by Jeff Bryant | Jan 29, 2014 | Education
Everyone loves "choice," right? In a country where in a single year there are more than 100 new choices for what to use to brush your teeth, it stands to reason that maximizing "choice" might be a goal for all kinds of enterprises. With that in mind, this week brought...
by Robert Borosage | Jan 29, 2014 | Blog
In a State of the Union address that lasted over an hour, President Obama called on Congress to raise the minimum wage, announced he would act immediately by issuing an executive order to lift the lowest wages of government contract workers, and urged companies to...
by Robert Borosage | Jan 29, 2014 | Economy, Progressive Vision, State of the Union
In a State of the Union address that lasted over an hour, President Obama called on Congress to raise the minimum wage, announced he would act immediately to issue an executive order lifting the lowest wages of government contract workers, and urged companies to join...
by Richard Eskow | Jan 28, 2014 | Progressive Vision
A banjo player dies at 94 and, for a moment, millions of graying Americans are young and idealistic again. Pete Seeger was a tall man, and he left a long shadow. He was born in 1919, in a nation that was born in 1776. That made him one-third as old as the United...
by Dave Johnson | Jan 28, 2014 | Blog
President Obama will announce tonight that he is delivering a big raise to more than a million low-wage employees of federal contractors. He is issuing an executive order that will require workers under new contracts to be paid a minimum of $10.10 an hour (or higher...
by Dave Johnson | Jan 28, 2014 | Blog
You hear often that we "live in a global world now." You hear that "globalization" means we have to drop our wages and standards to match those in impoverished, Third-World countries. You hear that the "cost" of controlling pollution makes us uncompetitive in the...
by Bill Scher | Jan 28, 2014 | Uncategorized
Obama Won't Wait On Minimum Wage President to announce executive order, raising minimum wage for federal contract workers. W. Post: "...he will use his executive power to increase the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour for workers on new government contracts ... An...
by Leo Gerard | Jan 28, 2014 | Democracy, Economy
Just about everything Americans need to know about the surge of income inequality is contained in the 43-page indictment last week of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. The Republican governor and his wife are accused of a sleazy exchange — taking pricey gifts like a...
by Robert Borosage | Jan 28, 2014 | Progressive Vision, State of the Union
Guides to the president’s State of the Union address are a dime a dozen. The annual ritual has even spawned drinking games: a shot for every time the president gets a standing O from both parties if you want to stay sober, one for every partisan ovation if you want to...
by Richard Eskow | Jan 27, 2014 | Conservatism
By now millions of people have heard that Silicon Valley billionaire Tom Perkins compared progressive political speech to Kristallnacht, the night of religious violence which led to the death of 91 Jews and paved the way politically for the Nazi Reich and the...
by Damon Silvers | Jan 27, 2014 | Progressive Vision, State of the Union
On Tuesday night, President Barack Obama is going to give his fifth State of the Union address. The president is likely to call for policies that will help working people, like an increase in the minimum wage and the extension of unemployment benefits to the long-term...
by Dave Johnson | Jan 27, 2014 | Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership
Today 564 organizations released a joint letter to Congress, opposing fast-track trade promotion authority. The organizations cover the entire field of what would be considered President Obama's "base" of supporters, including consumer, labor, environmental,...
by Digby | Jan 27, 2014 | Economy, Making it in America, Minimum Wage, Progressive Vision, The Jobs Challenge
Responding to the depressing news that the administration has succumbed to elite pressure to "tone down" the rhetoric about wealth inequality, Damon Silvers, special counsel for the AFL-CIO, points out the uncomfortable truth: [T]he president faces a choice of...
by Dave Johnson | Jan 27, 2014 | Minimum Wage
This post originally appeared at AlterNet. If the 1968 federal minimum wage had kept pace with inflation it would be $10.75 today. But it is only $7.25, an amount so low that many full-time workers need such government assistance as food stamps and Medicare just to...
by Sam Pizzigati | Jan 27, 2014 | Economy
Every January our global corporate and financial executive superstars, accompanied by assorted heads of state and deep thinkers, make the trek up the Alps to the Swiss village of Davos. They don’t come to party, though they do their share of imbibing. They come...
by Bill Scher | Jan 27, 2014 | Uncategorized
Grand Bargain Out, Fighting Inequality In, For SOTU "Obama isn’t expected to spend much time on deficit reduction and entitlement reform during Tuesday’s State of the Union," reports Politico: "For Obama, the shifting political landscape is a chance to move past an...
by Robert Borosage | Jan 27, 2014 | Unemployment Benefits
As Congress reconvenes this week, it faces one overriding imperative: Act immediately to renew emergency benefits for the long-term unemployed. Today, you can tell the Senate to make this their first priority. Call one of your senators now using our...
by Richard Long | Jan 24, 2014 | Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership
The head of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, who has just coauthored a book that offers proposals for revitalizing American manufacturing, has added his voice to the broad coalition opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership and calling on Congress to not...
by Jackie Tortora | Jan 24, 2014 | Economy, State of the Union, The Jobs Challenge
President Barack Obama will give his annual State of the Union address to the American people next week. But what is the state of our union? The vast majority of America's working families have experienced a raw deal in recent decades. Wages are falling, the gulf...
by Terrance Heath | Jan 24, 2014 | Conservatism
This has been a rough week for the American right. Some of its brightest stars now seem to be plummeting to the earth. Meanwhile, every time conservatives opened their mouths, they widened the chasm between the GOP and mainstream America. Here’s a selection of the...
by Richard Eskow | Jan 24, 2014 | Blog
What do you give a Wall Street CEO who has presided over a decade of fraud and criminality, who directly supervised a unit which lost $6 billion through incompetent and illegal trading, and whose reign of crime and mismanagement has cost his institution $20 billion in...
