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Not only does Walmart set the wholesale market price for many of the products and food commodities sold in its stores, it also apparently commands the unswerving political loyalty of some of the nonprofit groups that the retail giant underwrites. The Nation’s Lee Fang writes about how a trio of interns ran afoul of OCA Asian Pacific American Advocates (formerly known as the Organization of Chinese Americans), a prominent Asian American civil rights group, for displaying disrespect to Walmart — a large OCA funder. The story played out in Las Vegas last month during OCA’s annual convention, when one intern was rebuked by OCA staff for criticizing Walmart’s drive to open a grocery market in Los Angeles’ historic Chinatown. She and two colleagues were later booted out of the convention when a private video they’d made of flipping off Walmart made its way onto a public Facebook page.
» Read more about: Walmart Casts a Shadow on Civil Rights Group’s Convention »
(The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman fancies himself a prophet who can foresee the future. Just look at his recent column on the “Sharing Economy” to see what the future has in store for us. Not good enough? I’ve studied Friedman’s ways and also learned to see the future. In fact, I’ve gotten so good at it that I’ve already written his next column.)
The Washed-Out Economy
Bill Richman and Teddy Wealthman were San Francisco roommates with a problem.
“We worked all the time at our well-paying Silicon Valley jobs,” Bill recently told me, “and didn’t have time to do our laundry.”
So Bill and Teddy got an idea. While walking down 16th Street in San Francisco’s Mission District, on their way to get a $6-dollar cup of single-origin, private pour-over coffee,
» Read more about: Through Thomas Friedman’s Looking Glass »
On [July 30], President Obama gave a great speech on why good jobs are the foundation for his middle-out economic strategy… from a huge Amazon warehouse where the workers do not have good jobs. I’m still stuck on the setting.
There is so much in President Obama’s speech that I’ve been wanting him to say. While the press focused on his announcement of a proposal on corporate taxes, the speech was almost entirely about jobs. After Obama described “what it means to be middle-class in America” as “A good job. A good education. A home to call your own. Affordable health care… A secure retirement,” he pointed out, “It’s hard to get the other stuff if you don’t have a good job.”
He told the Amazon warehouse workers, “we should be doing everything we can as a country to create more good jobs that pay good wages.”
But as The New York Times reported,
In the Appalachian foothills of Georgia, about an hour north of Atlanta, the riverfront city of Rome serves as a regional hub for health care. Near Rome’s tree-lined historic downtown, there are two well-equipped acute care hospitals with a total of more than 530 beds. Two years ago, the Medical College of Georgia opened a satellite campus in the city.
But in Rome, 27 percent of adults under 65 are uninsured, a rate that holds true across the state. Last year, the city’s two hospitals report spending more than $80 million delivering uncompensated care, often in the emergency room, where costs run high. Taxpayers and those with health insurance will end up paying for that care through government subsidies and higher premiums, industry experts say.
Rome’s dilemma is exactly the situation that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare,” was designed to fix — but that fix isn’t coming to Georgia.
» Read more about: Dixie Governors Say No to Expanding Medicaid »
It’s August, and Americans by the millions are cramming themselves into coach-class seats as they embark on their summer vacations. Those able to learn from adversity might ponder this: Airline seating may be the best concrete expression of what’s happened to the economy in recent decades.
Airlines are sparing no expense these days to enlarge, upgrade and increase the price of their first-class and business-class seating. As the space and dollars devoted to the front of the planes increase, something else has to be diminished, and, as multitudes of travelers can attest, it’s the experience of flying coach. The joys of air travel — once common to all who flew — have been redistributed upward and are now reserved for the well-heeled few.
The new business-class seats that Lufthansa is installing convert to quasi-beds that are six-feet six-inches long and two feet wide, the New York Times’ Jad Mouawad reports.
» Read more about: Economic Inequality: The Sky’s Not the Limit »
Over 200 Oakland recycling workers staged a powerful show of unity and action by striking on Tuesday, July 30. Employees from the city’s two recycling contractors – Waste Management and California Waste Solutions (CWS) – walked off their jobs midway through the morning shift.
Then, instead of picketing in remote industrial areas where the recycling plants are located, workers formed caravans that converged downtown at Oakland’s City Hall. The result was a full day of political action and solidarity that included marches, “human billboards” along Broadway and 14th Street, visits with local and state elected officials, and a spirited rally. The day ended where rally participants – including many community allies – filled the upper seats of the City Council chambers and addressed the City Council that evening.
Recycling worker Emanuel San Gabriel is one of CWS workers who left his dusty and noisy workplace behind to join the protest.
» Read more about: Waste Happens — So Do Accidents and Death »
One of the most famous lines not spoken by the man it’s been attributed to is “Have You No Shame?” During the infamous Communist-witch-hunt Hearings of Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, attorney Joseph Welch supposedly fired these words at McCarthy. What he actually said, however, is “Have You No Sense of Decency?”
Nevertheless, the first wording, mythical as it is, seems the more appropriate one to ask present-day Republicans, especially in the House of Representatives.
