Jerome Braun: Lincoln didn’t fear the rich and powerful as much as he wanted to help the poor and helpless. Some have compared Barack Obama to Abraham Lincoln. Would that it be so.
Immigrant Laborers Strengthen American Workforce, Economy
By
Michele Waslin: While immigration restrictionists have long tried to demonize immigrant workers and blame them for high unemployment rates and other economic woes, the facts make it clear that immigrants actually create jobs and businesses and boost the wages of native-born workers.
Protests, Not Parades, This Labor Day
By
Robert Reich: Labor Day is traditionally a time for picnics and parades. But this year is no picnic for American workers, and a protest march would be more appropriate than a parade.
The Right to a Job
By
Herb Engstrom: At this time of TEA Party hysteria, Fox News mendacity, and GOP hypocrisy a government guarantee of universal employment might seem like a radical idea, although it seemed not to be so to Franklin Roosevelt.
Latinos Support Raising Taxes on Wealthy
By
Pilar Marrero: According to our poll, Latino voters are also almost completely opposed to balancing the budget following the formula of the GOP and the Tea Party: only budget cuts.
Obama’s Bold Jobs Bill (Maybe)
By
Robert Reich: A bold jobs plan is also good politics. With more than 25 million Americans looking for full-time jobs, the wages of people with jobs falling, and an economy on the verge of a double dip, the President has to come out fighting on the side of average people.
Inflation — Fighting the Last War
By
Steven Conn: For thirty years inflation has not been a serious threat to the American economy, yet politicians and pundits continually fret about it. The never-ending worry about inflation is like fighting the last war rather than the current one. What’s needed today is a war on unemployment and wage stagnation, not inflation.
Well-To-Do Americans Getting More Benefits than the Poor
By
Sherwood Ross: All the Federal welfare checks, food stamps, and unemployment benefits don’t begin to add up to the more than $1 trillion in indirect tax breaks awarded annually to America’s middle- and upper-classes.
As Food Stamp Numbers Hit Record Highs, Luxury Sales Boom
By
Randy Shaw: While Democrats are not nearly as zealous or extreme in their policy proposals, there is now a bipartisan consensus that budget deficits – not unemployment or poverty – are the nation’s top problem.
Republican Double-Dip: What Must Be Done
By
Robert Reich: Now that we’re slouching toward a double-dip recession, the only hope is voters will tell their members of Congress to stop obsessing about future budget deficits and get to work on the real crisis of unemployment, falling wages, and no growth.
The Costs of War
By
Vijay Prashad: The drain of wealth to the war economy is a massive regressive taxation on the population: the rich who pay a much smaller proportion of their taxes and the corporations are insulated from the costs of war, and indeed some of them benefit from the windfalls of war.
Vicious Cycles: Why Washington Is About to Make the Jobs Crisis Worse
By
Robert Reich: The only way out of the vicious economic cycle is for government to adopt an expansionary fiscal policy — spending more in the short term in order to make up for the shortfall in consumer demand.
Jobs Crisis Is About People’s Lives, Not the Next Election
By
Carl Bloice: If one out of ten people seeking work can’t find any, it follows that the average person has a friend, relative or neighbor amongst them. All she or he has to do is look out the window or answer the phone to be scared.
Social Costs of Rising Unemployment
By
Sy Slavin: While economists and national policymakers discuss economics in coldly statistical terms, research has shown that social costs of economic downturns, particularly rising unemployment rates have personal and social costs not previously discussed.
Mandatory E-Verify Will Not Magically Solve Immigration Woes
By
Michele Waslin: Immigration restrictionists argue that imposing a mandatory employment verification system will ensure that unauthorized workers are not able to get jobs in the U.S. and will choose to leave, leaving millions of jobs wide open for unemployed U.S. citizens. Of course, this ignores the facts.
Why Washington Isn’t Doing Squat About Jobs and Wages
By
Robert Reich: The silence is deafening. While the rest of the nation is heading back toward a double dip, Washington continues to obsess about future budget deficits. Why?
Back Toward Double Dip
By
Robert Reich: The Republican lie that the nation’s long-term budget deficit is responsible for high unemployment would be laughable if it weren’t so tragically irrelevant to the current situation.
Jobs: An Angry Dissent
By
Brent Budowsky: Never before in American history has unemployment been so high, yet neither the president nor Congress pushes for a major jobs bill.
Two Things We Need the NAACP to Do in the Midst of the Current Economic Crisis
By
Bill Fletcher Jr.: The NAACP should consider reaching out to the forces that were involved, some years ago, in the Hip Hop Convention and directly engage them.
Depression, Not Recession Rocks U.S. Ghettos
By
Sherwood Ross: Instead of investing in a framework to help blacks advance by their own initiative, the Federal government has flushed billions down the toilets of friendly foreign strongmen such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarek.
Made in the USA
By
Brent Budowsky: Buy American. Each of us individually and together has the power to lift our land the way previous generations of Americans lifted America to defeat depression, prevail in war and soar to the moon in less than a decade.
Double Dip Here We Come
By
Republicans, for their part, worry that if they tell it like it is Americans will want government to do more rather than less. They’d rather not talk about jobs and wages, and put the focus instead on deficit reduction (or spread the lie that by reducing the deficit we’ll get more jobs and higher wages).
Ray-Ray, Boo, Chico, Pookie and Today’s Political Economy
By
Carl Bloice: ‘The president and his aides know that the G.O.P. approach to the budget is wrongheaded and destructive,” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote March 11. “But they’ve stopped making the case for an alternative approach; instead, they’ve positioned themselves as know-nothings lite, accepting the notion that spending must be slashed immediately – just not as much as Republicans want.
PCL offers monthly Open House Events on the 2nd Saturday at 2pm and 3rd Thursday at 6pm. Click here to learn more.
Where Have All the Jobs Gone?
Judith Stein: If President Obama wants the United States to manufacture again, he must change foreign and domestic priorities. The United States is more committed to maintaining its open market than to providing jobs for Americans.