by Robert Borosage | Jan 24, 2014 | Economy, Progressive Vision, State of the Union
The White House is signaling that one focus of President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday will be on our extreme and rising levels of income inequality. He'll feature basic pocketbook issues like raising the minimum wage, extending unemployment benefits,...
by Bill Scher | Jan 24, 2014 | Uncategorized
Unemployment Insurance Battle Rejoined Dems renew push for jobless aid. The Hill: "Democrats will hold a national conference call Friday to highlight that the number of people who have lost unemployment benefits has reached 1.6 million ... Democratic lawmakers plan to...
by Richard Eskow | Jan 24, 2014 | Making it in America, Trans-Pacific Partnership
The “TPP,” or Trans-Pacific Partnership, is our nation’s newest proposed trade deal. It was negotiated without democratic input, and they’re trying to ram it through Congress the same way. Like NAFTA before it, the TPP would kill jobs. It would also cause lasting harm...
by Bill Scher | Jan 23, 2014 | Blog
If Mike Huckabee ever wants to meet Uncle Sugar, he need only look in the mirror. Earlier today, Huckabee invented quite the straw man in the not-so-controversial debate over the Obamacare provision requiring health insurers to cover contraception: "If the Democrats...
by Guest Writer | Jan 23, 2014 | Economy, Trans-Pacific Partnership
By Ron Carver Many hundreds of thousands of Americans saw their good working-class jobs disappear once NAFTA took effect. And millions of Mexicans lost their ability to live off the land after cheap factory farmed corn from the United States displaced their crops in...
by Dave Johnson | Jan 23, 2014 | Blog
Republicans voted for a budget that caved in to many of their economy-sabotaging, hostage-ransom austerity demands. Now the "debt ceiling" has to be raised in February so the government can pay for that budget that Republicans voted for. Republicans are saying no way...
by Digby | Jan 23, 2014 | Conservatism, Health
There has been some push-back among conservatives at the charge they are sabotaging Obamacare. They insist it's just imploding all on its own (despite the fact that it actually isn't.) But as Sahil Kapur reports, in one case, they're just admitting it right up front:...
by Bill Scher | Jan 23, 2014 | Uncategorized
Inequality To Be Spotlighted In SOTU Inequality, minimum wage to be Obama's focus in SOTU. The Hill: "A president who has yet to add to the big legislative accomplishments of his first term will call for raising the minimum wage to $10 per hour and extending federal...
by Dave Johnson | Jan 22, 2014 | Blog
Republicans smell an election opportunity – but only if they can keep the economy down, jobs down and wages down. Most recently to keep people and the economy miserable they filibustered long-term unemployment assistance, and are working to cut back from the meager 26...
by Dave Johnson | Jan 22, 2014 | Making it in America
The Hill reports that the White House is pushing hard for "fast track" trade promotion authority, to help push through the Trans-Pacific Partnership and other upcoming "trade" agreements. Meanwhile the yearly trade deficit resulting from previous trade agreements will...
by Thom Hartmann | Jan 22, 2014 | Economy, Minimum Wage, The Jobs Challenge
Economic inequality is a major threat to human progress. According to a new report from Oxfam, 85 people control the same amount of wealth as half the population of the entire world, and the top one percent has 65 times the wealth of the bottom half. This...
by Jeff Bryant | Jan 22, 2014 | Education
Now that ed-heads have had a chance to make their "what to expect in 2014" prognostications, it's evident that one of the most tumultuous issues – perhaps the most tumultuous – for the year ahead is the fate of the Common Core State Standards. The Common Core –...
by Isaiah J. Poole | Jan 22, 2014 | Democracy, Progressive Vision
The organizer of a February 8 "moral march" on Raleigh, N.C. says he wants the largest mass demonstration in the South since the 1965 Selma to Montgomery, Ala., civil right march to be a loud rebuke against Tea-Party extremism in state legislatures around the country....
by Bill Scher | Jan 22, 2014 | Uncategorized
America Gets More Unequal This Month States start cutting jobless aid. NYT: "Starting on Jan. 1, the maximum period of unemployment payments dropped to 26 weeks in most states, down from as much as 73 weeks ... the country’s safety net for jobless workers has...
by Richard Eskow | Jan 22, 2014 | Democracy
When the President of the United States delivers his State of the Union message next week, he'll be speaking to the wealthiest Congress in history. What does it mean for a representative democracy when most of its representatives are insulated from the real-world...
by Dave Johnson | Jan 21, 2014 | Blog
This morning's Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) AAM Early Shift Digest email asks, "What would a full-fledged manufacturing policy look like?" In this moment of calm, the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) is getting its ducks in a row. This week we’re...
by Sam Pizzigati | Jan 21, 2014 | Financial Reform
A new Toronto-based campaign is aiming to change the global conversation on CEOs, workers, and the real value of their labor. The 32,400 employees at Goldman Sachs averaged $383,374 each last year, the Wall Street banking giant disclosed last week. Typical employees...
by Leo Gerard | Jan 21, 2014 | Blog
In West Virginia after a cavalier chemical company poisoned the drinking water of 300,000 people, the corporate-hugging, right-wing extremist group Americans for the Prosperous congratulated itself for doling out bottled water one day. “What better way to help people...
by Bill Scher | Jan 21, 2014 | Uncategorized
SOTU Highlights Dem Divisions "Obama Under Pressure From Divided Democrats on Economic Message in State of the Union" reports National Journal: "The party's centrist wing, which generally backs entitlement reforms and free-trade agreements that appeal to the more...