The majority of Americans are not always correct. But their consistently low regard for the present Congress, especially the Republican behavior within it, is dead-on. In a late July 2013 NBC/WSJ poll, only 12 percent approved of the job Congress was doing, while 83 percent disapproved. Another question (and the percentage response indicated afterward) was “Do you think Republicans in Congress are too inflexible in dealing with President Obama (56 percent),
An interview with John Densmore is less a linear dialogue and more a jazz improvisation, with unexpected twists and turns and no clear beginning or end. Which is not to say that the Doors’ drummer is without a steady beat — this is a man determined to drive home his message about the corrosive effects of greed. Densmore’s convictions led him to sue his former bandmates, Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger, for trying to tour under the name “The Doors of the 21st Century” and using the band’s logo.
Densmore prevailed, but not without a bruising battle that created a bitter divide between the artists who once teamed with Jim Morrison on one of the greatest rock and roll bands in history. The story of that clash is the subject of Densmore’s latest book, The Doors Unhinged: Jim Morrison’s Legacy Goes to Trial.
Frying Pan News caught up with Densmore recently and riffed with him about what he calls “The Greed Gene,” Morrison’s views on money and his reconciliation with Manzarek before the keyboardist’s death earlier this year.
» Read more about: The Doors’ John Densmore Beats the Drum Against Greed »
The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare as it’s referred to, is going to dramatically change the way we live our lives and balance our budgets. The largest group of beneficiaries is working people who are currently not covered by their employer yet don’t earn enough to buy health insurance on their own, including a large number of food service and retail workers. These workers currently are forced to pay out of pocket, forgo medical treatment or rely on public health clinics.
You’d imagine these workers would be jumping for joy at the thought of a new federal law requiring their employers to help them meet a critical human need. Unfortunately, there is little recourse for these workers for the next two years. While most of the healthcare dialogue has revolved around the individual requirement, the recent announcement that the employer mandate will be pushed back until 2015 has quietly fallen off the radar.
A specter is haunting Detroit — the specter of the Koch Brothers’ toxic brand of unregulated corporatism, as embodied in a cloud bank of pollution that recently blackened the Motor City’s horizon. Abby Zimet, writing in Common Dreams, describes the event as captured by a
[m]ind-boggling video of a billowing, high-carbon, high-sulfur cloud from the mountain of petroleum coke – waste from Canadian tar sands shipped from Alberta to Detroit, and the dirtiest potential energy source ever – illegally stored by the Koch Brothers along the Detroit River. Produced by Marathon Refinery but owned by Koch Carbon, the pet-coke piles have for months been producing “fugitive dust” – i.e.: thick black crud – that blankets the homes of outraged residents and lawmakers; analysis shows the dust contains elevated levels of lead, sulfur, zinc and the likely carcinogenic vanadium.
As we noted here last year,
» Read more about: Koch Brothers’ Huge Coke Cloud Darkens Detroit »
Instead of spending August on the beach, corporate lobbyists are readying arguments for when Congress returns in September about why corporate taxes should be lowered.
But they’re lies. You need to know why so you can spread the truth.
Lie #1: U.S. corporate tax rates are higher than the tax rates of other big economies. Wrong. After deductions and tax credits, the average corporate tax rate in the U.S. is lower. According to the Congressional Research Service, the United States has an effective corporate tax rate of 27.1 percent, compared to an average of 27.7 percent in the other large economies of the world.
Lie #2: U.S. corporations need lower taxes in order to make investments in new jobs. Wrong again. Corporations are sitting on almost $2 trillion of cash they don’t know what to do with. The 1,000 largest U.S. corporations alone are hoarding almost $1 trillion.
» Read more about: Corporations to Congress: Cut Our Taxes Now! »
For several weeks, BART management has run a sophisticated media campaign telling the public that the lack of real progress in negotiations is solely the fault of the unions’ unreasonable and uncompromising economic demands.
When it comes to wages and benefits, however, management has presented a highly misleading picture: it has failed to mention the enormous concessions that BART workers accepted in 2009 at the depth of the economic recession. BART President Thomas Blalock stated that he was “extremely pleased” with that cost-cutting agreement. BART employees were much less pleased, of course, but they recognized the need for significant sacrifice in the dismal economy.
Under the guidance of their highly paid, out-of-state chief negotiator, Thomas Hock, BART management is misrepresenting key economic and safety issues. Hock has an outstanding reputation for driving down employees’ wages and benefits, but a dismal one for resolving disputes without disruptive strikes.
» Read more about: Why Is It Always ‘Safety Last’ at BART? »
Today’s employment figures show that 162,000 jobs were added to U.S. payrolls last month – enough, when combined with the number of people simply dropping out of the work force altogether, to tick down the national unemployment rate to 7.4 percent. But these gains hardly met analysts’ expectations of 185,000 employees being added to American payrolls in July. Most of the new jobs were in the low-wage-paying restaurant and retail sectors.
This last detail comes just as fast-food workers have been staging one-day strikes to protest their miserable existences as low-wage earners and to demand the minimum-wage be doubled to $15 per hour. The strikers’ actions met with condescending sneers from the usual quarters of conservative punditry. Wall Street speakerphone and Fox News business seer Neil Cavuto laid on an especially thick heaping of scorn.
