Fighting for a Living Wage, Economic Justice and the Redistribution of Wealth!

We are so off the ball. There was a great article from Sunday's Washington Post that we forgot to post for you all here. Please forgive us. We were out of town for a good friend's wedding and, quite frankly, were too hungover from well over a blender full of White Russian Milkshakes the evening before at a Fondue Party. What do milkshakes have to do with a fondue party? Nothing, of course. Still the article is shown on today's Blog @ Newsarama and it's our own lack of doing anything about it that allowed them to scoop us (which would be fine on anything except a POST article). Shudder.

Any-hoo, as our regulars readers know, we at Mister Fanboy think the Post is the best paper out there for a multitude of reasons. We won't go into them again. Here. Now. We promise.

On Sunday there was an article about groups of costumed super-persons who raid high-end stores stealing what they need. They are part of the Hamburg Free movement. Apparently, Hamburg has more millionaires per capita than any other part of Germany, but the unemployment rate is still over 11%. The town has lots of "absentee landowners who jet into town for weekends, etc., etc. ...

Why, it's much like our own fair burg. However, since we can't make our secret identity's public, we will use another analogy. Back to the wedding ... Which was held in Monterey, CA. A quick perusal of the real estate section showed that the cheapest crappily built shit-hole in that town with 2 bedrooms and 2 baths goes for $880,000+ (sadly, in our fair burg, you'd have to add another $100,000 to that). Many of the homes in Monterey are bought by the filthy rich from the Bay Area and Silicon Valley that are looking for a vacation or weekend home. In effect, they are pricing all of the locals out of the market. Since there is a water crisis there (not enough), there are restrictions on new building and the prices keep going up and up. Further, since it's a tourist destination most of the jobs are for the service economy and barely pay enough to pay rent.

For all of those reasons, this article resonates with us. Yes, it's wrong to steal. But it's equally wrong to create a perpetual underclass of the working poor. To read the article, click here. If they make you register, it's quick, free, and worth it.