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Editorial/Column
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Don’t Go To Sleep!
“
to be a citizen of a federation, anarchy or an ab- solute monarchy,” said one of our readers. He made the statement in response to the way President Don- ald Trump disregards the power of Congress and has installed his children in positions of power.
“Moreover, Trump is proposing a labor policy that could return the country to the pre-1938 Fair Labor Standard Act (FLSA) era when employers could require workers to work more than five days and more than 40 hours a week without overtime pay,” our reader continued on telling his group of awe struck friends.
Yes, while we were asleep, Trump tried to take more than 8 million citizens off of the Obamacare in- surance plan; proposed to cut Medicaid and Medicare, and proposed cuts to programs that serve people with disabilities, all which made front page news.
Showing no compassion, Trump now proposes to leave 8 million middle-class workers in a position of having no overtime protection, a move that hasn’t made front page yet. A Trump weak overtime rule strips workers making $35,000 per year, or more, of the right to receive time and a half pay if they work more than 40 hours a week.
The salary threshold beyond which workers must be paid time and a half if they work more than 40 hours a week currently is $47,476 per year. This means that Trump wants to lower the threshold to $35,ooo, leaving workers at risk of being made to work 50, 60, or 70 hours a week without receiving any extra pay. Keep in mind, there have been no ad- justments for the rise in cost of living for decades.
Trump’s proposal would end up reducing the number of guaranteed salaried workers to less than one in ten today. In 1975, the number was six in ten.
By the way, Trump’s proposal would rescind a 2016 Obama era Labor Department rule that re- stored overtime protection for two million workers earning up to $55,055 by 2023. Once again, big busi- ness rules, unless we wake up. When we sleep, we lose.
Only God Knows What’s Coming
ForaslongasIcanre- member I've always felt that doomsday predictors were the most ridiculous sort of people. The way they draw parallels between current events and ancient prophe- cies found in the Bible's Book of Revelations, the quatrains of Nostradamus or the vi- sions of Edgar Cayce al- ways seemed overreaching, especially considering that most of the predictions from those three sources derive from dreams that could be interpreted 100 different ways.
Whenever I read an arti- cle about one of these clowns coming forward and pro- claiming that a certain plan- etary alignment or peculiar occurrence is a harbinger of a coming apocalypse, I just shake my head and think to myself, "here we go again." Another false prophet hop- ing for the collapse of civi- lization so everyone else's life can become as miserable as
his own.
Of course, that was all be-
fore I began to notice how weird things have become lately. The unlikely election of Donald Trump to the presidency, the re-occurring presence of immensely de- structive once-in-a-lifetime weather systems, the contin- ued frequency of mass shoot- ings, the blistering pace in the advancement of artificial intelligence and the discov- ery of multiple space anom- alies has caused me to re-evaluate my position and wonder if there actually may be something to the fact that we're witnessing all of these curious developments at the same time?
I won't go as far as saying that I'm ready to join the "it's about to be a wrap" chorus. But it's hard to deny the pos- sibility that all of these dras- tic changes to our world could be leading us to a sin- gular phenomenal event.
As a skeptic I would love
to be able to say that it's all part of a huge coincidence. But, after the recent mysteri- ous church fires in Louisiana, the burning down of the Norte Dame Cathedral in Paris, the attacks on mosques in New Zealand, and the killing of over 300 people at an Easter Celebra- tion in Sri Lanka last week- end, chalking everything up to chance doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.
I mean, having one of these tragedies happen dur- ing the course of a year would be unusually horrific in itself. For them to happen almost simultaneously, within such a short span, ap- pears almost coordinated.
I don't know if what we're seeing is the work of some global secret society whose goal is to scare us into sub- mission, as some conspiracy theorists like to speculate, or something more spiritual and other-worldly in nature. And I can only imagine that, when the cause to the chaos is ultimately revealed, our collective faiths will be firmly tested as we're forced to deal with whatever it has in store for us next.
Reality On Ice is © by the Florida Sentinel Bul- letin Publishing Com- pany. You can contact Mr. Barr at: cbar- ronice@gmail.com.
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C. Blythe Andrews 1901-1977 (1945)
C. Blythe Andrews, Jr. 1930-2010 (1977)
’m afraid to go to sleep because I might wake up
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