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Marchers Spotlight Massey Mine Deaths at CEO Blankenship Press Club Speech
Sat, 07/24/2010 - 14:00By Mike Hall AFL-CIO Senior Writer Inside the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., this week, Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship tried to defend the indefensible – Massey’s coal mine safety record. Thirty-one miners have died in Massey mines this year, including 29 in the April 5 explosion at the Upper Big Branch (W.Va.) mine. Fifty-four coal miners [...]
Recovery Act in Action #8: Jobs in the Heartland
Sat, 07/24/2010 - 11:00By Jared Bernstein Chief Economist and Economic Policy Adviser to Vice President Joseph Biden Our latest Recovery-Act-in-Action installment features some exciting new technology, 100 good-paying manufacturing jobs, and the public/private co-investment that is critical to job growth right now. It’s all taking place in Indianapolis, Indiana, where Allison Transmission is building a new factory to make hybrid systems [...]
Atlanta Area Residents Demand Big Banks Help Struggling Homeowners
Sat, 07/24/2010 - 07:00By James Parks AFL-CIO Senior Writer In Atlanta—one of the areas hardest hit by foreclosures—residents who are about to lose their homes demanded last week that Big Banks like Wachovia/Wells Fargo reform their policies and protect homeowners on the brink of homelessness. More than 200 people, including community groups, clergy and labor and government leaders, attended a hearing at an [...]
It’s the Tax Cuts and Wars, Stupid
Fri, 07/23/2010 - 14:00By David Sirota Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist In a terrific column for Tax.com, Pulitzer-Prize winner David Cay Johnston breaks down new government data and puts USA Today’s whole “lowest tax bills since 1950″ revelation into dollars and cents we can all understand: In 1979 federal taxes for the median-income household totaled $6,100, but [...]
ABC: Bank Lobbying Groups Says Consumer Bureau Must See Banks’ “Side of Issues, Not Just Consumers’”
Fri, 07/23/2010 - 11:00By David Sirota Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist In a very solid piece about what the fight over Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren and the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFBP) is really about, ABC News includes this revealing snippet from the Financial Services Roundtable, one of the most powerful corporate front groups in Washington: The [...]
A Decade of High Unemployment and Falling Wages. . .Or We Could Create Jobs and Help Our Cities
Fri, 07/23/2010 - 07:00By Amy Traub Research Director Drum Major Institute for Public Policy Left to itself, the U.S. economy may not return to its pre-recession rate of unemployment until 2021, says a new study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Even under the more optimistic growth assumptions of the Congressional Budget Office, we’ve got five more years [...]
We’re in a One-and-a-Half Dip Recession
Thu, 07/22/2010 - 14:00By Robert Reich Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley We’re not in a double-dip recession yet. We’re in a one and a half dip recession. Consumer confidence is down. Retail sales are down. Home sales are down. Permits for single-family starts are down. The average work week is down. The only things not down are inventories [...]
Kick The Old And The Disabled To Show We’re Serious About Deficits?
Thu, 07/22/2010 - 11:00By Robert L. Borosage Co-Director Campaign for America’s Future In the deficit hysteria now sweeping Washington, Social Security has emerged in the bull’s-eye as a target for cuts. Perpetually tanned Republican House Minority leader John Boehner, called for hiking the retirement age to 70. The Democratic House Majority Leader, wrong-way Steny Hoyer, argued for hiking it to 69. [...]
Why Do Republicans Want to Raise the Deficit?
Thu, 07/22/2010 - 07:00By Sen. Bernie Sanders Independent U.S. Senator from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders gave the following speech on the floor of the United States Senate. “Mr. President” refers to the president of the Senate. Each and every day, it gets harder and harder to listen to my Republican friends who race to the Senate floor telling the American people [...]
