Who Broke the Economy?
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If you want to prepare yourself for the inevitable election year discussions/arguments with your right-wing uncle or tea party neighbor about the nation’s economy and how we got into the ditch that we’re finally driving out of, check out Failure by Design: The Story Behind America’s Broken Economy.
Named last month by The Washington Post as one of the best political books of 2011, it is a broad narrative of how the economy has failed to deliver for most Americans over much of the past three decades. Says author Josh Bivens, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute (EPI):
Over the past 30 years we’ve seen this rapid increase in inequality in the U.S. economy with more and more of economic growth going to a smaller and smaller slice of the people. None of that was an accident…it was not just something that happened….It happened because we very much changed the policy of the U.S. economy.
He says the policies that were put into place—including “an all assault on the right of workers to organize”—guaranteed “that the already rich got an ever increasing share of economic growth.” In other words, those policies sowed the seeds that grew into the 99 percent.
Click here for a video with Bivens. The book is available through the EPI bookstore and Amazon.
Report: Federal Intervention Needed to Stem African American Unemployment
The misery of U.S. joblessness has everyone’s attention, but in the African American community, high unemployment has been the norm for 50 years, in good times and bad.
A new report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is calling for federal intervention to break the cycle that has kept the jobless rate among African Americans at twice the rate among whites.
The three-part plan includes the creation of public-sector jobs, job training with job placement programs and wage subsidies for employers.
EPI urges federal implementation of the program in counties and metropolitan areas of 25,000 people or more that have suffered unemployment of 6 percent or more for the the past 10 years.
Says Algernon Austin, director of EPI’s Race, Ethnicity and the Economy program and the report’s author:
Our economy should be one in which everyone who wants to work can find a job.
Read more here.
GOP Plan Offers Cash Bait to Forgo Social Security
If this new Republican idea weren’t so scary, we would be laughing…hysterically.
Asreported by the Washington Post 2chambers blog yesterday, Rep. Jeffrey Landry (R-La.) is proposing that working Americans—already battered bloody by the recession—be forced to give up some of their Social Security benefits if they “opt in” to receive a payroll tax cut. (So much for the Republican mantra that tax cuts pay for themselves.)
Landry’s idea, introduced as H.R. 3551, would cut the payroll tax rate from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent—and allow workers to decide each year whether to receive the tax break.
The catch? Workers who chose to take advantage of the tax break in a given year would be forced to have their Social Security retirement age extended by one month, effectively cutting their own retirement benefits. Really? Read the rest of this entry »
As Unemployment Aid Sets to Expire, Jobless Worker Says: ‘All of Us Need to Stand Together’
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| Terry Maile |
Terry Maile’s supervisor called her into a conference room with all of her co-workers to hear the news: It was their last day of employment at Level 3 Communications in Pittsburgh.
That was it. The jobs were gone to India.
“I couldn’t stop crying,” said Maile, a divorced mother of one, who until that moment had spent her professional life as a telecommunications worker before being laid off first by Verizon and then by Level 3.
Even then, Maile said, she still believed in the American Dream.
You’ve got to work hard… work hard.
Maile owned her own home. Although she had been forced to liquidate her retirement after the Verizon layoff, she had begun to build it back up. Then came the Level 3 layoff. It shook her to her core.
That was my defining moment. I was filling out paperwork, and I couldn’t help it…. I was just crying and crying. I said, ‘They don’t understand…. We’re all interconnected.’
Ten years ago, back when Maile worked at Verizon, she earned $75,000 a Read the rest of this entry »
Alabama Deli Owner, Businesses Stand Strong for Immigrant Rights
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More from Alabama, where a delegation of African American labor and civil rights leaders is investigating the state’s recently passed anti-immigrant law. Follow the delegation here.
Alabama’s new anti-immigrant law instantly intimidated the nine Latino employees of Max’s Delicatessen, owned by Steve Dubrinsky, who says:
They are good solid people, and I don’t like how they feel right now.
Dubrinsky also quickly adds:
They’re all here legally.
