QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “Do you think you could live off $10,700 a year?“ Question Rep. Earl Jones, D-Guilford, posed to Rep. Stephen LaRoque, R-Lenoir, during NC House debate on raising minimum wage.
WEDNESDAY, 6/1
NC legislators voted 66-52 to reject a bill to raise the state’s minimum wage from $5.15 to $6.15 an hour. Opponents of the bill rolled out the old arguments that increasing the minimum wage would cause layoffs and inflation which then would hurt the workers it’s meant to help, blah blah blah.
The fact that the minimum wage is in effect a stopgap measure to keep workers from falling below the poverty line seems irrelevant to a majority of the Raleigh fat cats. “You can’t make it on five-fifteen an hour? Tough shit, you should’ve had the foresight to be born into a wealthy family like I did.” The opponents’ most revealing argument was that a minimum wage raise would give surrounding states an advantage in business recruiting. So, we’re actually recruiting companies that pay minimum wage? Not to be too obvious, but wouldn’t it be more beneficial if North Carolina was known as the state that recruits high-paying businesses, and thus educated, skilled workers — rather than the hog waste and turkey processing capital of the nation?
FRIDAY, 6/3
Oprah Winfrey announced her newest book recommendations, declaring this to be “A Summer of Faulkner.” The influential TV host picked As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Light In August by the Mississippi-born Nobel winner as her book club’s subjects this summer. This is the same Oprah Winfrey who, a couple of years ago, explained her choice of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden by saying, “It’s not like Shakespeare, or even Faulkner; it’s reader friendly.” Still, you have to like Oprah’s treatment of her audience as thinking human beings.
SATURDAY, 6/4
After a cold-ass week of gray skies and rain, Sweltering Southern Summer suddenly showed up, necessitating shorts and T-shirts — and guaranteeing that half the city would show up for work on Monday with colds.
SUNDAY, 6/5
The Independent newspaper of London reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Internal Revenue Service and the Manhattan DA’s office were investigating tax schemes marketed by Bank of America for possible breaches of securities and anti-money-laundering rules. The investigating bodies say up to $700 million in taxes were avoided over an 11-year period by various execs and corporations, including Texas billionaire brothers Charles and Sam Wyly, who were heavy donors to Pres. Bush’s campaign and bankrolled TV ads attacking Sen. John Kerry. Bank of America says it is cooperating fully with the investigations.
MONDAY, 6/6
The folks at Children’s Theatre began packing for the move from its venerable but too-cozy Morehead Street building to its spiffy new building-with-a-name-only-marketing-geeks-could-love, ImaginOn. In recent years, CT has become one of the city’s most well-run and innovative cultural organizations, often outshining other, “grown-up” theater companies, while providing thousands of kids with the chance to develop their creative sides. Not too shabby a legacy — here’s to a job well done.
This article appears in Jun 8-14, 2005.
