the laughable thing is that miners do not get this fee .. the mining pools keep it. the miners just get a share of the 25btc so it does not matter if miners solve a block with lots of fee's or no fee's, their average income is the same.
again mining pool owners are the greedy ones. and the second point of the laughable part is that the main pool that has adjusted its bitcoin mining protocols to be greedy, done so using code from Luke Jr.. and guess what? Luke Jr is in the bitcoin foundation..
mining pool owners with no fee's can still afford to live.. because they also take a 1% cut out of everyones earnings (0.25btc per 10 minutes) and they merge mine, giving themselves alot more satoshi's per block selling the altcoins on the side.
so while thousands of miners with high electricity bills are fighting over 24.75btc left overs. a pool owner is taking nearly $150 every 10 minutes, simply by running one computer of under 800watts (their server).
so miners, dont mine on greedy pools. and also dont sell your coins at a loss. because all your doing is making the price drop, causing future coins you mine to be worth less.