“It’s like jobs aren’t enough these days,” harrumphed Cavuto.
» Read more about: Neil Cavuto Remembers When He Held a Job Once »
President Obama took yet another stab Tuesday at boosting the economy, offering congressional Republicans a cut in the corporate tax rate in return for a $50 billion investment in sagging U.S. infrastructure. That the GOP immediately rejected the deal should come as no surprise. But Republicans should at least be made to stipulate where they think investment in the United States is going to come from.
Conservatives’ stock answer is that if we just lift regulations and cut taxes on business, if we only get rid of unions and the minimum wage, then corporate investment will flow like a mighty stream. There are all kinds of good reasons to dispute this, but a study by three economists provides proof positive that it is sheer hooey.
In late April, John Asker and Alexander Ljungqvist of NYU’s Stern School of Business and the National Bureau of Economic Research and Joan Farre-Mensa of Harvard Business School published a study looking at one of the U.S.
» Read more about: America’s Investment Gap is Strangling Its Economy »
Endless debates over austerity vs. stimulus policies agitate governments. Which is “the correct” one to escape global capitalism’s ongoing crisis? The debates proceed as if official policies were key to ending crises. But the politicians’ fights over policies are mostly distractions from the main events: how crises usually end themselves and their immense social costs.
In the U.S., Republicans promote policies that prioritize national debts as “the” economic problem. Enlarged debts, they assert, prevent businesses from making investments that “create jobs.” Republicans therefore demand austerity policies – chiefly cutting government spending – to reduce national debts and thereby exit crises. Democrats – at least those who still differ from Republicans – promote policies that prioritize reducing unemployment. They want increased government stimulus spending even if national debts rise. That spending, they argue, will boost demands for goods and services, thereby creating jobs and pulling the economy out of crisis.
(They drive our trains and buses, teach our children, repair our roads and protect our safety. Public employees perform these and countless other jobs, although they remain mostly off the radar of the public they serve. With our new “Pro Publica” series, Frying Pan News presents the lives of these men and women front and center.)
After 10 years of marriage, Aisha Blanchard-Young’s husband is still shocked by the amount of time Aisha spends in her kindergarten classroom teaching. He jokes that if someone really wants to find out what it is like to be a teacher, they should talk to a teacher’s spouse. As a quality control technician for a stadium electronics company, he never has to take his work home. Aisha isn’t as lucky.
During the school year Aisha gets up at five in the morning to ready herself and the couple’s two boys (one 5 and one 2) for the day.
» Read more about: Aisha Blanchard-Young: A Passion for Teaching »
In the Food Network’s popular show, Restaurant Impossible, star Robert Irvine visits a failing restaurant that is poorly managed, has depressing décor, and which serves inedible food. He and his staff completely transform the business, and by show’s end there are hugs and smiles all around. Many of the restaurants Irvine visits are completely unsanitary. In a recent episode, Irvine told the owners that their place had “over 500 health code violations.” He said the kitchen was so disgusting that he would not even try the food, and told diners that they were eating at their own risk.
But neither Irvine nor the Food Network reported the establishment to the local health department. Nor did they ask how such a “disgusting” kitchen could have gone uninspected by city officials, or raise alarms as to the likelihood there were many other restaurants in the city also endangering their customers’ health.
» Read more about: Why ‘Restaurant Impossible’ Blows the Wrong Whistle »
you want dogs? I walked all four shepherds
in the park, by day and dark
and nobody dared come near; bark?
all they had to do was walk,
the four big shepherds in the park
love? you want love? I hardly miss her;
but her dogs I walked
by day and dark, yes,
I miss the dogs, the four
big shepherds in the park.
——————————————————–——————————————————–
Source: Intensifications, published by Red Hen Press (2010).
Originally from Brooklyn, N.Y., Austin Straus has been drawing and painting since childhood, but began writing seriously in his mid-thirties. His poems and illustrations have appeared in such literary magazines and anthologies as Caliban, Grand Passion, Jacaranda Review, Red Dance Floor and The Maverick Poets. Known as the host of KPFK’s The Poetry Connexion,
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is now fully staffed and able to continue to function to protect workers’ rights after the U.S. Senate today confirmed five members. The votes end a months-long blockade on President Obama’s nominees by Senate Republicans who threatened to shut the board down Aug. 27.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says the confirmations are:
Good news for all workers seeking to exercise the rights they are guaranteed by law. Those essential rights include the ability to bargain together for fair wages and living standards and a workplace safe from abuse, harassment and intimidation.
The five members are current NLRB Chairman Mark Pearce; Nancy Schiffer, a former AFL-CIO associate general counsel; and NLRB attorney Kent Hirozawa, currently the chief counsel to Pearce; and attorneys Philip Miscimarra and Harry Johnson, who represent management in labor-management relations.
Earlier this month, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was set to change Senate rules that would have eliminated filibusters against certain executive branch nominees,
» Read more about: Finally: National Labor Relations Board at Full Strength »