I hope everyone will share in a point I have to make about the “special treatment” that youth are receiving with the Democrats’ minimum wage increase. If you notice the Minnesota legislation, it even singles out the ages when these young people are most vulnerable to military recruiters in the high schools.
No young people, in one of the most difficult periods of life as it is, should have to face the added, extreme pressure from lying and corrupt military recruiters. With their lives and futures in front of them, they face principals, guidance counselors, and other “recruiting assistants” who take kickbacks (as has recently been exposed) for pushing these young people into the arms of the military.
People like to say that we have no more draft in America. Politicians have learned the way to avoid a draft is to keep working class youth very poor — one of the reasons they refuse to raise the minimum wage to a real living wage, though nobody seems to want to talk about this. Most young people, if they had a job, and if the job paid real living wages, would never think of “volunteering” for the military. The United States has a draft, an economic draft. Maintaining the legal minimum wage as a poverty wage is a part of this draft. Military recruiters concoct any lie they can think of to hoodwink young people into joining the military, but the main lie they spread concerns how economically well off they will supposedly be when — never mentioning if — they get back.
The situation is even more difficult for youth of color, who have an even more difficult time finding employment because of racist discrimination. For Native American youth, trapped in the racist unemployment of reservation life, this is even more of an issue.
The fact is, and anyone can think about this, it would be nearly impossible for the United States government to maintain a military if everyone who wants a job had a job paying real living wages.
In Minnesota, one union that was a big pusher for the $9.50/hour minimum wage law, the United Food and Commercial Workers, actually allows young people to come into the stores that it has organized, and to bag and carry out groceries solely for “tips”. The military recruiters actually come into these stores to harass these youth as they are trying to scrape together a few dollars.
When I intervened in one of the “discussions” that military recruiters were having with a group of such young people, the manager of the Cub store called the police. They arrived and told me that if I didn’t leave, I would be arrested for disorderly conduct and trespassing. And when I tried to give the youth my card which asks the question, “How is Barack Obama’s Wall Street war economy working for you?” I was told, “Cub Foods has a strict ‘no soliciting’ policy.” The same thing was not said to the military recruiters, whom the police allowed to stay.
I thought about this incident recently after the University of Minnesota made itself into a platform for a speech by Condoleezza Rice (who, incidentally, got a $150,000 speaker’s fee for the event).
Condoleezza Rice speaking at the University of Minnesota on April 17, 2014
Rice gets her “freedom of speech” at the University, but we get “trespassing” and “disorderly conduct” at Cub Foods. And youth get poverty wages and the “opportunity” to go to war.
Perhaps I have missed a few of the dots when it comes to connecting youth, unemployment, the minimum wage, militarism, and America’s endless stream of wars. If I have, then perhaps the President of the Minnesota AFL-CIO Shar Knutson or her sidekick Mark Froemke can fill us in.
