James Robertson's Story Makes Me Want to Stop Giving to Charity

I make a point of giving at least five percent of my gross income every year to charity.  That's more than I can afford, but because they are charities that help people less fortunate than me with food, housing and healthcare, I do it gladly.

So I should have been an easy mark for donations to the fund to get a car for walking-21-miles-each-way Detroit commuter James Robertson, right?

Wrong.

Yes, he deserves the donations.  But that money should have come from his chintzy employer, not from donors nearly as desperate as he.

Robertson earns is paid (he earns way more than he gets paid) less than $11 an hour, 50 percent more than minimum wage, lives in an impoverished neighborhood, yet cannot afford a car or medical care.  What does that tell you about his exploitative boss and the motherfuckers who think there should be no minimum wage?

That anyone who works full time needs charity in order to afford a car is a crime by his employer.  How dare that motherfucker brag about an worker walking 21 miles each way to and from work when the cause of that obscenity is the employer's failure to pay the worker a living wage?

If the filthy rich job creators billionaire moochers resent the poor receiving tax dollars to keep them from starving in the streets, then they can start paying the $25 minimum wage that American workers have literally earned over the last 40 years.

Or they can start paying the 90 percent taxes they paid in the 1950s that built and maintained fast, efficient public transportation for workers.

The charity given by the middle-class and impoverished workers of this country is nothing but a way for the rich - whose charity goes to self-aggrandizing buildings - to avoid their social responsibility to pay workers a living wage.