Steve Hochstadt: Isn’t freedom more than having a low tax rate? Doesn’t freedom mean the ability to direct our own lives, to influence the big decisions that affect our families, our workplaces, and our communities?
Democrats Should Never Have Started Paying Ransom
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Robert Reich: Problem is, when you pay ransom once, you’re almost begging to pay it again. And that’s exactly the pickle the Obama administration is finding itself in.
The Jobs Report, and America’s Two Economies
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Robert Reich: With corporate profits are through the roof, the Dow is flirting with 12,000, Wall Street paychecks are fat again, and big corporations are sitting on more than $1 trillion in cash, you’d expect jobs be coming back. But you’d be wrong.
What Does the Vitter-Paul Resolution to Amend the Constitution Solve, Exactly?
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Michele Waslin: In the latest attack on the Constitution and U.S. citizenship, Senators David Vitter (R-LA) and Rand Paul (R-KY) introduced a resolution (S. J. RES. 2) last week proposing an amendment to the constitution to limit citizenship to children born in the U.S.
The Forgotten Jobless and Our Future
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Mark Vorpahl: As in the 1930s, today we must organize in a way that creates unity between the employed and unemployed. To start, we can organize the largest possible union-led demonstrations to realize this unity in the streets.
The American Jobs Emergency Requires Action
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Robert Reich: Not only do we need extended unemployment benefits. We need a new WPA, modeled after the WPA of the Great Depression, to put jobless Americans to work. We need a national infrastructure bank to rebuild our crumbling highways and water and sewer systems, thereby putting additional people back to work.
Who Is Behind the Deficit Crisis
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Shamus Cooke: Unless labor and community groups massively mobilize working people in fighting for a pro-worker solution to the deficit crisis, austerity measures — like reducing Social Security and Medicare — will be forced upon us.
Unless Congress Acts, A Bleak Holiday Season for Millions
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Carl Bloice: If Congress does not vote over the next week and a half to re-authorize federal unemployment benefits through next year, before they expire November 30, nearly 2 million women and men and their families will face a dismal holiday season.
Happy Election Day!
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Steve Hochstadt: Republicans and Democrats agree on little else, but that this will be a transformative year for our national politics. After saying that, I wish that they both would offer me more about how my family’s life, my community, my country will be better
Meg Whitman, Job Killer
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Craig Williams: The countless ads by Whitman in the current California gubernatorial race lead most people to believe that she’s been creating lots of jobs. But when you take a close look at what her company EBAY actually does, on balance she may well be the jobs killer.
Democrats or Republications: Who Will Be “The Biggest Loser” This November?
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Anthony Samad: With no real “new ideas” to combat a recovering economy, all Republicans have to bash is President Obama, who is really more popular than polls indicate because polls don’t really survey his base.
Recession Is Over! (If You Want It)
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Joseph Palermo: The National Bureau of Economic Research tells us the Great Recession is “over.” The only thing this announcement reveals is just how out of touch and compassionless those who view human society through the lens of quantitative measurements can be.
Of Course Poverty Is On the Rise In Charles Dickens’ America
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David Love: That anyone can actually utter the words “the recession is over” at a time of mass unemployment, foreclosures, homelessness and general despair tells you all you need to know about America. The nation actually exists as two nations: the few that have, and the many who don’t.
Frog Economy?—A Reaction to Professor Reich’s Tortoise Economy
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Bob Letcher: The workforce has become as dilapidated as the proverbial rust-belt factory. It took a long time for us all to get us all into this mess, and it’s going to take at least as long for us all to work ourselves back out of it
The Tortoise Economy
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Robert Reich: The rich don’t spend nearly as much of their incomes as everyone else, and the $36 billion windfall they’d otherwise get could be better spent saving the jobs of teachers, fire fighters, and police officers who do spend almost all their incomes.
Financial Depression Spreads Among Seniors
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Sherwood Ross: President Obama has U.S. taxpayers paying billions to meet the costly payrolls of 50,000 troops and 190,000 contractors in Iraq while 20-million-plus jobless are looking for work in USA and can’t find it.
The Stock Market Rally Versus the World’s Economic Fundamentals
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Robert Reich: The real economy is jobs and paychecks, what people buy and what they sell. And the real economy — even viewed from a worldwide perspective — is as precarious as ever, perhaps more so.
Obama’s Delusions: The Economy and Iraq
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Shamus Cooke: The hundreds of billions of dollars that Obama will use to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan could just as easily go to create jobs in the United States: public works could be financed by the government, as they were during the last Depression, that directly create jobs.
Why Growth Is Good
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Robert Reich: If governments keep hacking away at their budgets while consumers almost everywhere are becoming more cautious about spending, global demand will shrink to the point where a worldwide dip is inevitable.
Forget Double Dip: We’re Still in One Long Big Dipper
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Robert Reich: It’s nonsense to think of the economy heading downward again into a double dip when most Americans never emerged from the first dip. We’re still in one long Big Dipper.
The Great Decoupling of Corporate Profits from Jobs
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Robert Reich: Higher corporate profits no longer lead to higher employment. We’re witnessing a great decoupling of company profits from jobs.
Labor Fights Back for Living Wages, Jobs For All
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Shamus Cooke: Employers are exploiting fears of joblessness by demanding workers take wage cuts and reductions or eliminations in benefits. The millions of unemployed are giving corporations an excuse to slash wages, since desperate workers will work for almost anything.
What Teabaggers Owe Liberals
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Sherwood Ross: Get it straight: the best remedy for what ails America is to pay working people fairly. It is the toil and dollars of the American people that made America great.
The Vanishing American Consumer and the Coming Trade War
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Robert Reich: We’re unlikely to see a repeat of the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariffs that worsened and lengthened the Great Depression. But you can forget trade-opening agreements. In Toronto last week, the G-20 leaders dropped their 2009 pledge to finish the Doha round this year. In the U.S., agreements with South Korea, Panama, and Columbia are languishing.
Jan Brewer, the Sarah Palin of the Desert
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Mario Solis-Marich: Jan Brewer is a lousy Governor. Any objective view of her performance to date indicates that Jan Brewer is the Sarah Palin of the Desert.
Why We Are Moving Toward a Recessionary Era
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Robert Reich: The biggest ongoing threats are chronic recession or even deflation, because consumers don’t have enough money to what the economy is capable of selling at full or near-full employment. Despite gains in productivity, little has trickled down to America’s middle class.
Why Main Street Isn’t Getting Any Better
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Robert Reich: Americans have no choice but to pare back their debt. That’s bad news because consumer spending is 70 percent of the economy. It helps explain why we so few jobs are being created, and why we can’t escape the gravitational pull of the Great Recession without far more government spending.
Friday’s Job Numbers: What They Won’t Tell Us About America’s Growing Anxious Class
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Robert Reich: New businesses are vital to job growth, and entrepreneurship does fuel the economy. And surely some of America’s new independent workers will build their own companies. But when the economy is still so hard on so many, it’s important to distinguish between entrepreneurial zeal and self-employed desperation.
Bush Recession Comes Home to Roost
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Adam Eran: Tax cuts caused the current budget deficit, not crazy spending. Local government revenues fell 57% after Proposition 13. Even more egregious, the consume-atives™ (they do not conserve), now complain that State funding for local governments to fill that revenue hole meddles too much in local affairs.
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