Tag: wages

Egypt Interior Ministry Fire: FOX News, After a Full Four-Hour Investigation, Names the Culprits, Because They Can

Michael MatheronLeave a comment

March 22, 2011

CAIRO — An Egyptian security official says police protesting in front of Egypt’s Interior Ministry have set fire to part of the downtown complex. TV footage shows flames licking up the building’s top floors and a huge plume of black smoke filling the sky. The official says protesters lit Tuesday’s fire in the building housing in the ministry’s personnel department. It then spread to an adjacent building. The fire followed a protest by thousands of low-ranking police officers calling for better wages and working conditions. Mass demonstrations that toppled former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Feb. 11 have set off frequent protests by laborers seeking to improve their lot.

As of 2:15 pm (EDST) the investigation of the fire at the Ministry of the Interior in Cairo concluded. FOX Newsiness announced its findings after nearly four hours of digging through its predispositions. FOX pinpointed the culprits as the “police protesters” who had assembled earlier in the day to demonstrate for better wages and living conditions. FOX positively named an unnamed Egyptian “security official” as their source. This compelled the closing of their investigation.

FOX also exposed that this latest example of criminal and civil disobedience fits within the larger conspiracy of those continuous mass demonstrations by other ungrateful “laborers seeking to improve their lot.” FOX has completed so thorough an investigation that the thousands of police and interior ministry protesters at the ministry site today will soon be apprehended and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. For the less disobedient among them, re-education will follow so that each learns how well off one is when compared to many others, such as those lost for years in caves in the Sinai. 

An Answer to the Why of Whys

Michael MatheronLeave a comment

March 11, 2011

Let’s ask a really meaningful question: Why are non-public sector workers paid so little that, by comparison, moderately compensated public sector workers appear to be overpaid or “over-benefitted” or both?

It’s a way to pit the dwindling middle class against itself. In a way it’s saying to non-public sector workers,” Hey, these underpaid public sector bums are making more than you are, and they have more generous benefits at lower cost to them.” Unspoken truth: The GOP way to fix this apparent injustice is not to work to increase wages and benefits to non public-sector employees, but to bring public-sector workers down to your income/benefit levels. And income among the old-fashioned middle class has fallen or stayed steady for the past ten years, benefits have worsened, and pensions are a memory for many, a craven “success” for the GOP.

This, in the long run, will make public sector work less attractive in order to undermine government operations. Given the recent troubles, will the public sector be able to staff its operations, even at the far lower level of operations being budgeted for in many states? GOP rabid economists want the answer to be a permanent “Yes!”