"Words that make actions speak louder."
This week the minimum wage rose by 70 cents to $7.25 an hour, a beggar’s lot really, but still corporations across America decried it. Good times or bad, somehow Wall Streeters walk away with $700,000 bonuses, you know, on top of their salaries, but a 70-cent minimum wage hike is never affordable. That’s why America’s […]
A post by Leo Gerard and Scott N. Paul Our nation faces rising unemployment, staggering debts, shrinking trade, and no sense of when (and if) a real recovery — one that reaches Main Street and working families — will take hold. As the federal government responds to these concerns, and especially since President Obama was […]
Just days ago, America celebrated her birthday with fireworks, spontaneous renditions of the Star Spangled Banner and chants of, “We’re Number One!” In a crucial area, health care, the chant is untrue. Many of us love the individual doctors who may have saved our lives or the lives of loved ones. But the health care […]
Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele appears to be suffering from philosophical identity confusion. He’s got an organization named United STEELE Workers Union, white hardhat emblem and all, collecting members for him on Facebook. It had 255 worldwide as of June 19. This is disconcerting on so many levels, least of which is that I head […]
A group of tire importers that should be competitors banded together recently to ally themselves with China in a trade case. Doesn’t sound like they’re working for the interests of the United States, does it? No, they’re not. They’re collaborating with China against American manufacturing in general and American tire workers, represented by the United […]
Randel K. Johnson, vice president of that esteemed group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, recently revealed a corporate-squelched truth in a slip of the tongue. During a debate on May 15 with Stewart Acuff of the AFL-CIO about the Employee Free Choice Act, Johnson admitted – finally – that the act preserves secret ballot elections […]
The economic structure of Jim Henson’s cartoon realm called Fraggle Rock reflects our own. In one HBO episode, the industrious, hard-hatted Doozers prepare to leave the rock, which would have quickly left the Fraggles starving. Somehow, politicians and powerbrokers in this country don’t see the simple parallel. If the U.S. continues to send its manufacturing […]
The proposition General Motors has presented to the United Auto Workers and American taxpayers in its latest restructuring plan is simple: You must pay for your own execution. GM, which already took $15.4 billion in bailout money, wants another $11.6 billion and is offering in return this deal: It will close 16 of its American […]
“He’s a real nowhere Man, Sitting in his Nowhere Land, Making all his nowhere plans For nobody.” These lyrics to “Nowhere Man,” written and recorded in 1965 by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, describe the Republican Party of 2009. Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter rejected that party and returned to his Democratic roots because, even at […]
Americans are paying big time now for decades of buying into a hoax. And it wasn’t sub-prime mortgages. It was the conservative contention that government is evil and inept. Swallowing that absurd assertion resulted in relaxation and elimination of supposedly onerous and unnecessary government regulations – from the ones that prevented banks from growing too […]