All of the original justifications for budget cuts have gone away. The sequester is hurting the economy and keeping unemployment high. But instead Republicans plan to double down on cuts. Apparently their real game is to force high unemployment and desperation for 99% of us to further enrich the 1%. A continuing seriesRead the full [...]
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Affluent business flyers inconvenienced by delays = national emergency that Congress immediately fixes. Cancer clinics closing = Congress does squat, goes home. This is just one more story of our corrupt times. A continuing seriesRead the full series Last week the sequester cuts kicked in at airports and caused affluent business fliers to experience some [...]
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There was a flaw in the “sequester” — it hit some people who are not poor. The sequester budget cuts caused delays for business travelers (and members of Congress) and the Congress acted in hours. Meanwhile the elderly, poor, homeless, disabled, hungry and unemployed experience dramatic cutbacks. And 750,000 layoffs in 2013 will result. Congress [...]
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The deficit is already down by half. The intellectual foundation for austerity turned out to be a spreadsheet error combined with cherrypicked data. In Europe austerity has brought nothing but stagnation, recession, depression and suffering. But our own “sequester” ramps up with disastrous effects — unless it affects the affluent. Deficit down by half. See: [...]
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What does it mean to be an American? What does it mean to be an American corporation? An article in the Wall Street Journal the other day should trigger questions like these. WSJ: Domestic-Based Multinationals Hiring Overseas, Multinational companies based in the U.S. boosted their global work forces in 2011 almost entirely by hiring workers [...]
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The pundit world is busy rehabilitating the reputation of George ‘W’ Bush. Somehow in today’s America killing hundreds of thousands of human beings illegally invading a country, torture, corruption and “no-bid contracts” to crony insiders, crashing the economy, intentionally creating massive deficits, using phony terrorist-attack alerts to stampede frightened citizens into voting against their own [...]
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A quick point on whether the minimum wage “costs jobs.” An op-ed in today’s San Jose Mercury News, Minimum wage: Credible studies show raising it costs jobs says, The usual corporate nonsense, the usual “low wages create jobs” stuff, the usual “paying people hurts the economy” bullwaste, the usual this, the usual that… Here is [...]
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Austerity is beginning to hit and the economy is slowing as a result. The most immediate effect is that flights are delayed, but unemployment checks are smaller and there are fewer things We the People do to make our lives and economy better — also called “government spending.” But hey, as Dean Baker writes in, [...]
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The Walton (Walmart) heirs now have as much wealth as up to 40 percent of all Americans combined, and Walmart’s sales have been slowing down. What does the first fact have to do with the second? (Hint: Sign this petition for raising the minimum wage.) The top 1 percent now rakes in 20 percent of [...]
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Earlier this week I wrote about Executive PayWatch from the AFL-CIO. This site tracks the huge wage gap between CEO pay and the average employee. Something many people don’t know is that the Wall Street reform law was supposed to do this, but years later the regulations still have not been written! The SEC delays [...]
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