faraway sweatshop make your shit for next to nothing, but you can't actually outsource the federal contract for food service workers at government buildings to Indonesian children. That shit just does not work virtually, much to the chagrin of global empire builders everywhere. And if you think that the ginormous corporations that rely upon sweet-ass federal contract gigs are just going to stonewall and refuse to bid on future projects because they'll have to pony up two bucks or so more per worker, you are a fool. That shit is their lifeblood.

All hail the glorious Kenyan usurper! May he reign forever!

[ HuffPo ]