Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Unlike Ebenezer Scrooge, there will is no redemption and transformation of the disgraced former House Speaker this Christmas.
Newt Gingrich really hates poor children.
A couple of weeks ago, Newt Gingrich said that child labor laws are "truly stupid" and that unionozed school janitors should be fired and poor kids hired to clean up after their own classmates.
He has previously suggested that children on welfare be shipped off to orphanages. His model? The 1938 workhouse film Boys Town.
On Thursday, Ebenezer Newt defended his stance against certain child labor laws during a campaign stop in Iowa, saying that children born into poverty aren't accustomed to working unless it involves crime. Newt: Poor Children Have "No Habits of Working":
"Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they have no habit of showing up on Monday," Gingrich claimed.
"They have no habit of staying all day, they have no habit of I do this and you give me cash unless it is illegal," he added.
AFSCME came up with a great parody ad (Really, Newt?) based upon "Annie" a couple of weeks ago, which has since been taken down.
The AFL-CIO NOW blog posted Tell Newt His Plan to Fire Unionized Janitors and Hire Poor Kids is Nuts:
We noted yesterday that Newt Gingrich wants “get rid of unionized janitors” and hire poor kids to clean the schools in low-income neighborhoods. Today AFSCME says it’s time to tell Gingrich that his ”model” to lift kids out of poverty is outrageous dangerous and downright hogwash.
Click here to sign a letter that reminds Gingrich that
“doing janitorial work in a school entails sanitizing toilets, handling hazardous cleaning chemicals, and scrubbing floors hunched over a mop for hours. It’s hard to imagine a nine-year old doing any of those tasks. Come on.”
You can also tell the oh-so-brilliant Gingrich—at least in his mind—that when he fires all those janitors,
a lot of them are parents. That job puts a roof over kids’ heads, food on the table, and provides them with health care and the chance to get an education. That job is the only thing between a kid and poverty. Firing someone’s mom and hiring the kid for less money isn’t exactly the “process of rising.”
Click here to tell Newt he’s out of his mind...
AFSCME letter Really, Newt?
At the Washington Monthly’s Ten Miles Square blog, Rick Ungar said the far-right Republican went “way over the line”:
Could it possibly be that the self-professed, master of the big idea managed to miss the fact that there are more than 10 million low-income (earning less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level) working families in this country — representing 45 million Americans, 22 million of which are children?
These are the very people who live in the poor neighborhoods that Gingrich is talking about -the communities where Newt seems to believe that people don’t understand working for a dollar unless it involves doing something illegal.
I’ve been closely following politics for much of my life — and, in my case, that’s a pretty long time — and I am comfortable in saying that Newt’s speech may well be the most offensive political speech I have ever heard spoken by an American politician.
Ungar adds that Gingrich’s comments are the kind of “utterings one might expect from an imbecile who grew up in a community so shielded from the poor that such a person simply could not know any better.”
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