Made In America
Wed, 07/21/2010 - 14:00By Scott Paul Executive Director of Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) Made in America seems to be all the rage in the Capitol right now. Rahm Emanuel promised us that we’d be hearing a lot more from the White House about this over the next few weeks. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi previewed the House Democrats’ “Make it [...]
President Obama, Make Congress Stay In DC Until They Pass Jobs Legislation
Wed, 07/21/2010 - 11:00By Dave Johnson Fellow with Campaign for America’s Future The Constitution of the United States, Article II, Section 3: “He may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them…“ We have a jobs emergency and the Congress has not acted. Almost everything the Senate does is being blocked by an obstructionist minority that is trying to [...]
Build a Billboard for Boehner
Wed, 07/21/2010 - 07:00By Mike Hall AFL-CIO Senior Writer House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) appears to have two favorite pastimes. The first is bashing everything President Obama and congressional Democrats are doing to revive the economy—including Wall Street reform, job creation, unemployment insurance benefits, health care reform and on and on and on. The second is golf. Boehner, who has been [...]
Poetic Justice for Thoughtless Politicians
Tue, 07/20/2010 - 11:00Let’s see now… The Republicans in Congress refused to pass an extension of unemployment benefits unless a way could be found to pay for them. These are the same Republicans who, with a Republican in the White House and a Republican majority in Congress, took the surplus in the U.S. Treasury and gave it away to [...]
Are Our Bosses Becoming Meaner?
Tue, 07/20/2010 - 07:00Sam Pizzigati By Sam Pizzigati Editor, “Too Much” The staggering gap between CEO and worker pay, new research from three business scholars suggests, has left America’s workplaces still more nasty, brutish, and short. We have today in academia, after 30 years of rising CEO pay, a vast scholarly literature on CEO compensation. Much of this vast literature revolves exultingly [...]
The Senators Who Gave Us 15 Million Unemployed Want to Deny Them Benefits
Tue, 07/20/2010 - 02:00By Dean Baker Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research It is amazing how people in Washington are so forgiving — of each other. We have close to 15 million people unemployed and more than 8 million people under-employed because the folks managing our economy were incompetent. In spite of the efforts of economists and policy types to [...]
Alan Greenspan and Things Forgotten
Mon, 07/19/2010 - 14:45By Dave Johnson Fellow with Campaign for America’s Future Ah, the things we forget. This was then: Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan greenlighted the Bush tax cuts, saying that Clinton was paying down the country’s debt too fast as a result of modest taxes on the wealthy. So the Bush tax cuts for the rich passed, which immediately [...]
Republicans Kiss the Rich; Diss the Jobless
Mon, 07/19/2010 - 09:59By Leo W. Gerard USW International President A brutal competition pits worker against worker continually now in this country. Five unemployed people vie with each other for each available job. It’s like a cruel game of musical chairs, with five desperate competitors for one seat. Workers who’ve lost cars to repossession and homes to foreclosure run around frantically [...]
Happy 75th, Social Security, Watch Out for Deficit Scam
Mon, 07/19/2010 - 07:00Mike Hall By Mike Hall AFL-CIO Senior Writer Seventy-five years ago this August, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Social Security into law. Today, the nation’s most successful safety net, a program that has provided retirement security and kept hundreds of millions of seniors out of poverty, is under attack. Politicians like House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) want to raise the [...]
After Goldman Give Up, Why Would Wall Street Be Scared of SEC?
Sun, 07/18/2010 - 11:00By Don McNay Award winning financial columnist and structured settlement guru My father was a professional gambler and used to carry a roll of money that he called “walking around” money. Walking around money is what the SEC settled for in the Goldman Sachs case. $550 million is walking around money to a company like Goldman Sachs. It is [...]
Level the Playing Field in Trade Policy
Sun, 07/18/2010 - 07:00By Stan Sorscher Labor Representative, Society for Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) One popular position on trade is to “level the playing field.” I’m not always sure what that means, but I’m in favor of it. Any intention to level the playing field starts with a simple realization — that rules of trade can favor one outcome over [...]