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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

It is time – in fact, it is past time – to demand that Congress act to increase the minimum wage. This week, the effort to get Congress to act is accelerating. As of late Wednesday, more than 15,000 people have signed a SignOn.org petition posted by the Campaign for America’s Future. The goal is [...]

As millions of Americans raced to the post office this week to mail in their taxes, we were reminded that April is, indeed, the cruelest month. It’s cruel because the sagging economy continues to create economic hardships for working-class Americans — including the Rising American Electorate. Composed of unmarried women, African Americans, Latinos, other people [...]

In our post-mortem of the 2012 elections, the Campaign for America’s Future was one of the few organizations willing to say that “class war” was not only the common theme of many of the Democratic Party’s electoral successes but it is a strategy that the party should proudly embrace as it moves toward the 2014 [...]

All the smartest people in the executive suites just knew that the taste of Coca-Cola needed “reform.” Rival Pepsi was advertising to the “New Generation” and Coke’s executives came to believe their product wasn’t what the “cool” people wanted to drink. Everyone they talked to at the executive-level strategery seminars, and all the other executive-level [...]

Take a look at the 2013 Edition of the website called Executive PayWatch from the AFL-CIO. This site, active since 1997, helps drive awareness of the huge wage gap between CEO pay and the average employee. Compare your pay to the pay of top executives. Heck, you might even make more than they do! (Hint: [...]

The “Grand Bargain” is about showing the world that we can hurt people, so they will know we are “serious.” Reading Jason Linkins’ HuffPo account of elite-pundit thinking about the “Grand Bargain,” Passing ‘Grand Bargain’ Voters Don’t Care About Is Critical To Confidence In Government, Apparently, I am struck by the similarity between the (elite [...]

The Congressional Progressive Caucus and AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka pressed their opposition to President Obama’s proposed chained-CPI change to Social Security benefits at a Thursday afternoon news conference, denouncing it as a cut in benefits for those who need the social safety net the most. Fifteen members of Congress, as well as around 45 supporters [...]