This week, New York Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos dashed any hope workers advocates had for a minimum wage increase this year. He released a letter that essentially called a minimum wage increase non-negotiable issue for his members.
By now it's pretty clear that Mitt Romney's recent claim about female job losses during the Obama presidency has more to do with selective number fudging and electoral pandering than factual accuracy.
States are spending less money on public colleges than they did in the past. According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, adjusted for inflation, state support for public colleges and universities has fallen by about 26 percent per full-time student in the last 20 years.
Adjusted for inflation, state support for each full-time public-college student declined by 26.1 percent from 1990 to 2010, forcing students and their families to shoulder more of the cost of higher education at a time when family incomes were largely stagnant, according to a report released on Monday by the think tank Demos.
Though President Obama used the event to declare that “women are not a voting bloc,” it’s clear that the White House had the election in mind when it released a new report Friday on women and girls.
When the banking system reached the precipice of a total collapse in 2008, the U.S. government bailed it out with direct cash infusions as well as a system rigged to allow the banks to “earn” their way out of the mess. They were allowed to borrow for nothing and the Fed jacked up returns on invested reserves.
Corporate accountability campaigns are gaining steam and already racking up victories.This week has seen several stunning victories for direct citizen action. On Wednesday, Coca-cola renounced its membership on the private enterprise board of ALEC, stating that:
Here we go again. Another round of the game we call Congressional Creep. After months of haggling and debate, Congress finally passes reform legislation to fix a serious rupture in the body politic, and the president signs it into law. But the fight’s just begun, because the special interests immediately set out to win back what they lost when the reform became law.
Whenever oil prices increase and the trip to the pump becomes noticeably more painful, the mantra is repeated over and again: prices are set by supply and demand and the only remedy is to change that relationship.
The right trots out its favorite slogan, “drill baby drill,” to the undoubted delight of the oil companies. This line of discussion conflates market pricing with energy independence, usually employing the metaphor of a U.S. president bowing to a Saudi prince with unmanly obsequiousness.
Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney's father George Romney, former chairman of American Motors, on the cover of TIMEMitt Romney famously wrote an op-ed in the New York Times a few years back called, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt
Lucky enough to attend college, I sat in a first-year seminar meant to expose students to a variety of both subject matter and viewpoints. To this day I tell people about two books from that course that changed my life. One of those books was the very first overtly feminist book I ever read, Arlie Hochschild’s The Second Shift. This book transformed how I talked about the world and, thus, how I perceived it and engaged it. I became a feminist because caring was a kind of work which was ubiquitous, undervalued, and gendered and, as such, a matter of justice.
The competing plans proposed by California's Jerry Brown and Molly Munger (both "committed liberals," says the hometown paper) are a rare thing: two distinct visions of how to raise revenue and strengthen essential state programs. Both the governor and Ms. Munger, daughter of the illustrious Berkshire Hathaway Vice-Chairman, advocate raising taxes.
The economic consulting business is experiencing quite a boom. A continuing battle rages between the banks and the public’s interests over implementation of the Volcker Rule provisions of the Dodd-Frank financial sector reform legislation.
One core assumption of political economy, going back to Marx, is that the owners of capital will not do anything that benefit workers unless their hand is forced -- either by labor unions or government. When it comes to who gets what under capitalism, the logic goes, raw power is all that counts.