The trade deficit fell to “only” $38.8 billion in March. This could mean that manufacturing is starting to shift from China (good) — or it could mean our economy is slowing and we just aren’t buying as much as we would have (not so good). It is also because we are importing less oil (really [...]
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MORNING MESSAGE: CEOs Pushing Austerity Enjoy Taxpayer-Subsidized Pay Campaign for America’s Future: “Ordinary taxpayers are subsidizing exorbitant executive pay at the corporations leading the push for austerity in the budget debate, according to a new report by the Institute for Policy Studies and Campaign for America’s Future. The report is the first to put a [...]
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The CEO of a big company makes 1795 times what its clerks are making, and the company is now in trouble. Does it matter which company, when so many other companies are in a similar situation? There is a three-year-old law that requires companies to disclose to shareholders the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay, but the [...]
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Cuts to government spending like the now-reviled “sequester” are not only “dumb” as my colleague Robert Borosage explained this week. They are literally making us dumber. What’s dumb is to cut money for air traffic controllers and endanger airline passengers and relegate them to long waits for delayed flights. A continuing series Read the full [...]
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“Duty evasion” is when foreign competitors undermine American producers using fraudulent schemes to avoid paying the duties they owe. The foreign companies get a competitive advantage from lower prices that come from avoiding duties imposed for “dumping” by selling under cost to drive competitors out of business, trade violations, exploited workers, substandard parts, etc. The [...]
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MORNING MESSAGE: Political Corruption and the “Free Trade” Racket Dean Baker: “…the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the U.S.–European Union ‘Free Trade’ Agreement are both being pushed as major openings to trade that will increase growth and create jobs. In fact, eliminating trade restrictions is a relatively small part of both agreements, since most tariffs and [...]
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In polite circles in the United States’ support for free trade is a bit like proper bathing habits. It is taken for granted. Only the hopelessly crude and unwashed would not support free trade. There is some ground for this attitude. Certainly the United States has benefited enormously by being able to buy a wide [...]
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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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MORNING MESSAGE: Real Faces of the Minimum Wage OurFuture.org’s Richard Eskow: “Corporate interests and their elected representatives have created a world of illusion in order to resist paying a decent wage to working Americans. They’d have us believe that minimum-wage workers are teens from ’50s TV sitcoms working down at the local malt shoppe … [...]
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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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