Employment

(Tomdispatch.com ) – During the Trump years, the phrase “Infrastructure Week” rang out as a sort of Groundhog Day-style punchline. What began in June 2017 as a failed effort by The Donald’s White House and a Republican Senate to focus on the desperately needed rebuilding of American infrastructure morphed into a meme and a running […]

Employment

Can Biden-Harris make a Counter-Revolution against Reaganism and Restore Dignity to Work?

Rebecca Gordon

( Tomdispatch.com ) – A year ago, just a few weeks before San Francisco locked itself down for the pandemic, I fell deeply in love with a 50-year-old. The object of my desire was a wooden floor loom in the window of my local thrift shop. Friends knowledgeable on such matters examined photos I took […]

Employment

The Decades-Long Struggle Over Big Corporations and Poverty Wages

Inequality.org

By Phil Mattera | – ( Inequality.org ) – The Senate Parliamentarian dealt a strong blow to the Fight for $15 movement by ruling that a federal minimum wage increase could be included in the stimulus bill. Senator Bernie Sanders is pushing back with an amendment to take tax deductions away from large, profitable corporations […]

Employment

Essential Workers deserve $15/ hr. – Remember when we Fêted them for Serving us in Pandemic?

OtherWords

By Eshawney Gaston | – ( Otherwords.org) – I’m one of America’s millions of essential workers. We’re working in your children’s schools, at your grocery stores, and at drive-through windows. We’re cleaning your homes. And we’re struggling so hard to make ends meet. Congress is debating whether to raise the minimum wage to $15 an […]

Employment

Why the Opponents of a $15 Minimum Wage are Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – Conservatives in both political parties want citizens to believe opposition to an increase in the minimum wage is a simple matter of supply and demand economics. If government regulators increase the price of hamburger, consumers will buy less hamamburger. Increase the price (wages) of labor and businesses […]

Development

Yes we need the $1.9 Trillion Stimulus: Real Unemployment is 3 times what they’re telling us

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – As Congress gets set to debate the Biden Pandemic relief package, one of the favorite Republican lines is the contention that an economic recovery is already well underway. Pouring more money into an accelerating economy is likely to induce seventies style inflation. It is time, they argue, […]

Employment

Can Biden’s $15/ hr Minimum Wage begin restoring Working Class trust?

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – Watch CNN almost any time lately and one is inundated with scenes of the lethal riots in the Capitol. And in an era when every man or woman is their own video journalist new and often terrifying footage is released on a continuing basis. Along with footage […]

Donald Trump

Biden to invoke Defense Production Act for Vaccine manufacture. Trump? Playing Golf at Mar-a-Lago

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Will Feuer at CNBC reports that Joe Biden will invoke the Defense Production Act to ramp up the manufacture of more doses of the coronavirus vaccine. You may ask yourself, why has this not already been done? Trump said on December 9 that he “might” invoke the Korea War-era act, […]

China

How incompetent Boob Trump took down America and launched the Chinese Century

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The twentieth century was dubbed “the American Century” in 1941 by Time magazine publisher Henry Luce. Luce hoped that Americans would abandon their isolationism and seek international allies, joining against the Axis in WW II. It was then more wishful thinking on his part than reality, but his wish arguably […]