Hooray for Congress. The House of Representatives recently voted to raise the federal minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $7.25 an hour by 2009. It looks likely that the Senate will do the same, soon.

Mind you, this was the first adjustment to the minimum wage in ten years. Yet during that same ten-year period of inaction on the minimum wage, members of Congress did manage to increase their own salaries eight times. Our representatives in Congress now make $165,200 per year. If they were working 52 weeks a year, 40 hours a week (and many work less…), that comes out to $79.42 per hour. Meanwhile, 13 million minimum wage workers will now make $7.25 an hour. In 2009.

Meanwhile, President Bush has argued he won’t sign the minimum wage increase unless there are special exemptions for small business owners. Profits, he explains, must be protected. Apparently, even if those profits come at the expense of workers, who can’t afford to feed their children or heat their homes. The real question is, how was it ever morally acceptable for employers of any size to pay people just $5.15 an hour for their hard work? Even the new rate of $7.25 an hour still places a family of three with one full-time worker below the federal poverty line. The gap between the rich and poor is reaching epic proportions in the United States and we continue to accept ridiculously abusive working conditions and wages for America’s hard working poor. I think that any employer who pays his or her workers below $7.25 an hour should be ashamed, no matter what the minimum wage is. And as a nation, we should be outraged.

While we’re on the subject, we should be outraged that Home Depot CEO Robert Nardelli is getting paid $210 million dollars to not work, money that could be going Home Depot’s workers, some of whom start with hourly salaries around $7.25 an hour. By the way, in 2005, Nardelli received $37,862,312 in total compensation, which works out to about $18,203.03 an hour. Nardelli is cashing in on Home Depot while many of his employees can’t even afford to have a home. Where is our outrage?

The list goes on. There were more than 10.2 million cosmetic surgery procedures performed in the United States in 2005---including 324,000 liposuctions, 298,000 nose jobs and 291,000 breast enhancements. In all, wealthy Americans spent over $8.4 billion dollars on plastic surgery last year while over 46 million Americans didn’t even have health insurance and millions more struggled to pay rising premiums. Where is our outrage?

In Iraq, our government is waging a war that we all now know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was launched to gain control of Iraqi oil fields. Our hunger for oil is coming at an incalculable cost to the many Americans and Iraqis who have died in the conflict. Meanwhile, Americans continue to buy SUVs and waste electricity with abandon. And fighting for oil has distracted us from more important fights for life, such as the mounting humanitarian crisis in Darfur. Where is our outrage?

Candidates are buying themselves into office while voting machines in many communities don’t even work. Elite private schools are making use of the latest science and math technology while poor urban public schools often don’t have toilets that flush. Workers in the United States, Mexico and China are all being exploited by economic globalization while elite investor and CEO profits only rise.

While Congressional action to increase the minimum wage is a good start, we should be embarrassed that it’s still so low and so long overdue. And we should also be embarrassed by the businesses owners who gripe about having to pay their workers a fair, livable wage—and embarrassed that we even feel the need to account for their gripes. In other words, we should be embarrassed that a law mandating a living wage should be needed in the first place.

It is not the job of Congress alone to set the moral aspirations of our nation. As citizens and residents of this country, it is our job as well. For too long, we’ve been laying blame on gay people and immigrants and the poor rather than directing our anger and frustration at those who are really to blame: the small handful of economic and political elites who have created an extreme winner-take-all society, crowning themselves kings with the rest of us merely pawns in their game. The horrible imbalances between the haves and the have-nots that we see all around us are not natural. They are the result of morally bankrupt exploitation.

We can stop this pattern, but we must first stop condoning it. We must stop celebrating the kings of industry who pay their workers poverty wages. We must stop praising millionaire politicians who represent the interests of money more than the interests of America. We must stop drooling over celebrities with enormous cars that are polluting our environment. Americans want a different world, where we value community and compassion not just because a law says so but because our conscience says it’s right. That future is just around the corner. Every American who shares this vision has a responsibility to express outrage — raw, righteous, emphatic, emotional OUTRAGE! — at the selfish, greedy elites who are so destructively holding us all back.

Sally Kohn is director of the New York-based Movement Vision Project, working with grassroots organizations across the United States to advance our shared values of family, community and humanity.

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