Are our rich content? It’s a question that bounces back and forth in the blogosphere. Are elites, economic and otherwise, happy with the pace of the weak recovery? Are they indifferent? Or are they actively worse off than they would be if unemployment were lower?
This question comes up when Emmanuel Saez updates his data on the incomes of the top one percent. Most of the coverage has focused on the rate of change for incomes of the top one percent, particularly the fact that the top one percent have enjoyed 95 percent of all income growth from 2009 to 2012. But I want to focus on levels. I’m going to modify one of Saez’s charts to show something I don’t think has been pointed out:
This is the percentage of all income, excluding capital gains, that goes to the top one percent.
» Read more about: Why 2012 Was the One Percent’s Favorite Year Since 1928 »
(Note: Katha Pollitt’s feature first appeared in The Nation and is republished with permission.)
Here’s a little window into poverty, American- style. According to a Yale University study published in August in Pediatrics magazine, almost 30 percent of low-income women with children in diapers can’t afford an adequate supply of them, with Hispanic women and grandmothers raising grandchildren the most likely to be in need. Some women are forced to make one or two nappies last the whole day, emptying them out and putting them back on the baby. Based on a survey of almost 900 low-income women in and around New Haven, Connecticut, investigators found the lack of diapers—such a simple thing—had profound and complex effects. The risks to children’s health are obvious: rashes, urinary tract infections, painful chafing. (If a mom is too poor to afford diapers, she probably can’t afford diaper cream or wipes or baby powder,
In 2004, after a long string of Republican governors and the shockingly narrow defeat of Prop. 72—which would have ushered in the most progressive health care reform ever implemented in the United States—California labor leaders got mad. And then they got organized.
“We said, we’re never going to lose that bad again—what do we have to do to change?” said California Labor Federation Executive Secretary-Treasurer Art Pulaski, who moderated [last] Wednesday’s AFL-CIO 2013 Convention panel discussion “Winning and Building Over Time: Winning in California and You Can, Too.”
The federation decided to do an extensive poll of all of their unions and labor council affiliates, asking members how they voted, who they voted for and what kinds of actions they took, and then conducting an analysis. They discovered that some unions and locals were vastly out-performing others, and that if each affiliate had carried their own weight,
Today Walmart opened its newest supermarket, a 33,000-square-foot “grocery store” on the Chinatown corner of Cesar Chavez and Grand avenues. It’s a stone’s throw from Our Lady of the Angels’ stained-glass windows and within shouting distance of dozens of small local businesses now threatened with extinction. Local community groups had fought Walmart’s arrival as a corporate intrusion into the historic neighborhood – the store represents the retail giant’s deepest penetration into urban Los Angeles yet.
For now the new store’s critics and business competitors await the worst.
“It’s just sad for a small economy like Chinatown’s to have a large national chain whose money is going out of state and not staying in the community,” says Steven Y. Wong, interim executive director of Los Angeles’ Chinese American Museum. Wong, who says that his comments are his private opinions and not those of the museum, adds that the store “drastically changes the character of the neighborhood and will have a long-term,
» Read more about: As Walmart’s Chinatown Store Opens, Questions Remain »
Forbes magazine, which calls itself the “capitalist tool,” seems to have a penchant for publishing right-wing diatribes posing as serious economic analyses. The latest is by Paul Roderick Gregory, who accuses me of “false facts and false theories” in a recent piece I wrote about why high wages are good for the economy.
If I’m correct, Gregory asks, how could it possibly be that America become world’s richest and most powerful economy in late nineteenth century, when the typical worker was earning peanuts?
Gregory claims to be an economic historian but he doesn’t seem to know American history. The answer is simple: Ours was a land of unbounded natural resources. We also found it relatively easy to copy the industrial advances of England and Germany, and erected a protective tariff so that our manufacturers didn’t have to compete directly with them. A giant wave of immigrants came to our shores,
Lazy. Out of touch. Greedy. Self-serving. Thuggish.
Chances are you’ve heard a union member or leader called one of these things (and in all likelihood, more than once), and it made your blood boil. The unfortunate truth is that misconceptions, stereotypes and all-out lies seem to be dominating the public discussion and perception of labor unions, even among some progressives. We in the labor movement know that unions stand for the working class as the sole and vital counterbalance to corporate greed and excess…but no one else seems to have gotten the memo.
That disconnect—between what we actually do and what others think we do—is the impetus behind yesterday’s action session at the AFL-CIO Convention, entitled “10 Ways to Change How People See Unions.” Featuring AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Elizabeth Shuler, AFSCME’s Chris Policano and Brandon Weber of Upworthy’s Workonomics, this exciting session focused on reintroducing unions to America by focusing on what we actually do every day for working families.
» Read more about: 10 Ways to Change How People See Unions »
They wake like cosmetic surgery patients.
Memories of crawling vanish
as the sun warms the body
they could not have dreamed of:
Dog Face,
Provence Chalk-Hill Blue,
Great Spangled Fritillary.
When the woman I married woke up
next to the wrong man,
that was my signal
to become inert,
await rebirth.
I want to be great,
spangled,
fritillary.
I want the caterpillar’s gift to the butterfly—
amnesia, and wings.
———————————————
Source: The poem originally appeared in Pearl and was reprinted in Amnesia and Wings, published by Tebot Bach (2013).
Photo: Derek Ramsey
Larry Colker has been co-hosting the weekly Redondo Poets reading at Coffee Cartel in Redondo Beach for more than a decade.
See original feature by Gary Cohn, “Slash and Burn: The War Against California Pensions.”
The AFL-CIO closed out its quadrennial convention in Los Angeles yesterday with a morning remembrance to the victims of 9/11 before delegates rolled up their sleeves and finished up with a day of internal housekeeping and policy chores.
The convention might be remembered most for debuting its highly popular afternoon Action Sessions. Comprising about 50 workshops and panels over three days, these sessions gathered together innovative thinkers, cutting-edge organizers and committed activists from around the country to share the lessons learned in hard-won battles to moved labor to the center stage of a 21st century economy.
Collectively they signaled the AFL-CIO’s seriousness about returning to the grass roots and leveraging one area where labor remains unrivaled and undiminished — its organizational power.
This commitment was especially clear at a Wednesday Action Session entitled “Policy Initiatives That Enable Organizing: Living Wage and PLA Campaigns.”
Moderated by James Elmendorf,
» Read more about: AFL-CIO Convention: A Tale of Two Action Sessions »
What would you do if your employer charged you a fee for everything you needed to work for them: your office desk, your computer, your phone line, your chair, your share of the water cooler and internet connection? What would you do if at the end of a week you were left with just one percent of your paycheck after all these had been deducted? How long would it take for you to stand up and refuse to keep paying to access the tools that allow you to do your work?
As you can see in the paycheck image above, that is the situation that truck drivers from the port trucking company, Pacific 9 Transportation, are facing. Drivers at Pac 9 move cargo to and from the ports of L.A. and Long Beach. The trucks they drive are leased from the company at $125 per week ($537.50 per month). In addition to the lease,
» Read more about: Port Truck Drivers Seek Millions in Owed Wages »