Employment

By Karen Dolan | – ( Otherwords.org ) – There’s no getting around it: 2021 has been a tough year. As with 2020, many of us are glad to see its back end. Do let the door hit you on the way out. Yet, there is more than just Senator Joe Manchin’s coal and Omicron […]

Carbon Footprint

Don’t care about the Build Back Better Act? Hearing People’s personal Stories might change that

The Conversation

By Angela Bradbery | – When U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said that he wouldn’t support President Joe Biden’s signature Build Back Better Act, he set off a wave of breaking news alerts. It was fitting. For months, media coverage has breathlessly focused on the behind-the-scenes wrangling and hour-by-hour negotiations around the legislation. How much […]

Employment

The “Graveyard Shift” in a Pandemic World: The Real Meaning of Supply-Chain Woes

Rebecca Gordon

( Tomdispatch.com) – In mid-October, President Biden announced that the Port of Los Angeles would begin operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, joining the nearby Port of Long Beach, which had been doing so since September. The move followed weeks of White House negotiations with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, as […]

Congress

Fightin’ Joe Biden Wins big, on Jobs, Covid, the Dow and Infrastructure, but Corporate News downplays Successes

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The for-profit press thinks it knows what the story in Washington, D.C., is. Joe Biden is a boring president who struggles to get anything done and the Democratic Party is a hot mess of infighting that paralyzes it. Corporate news is the Eeyore of the news world, spreading pessimism and […]

Employment

We don’t need a Debt Ceiling, we Need Gov’t to Invest in Truly Rewarding Jobs

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – Who is at fault for a standoff on the debt ceiling? Republicans are the obvious choice because when in power deficits don’t matter but out of power deficits and a growing debt are the path to hell. Deficits will burden our grandchildren and so we must accept […]

Corporations

Our Future vs. Neoliberalism

Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davies

( Code Pink) – In country after country around the world, people are rising up to challenge entrenched, failing neoliberal political and economic systems, with mixed but sometimes promising results. Progressive leaders in the U.S. Congress are refusing to back down on the Democrats’ promises to American voters to reduce poverty, expand rights to healthcare, […]

Employment

How Finding that immigrants don’t reduce the wages of native-born workers won the Nobel Prize

The Conversation

By Arvind Magesan | – Applied economists spend a large fraction of their time trying to squeeze meaningful answers — causal effects — out of observational data. Unlike the natural sciences, we can’t run experiments in order to answer the big questions in our field. If we want to know, for example, how raising the […]

Employment

Unemployment Insurance Isn’t Holding Back the Economy. Inequality Is.

OtherWords

By Rebekah Entralgo | – An estimated 9 million Americans got the rug pulled out from under them over Labor Day weekend as enhanced pandemic federal unemployment benefits expired, leaving millions of families in the lurch during a record-breaking season for COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. Some 35 million people — nearly 1 in 10 Americans […]

Debt

Only $3 Bn. of Federal $46 Bn rental assistance dollars reach renters, as eviction moratorium ends

Cronkite News Arizona PBS

By Brooke Newman | – ( Cronkite News) – WASHINGTON – The federal government’s COVID-19 moratorium on renter evictions ended Saturday, leaving thousands of Arizona renters vulnerable while state and local officials have distributed just a fraction of the funding aimed at keeping people in their homes. Government agencies in Arizona received almost $495 million […]