His qualifying statement has become obligatory for everyone in Alabama these days who mentions an employee, friend or family member who’s Latino.
Dubrinsky wants that to change. Today, he hosted a group of local business owners to meet with African American union and civil rights leaders from as far away as Michigan and Washington, D.C., to enable owners to talk about Read the rest of this entry »
More Proof of CEO Greed (In Case You Had Doubts)
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In 1965, when the U.S. economy was humming, the average CEO collected $24 for every $1 earned by a worker. Today, as the economy struggles, that ratio is $243-to-$1. It sounds bad and as the chart shows, looks even worse. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) shows the trend here.
The Snapshot graph is part of the EPI report, “Occupy Wall Streeters Are Right About Skewed Economic Rewards in the United States,” released late last month.
Iceland’s Recovery Proves Fallacy of Economic Austerity
As Greece teeters toward collapse because of austerity measures imposed upon it by international lenders, the current doctrine of cutting public employment and programs in the midst of an economic crisis perhaps deserves a reassessment.
In his New York Times column, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman describes the austerity doctrine, so in vogue these days, this way:
Report: Without More Investment in the Young, Middle Class Could Disappear
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In “The State of Young America: The Databook,” the economic experts at Demos demonstrate that by virtually every measure, the fortunes of America’s young people are falling under a deluge of debt, shrinking opportunity, rising costs of living and lack of access to health care. Writing with members of the Young Invincibles think tank, the authors write:
The path that each young person takes during their young adulthood often largely determines whether they end up in the middle class as older adults. Given the nation’s current anemic levels of investment in young people, the existence of our future middle class is severely imperiled.
The Databook looks at the well-being of 18- to 34-year-olds across the span of a generation in such areas as income, higher education and family life. Notable among the findings is that as the business environment became increasingly hostile to unionization, the fortunes of young people fell. Today, the Databook tells us, only 10 percent of young people have union representation, compared with 20 percent in 1980. Consequently, with few exceptions, only those who have attained a bachelor’s degree have seen their incomes rise over the course of the past three decades. (Once exception would be those who find their way into a trade union apprenticeship.) Read the rest of this entry »
Trumka: In Speech, Obama ‘Goes to the Mat’ to Create New Jobs
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka issued the following statement on President Obama’s jobs and the economy proposal that he presented to a joint session of Congress tonight.
The President took an important and necessary step tonight: he started a serious national conversation about how to solve our jobs crisis. He showed working people that he is willing to go to the mat to create new jobs on a substantial scale. Tonight’s speech should energize the nation to come together, work hard and get serious about jobs.
As the President explained, we can no longer delay putting Americans back to work and rebuilding our nation’s schools, roads, bridges, transit, ports, rail, communications and energy systems. And we need to help state and local governments avoid layoffs that are dragging down the economy—rejecting the pernicious myth that the only way to address Wall Street’s crisis is to punish firefighters, teachers and others who perform critical public services.
We call on Congress to act and look forward to working with the President and Congress on all elements of this proposal.
Jobs Plan Must Be ‘Big, Bold,’ Groups Tell Obama
In a letter to President Obama, 70 progressive groups urge the president to use tonight’s address to the nation on jobs and the economy to present a plan that is “big, bold and creates jobs directly.”
With 25 million Americans out of work, or only able to find part-time work when they want and need full-time jobs, aggressive action is needed.
They also say that “tax cuts and incentives for corporations have repeatedly failed to put Americans back to work.”
It is time to move beyond these half measures designed to appeal to a narrow ideological minority who have repeatedly shown their unwillingness to negotiate and disinterest in real solutions.
Click here for the full letter.
Meanwhile, the Strengthen Social Security coalition is calling on Obama to stand firm against cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The group is mounting an e-mail petition campaign demanding the president spare those vital programs from cuts as he and the so-called budget deficit Super Committee negotiate.
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are the foundations of our economic security. Social Security does not contribute a penny to the deficit. Its benefits should not be cut, including reducing the Social Security COLA. Medicare is a sacred trust. Medicaid is crucial for seniors, women, children and people with disabilities.
Click here to sign the petition.
