"Words that make actions speak louder."
“Protectionism” is a very powerful word. In fact, simply evoking the word is capable of ending debate on any subject related to trade. Invoking the magic words, “You can’t do that, it would be protectionist,” settles all arguments. Why, exactly, is protectionism so bad? Why can’t we have fair trade that lifts workers and protects […]
Let’s go back, just for a minute, to a time before screaming teabaggers, before Republicans decided to kill health insurance reform as a means to politically destroy this country’s first African-American president. Try and remember what it was like before discussion of health insurance reform raised voices, a time when instead it raised concern. Recollect […]
Barack Obama proved Friday he’s got grit. He enforced trade laws. These are special trade safeguard rules called “Section 421” that the Chinese had agreed to obey to gain entrance to the World Trade Organization (WTO). They are, however, laws that had gone unenforced by the U.S. in the past. President Obama used these safeguard […]
Across the pond, in the UK, the idea of capping income is suddenly starting to make a respectable splash. The Great Depression gave us the minimum wage. Might we now see a “maximum wage,” thanks to the Great Recession? That prospect now seems to have entered into the realm of political possibility. Last week, in […]
There are things you can see in front of your face, and then there are things that conservative “free market” ideologues tell you. One example is when they talk about the minimum wage. (An increase in the national minimum wage goes into effect today.) Conservative “free market” ideologues tell you that raising the minimum wage […]
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 […]
To rescue the global economy from reckless power suits, we just may need a ‘maximum wage.’ So say Australia’s top labor leaders and a fairly daring cohort of MPs in the UK. By Sam Pizzigati You don’t need to be particularly bold, not these days, to blame excessive executive compensation for a good chunk of […]
The wind is at our backs. The media still calls America a “center-right” nation, but “center-left” is closer to the truth. On issues ranging from health care to energy, the public is more progressive than people think. Demographic groups from youth to Hispanics are voting farther left and in larger numbers than ever before. The […]
As President Bush and conservative leaders were still touting the “soundness” of the economy in 2007, trends among the working poor were already beginning to tell a different story. After two years of declines in the number of people characterized as “poor” despite working at least 27 weeks a year, that number began to increase […]
Every once in a while, an idea gels in my head and I dismiss it, thinking to myself “Nah. I gotta be missing something. It can’t be that. And then I hear someone who probably knows a lot more than I do about the subject at hand say pretty much what I’d been thinking all […]