Culinary Disasters (Averted)

For the past 16 months, Angelo Mike has been living in his beige Toyota Camry in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. It’s difficult for obvious reasons: no bed, no kitchen, no bathroom. But, Mike says, structure and organization make it manageable.

Until recently, his daily routine involved waking up by 6:00 a.m. most mornings and heading to a nearby gym. There he’d exercise and shower. If he didn’t need to be on set — Mike works as a crew member on movie sets — he’d head to the library after the gym to work on his laptop and search for new gigs.

Imagine that. Somebody who’s making 12 bucks an hour, now like the rest of us, faces an unprecedented economic crisis, with the 600 bucks on top of their normal- their regular unemployment check- might be making a few bucks more for four months. Oh my WORD! Will the universe survive? 

How absurd and wrong is that? What kind of value system is that? Meanwhile, these very same folks had no problem, a couple years ago, voting for a trillion dollars in tax breaks for billionaires and large profitable corporations! Not a problem! 

But when it comes to low-income workers in the midst of a terrible crisis, maybe some of them earning or having more money than they previously made- [tongue clicks] oh my word we gotta strip that out. Gotta- we gotta tell those poor people that no matter what- 

By the way when this bill, when the McConnell bill first came up, unbelievably, and I know many Republicans objected to this, they were saying that well we wanna give a, whatever it was, a thousand or twelve hundred bucks, but poor people should get less. 

You see, because poor people are down here, they don’t deserve- they don’t eat. They don’t pay rent. They don’t go to the doctor; they’re somehow inferior, because they’re poor we’re gonna give them less. 

Well that was addressed. Now everybody is gonna get the 1200 dollars. But some of our Republican friends still have not given up of the need to punish the poor and working people. 

You haven’t raised the minimum wage in ten years! Minimum wage should be at least fifteen bucks an hour, you haven’t done that! 

Designs taken from ‘Floriated Ornament’ by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin.

Published 1849 by H.G. Bohn.

 Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Library

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