Editor's note: Richard Trumka is president of the AFL-CIO. Christine Owens is executive director of the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group for lower-wage workers.
The sad truth is that the rewards for productivity and hard work such as health care coverage, retirement security, opportunity — rewards that used to make America's workers “middle class” — are on the rocks.
All the wage increases over the past 15 years have gone to the wealthiest 10%, according to the Economic Policy Institute. All of them. And almost all, 95%, of the income gains from 2009 to 2012, the first three years of recovery from the Great Recession, went to the very richest 1%.
Something else has happened, too. The bottom has fallen out of America's wage floor. And the erosion of the minimum wage has lowered pay and working standards for all of us.
This week, America will kick off the sixth holiday-shopping season since the economy melted down in 2008. As everyone sits down to be thankful Thursday, too many people are still struggling to recover. Here’s a free-market way that everyone can show their concern about inequality: Don’t shop on Thanksgiving.
More than half a decade on, we’re still missing 976,000 jobs — and we’re missing 12 million jobs if you figure that jobs should grow as the population grows.
But it’s one thing to be economically afraid. It’s another to be cut off from fully celebrating America’s all-race, all-religion family holiday because you and your fellow Americans are fearful economically.
That’s what’s happening to millions of retail workers who’ve had to work on Thanksgiving for the past half-decade.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics and University Professor at Columbia University, was Chairman of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and served as Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. His most recent book is The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers our Future.
NEW YORK – International investment agreements are once again in the news. The United States is trying to impose a strong investment pact within the two big so-called “partnership” agreements, one bridging the Atlantic, the other the Pacific, that are now being negotiated. But there is growing opposition to such moves.
South Africa has decided to stop the automatic renewal of investment agreements that it signed in the early post-apartheid period, and has announced that some will be terminated. Ecuador and Venezuela have already terminated theirs. India says that it will sign an investment agreement with the US only if the dispute-resolution mechanism is changed. For its part, Brazil has never had one at all.
There is good reason for the resistance. Even in the US, labor unions and environmental, health, development, and other nongovernmental organizations have objected to the agreements that the US is proposing.
Monbiot: Corporate New World Order Dictatorship Close to Implementation, Democracy and Law for Ordinary People Nearly Dead
It's coming together piece by major piece for the Elite's plans of absolute and total world domination: imposition of GMO food and many toxic substance for human consumption, covert eugenics via not only food and water, but constant aerial spraying and massive and on-going vaccines of numerous types, a vastly increasedand efficient surveillance and military control infrastructure imposed at a maniacally rapid tempo, the destruction of net neutrality and thereby guaranteeing control and closing down of almost all independent information flows on the Internet, and now, as seen so clearly in this article by Monbiot, the forced imminent world-wide imposition of a legal structure that will remove all protections from services and products that cause wide-spread disease in humans and all other living beings and toxify the entire planet and also cause immense cultural and economic dislocation for 50%-99% of all people. In short, as Monbiot says, this major piece will create, “as the Democracy Centre says…”a privatised justice system for global corporations”. This initiative will be key to utterly circumventing virtually ALL citizen-based efforts at protecting itself medically, politically, legally and economically, a citizenry which will be much reduced or weakened by covert eugenics, and those remaining who are not weakened, will be radically coerced and controlled by the military/police state.
The unprecedented Saudi refusal to take up its Security Council seat is not just about Syria but a response to the Iranian threat
The Muslim world’s historic – and deeply tragic – chasm between Sunni and Shia Islam is having worldwide repercussions. Syria’s civil war, America’s craven alliance with the Sunni Gulf autocracies, and Sunni (as well as Israeli) suspicions of Shia Iran are affecting even the work of the United Nations.
Saudi Arabia’s petulant refusal last week to take its place among non-voting members of the Security Council, an unprecedented step by any UN member, was intended to express the dictatorial monarchy’s displeasure with Washington’s refusal to bomb Syria after the use of chemical weapons in Damascus – but it also represented Saudi fears that Barack Obama might respond to Iranian overtures for better relations with the West.
The Saudi head of intelligence, Prince Bandar bin Sultan – a true buddy of President George W Bush during his 22 years as ambassador in Washington – has now rattled his tin drum to warn the Americans that Saudi Arabia will make a “major shift” in its relations with the US, not just because of its failure to attack Syria but for its inability to produce a fair Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.
What this “major shift” might be – save for the usual Saudi hot air about its independence from US foreign policy – was a secret that the prince kept to himself.
Israel, of course, never loses an opportunity to publicise – quite accurately – how closely many of its Middle East policies now coincide with those of the wealthy potentates of the Arab Gulf.
Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.
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Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.
The findings come as President Obama tries to renew his administration’s emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to “rebuild ladders of opportunity” and reverse income inequality.
As nonwhites approach a numerical majority in the U.S., one question is how public programs to lift the disadvantaged should be best focused — on the affirmative action that historically has tried to eliminate the racial barriers seen as the major impediment to economic equality, or simply on improving socioeconomic status for all, regardless of race.
The American economic crisis of the 21st century is becoming worse. Wall Street and the multinational US corporations have offshored millions of US jobs that provided middle class incomes. Americans who lost these jobs have experienced dramatic reductions in their incomes and access to medical care. They have used up their savings and now have to sell parts of their bodies for money. This crisis will worsen as the American economic collapse proceeds. Income and wealth are concentrated in the hands of a few oligarchs, with 400 families having as much wealth as 150,000,000 Americans. Bloomberg is wrong about “the four-year-old economic expansion.” The alleged recovery is a product of statistical manipulation, as John Williams (shadowstats.com) has made clear.
Hair, breast milk and eggs are doubling as automated teller machines for some cash-strapped Americans such as April Hare. Out of work for more than two years and facing eviction from her home, Hare recalled Louisa May Alcott’s 19th-century novel and took to her computer.
“I was just trying to find ways to make money, and I remembered Jo from ‘Little Women,’ and she sold her hair,” the 35-year-old from Atlanta said. “I’ve always had lots of hair, but this is the first time I’ve actually had the idea to sell it because I’m in a really tight jam right now.”
The mother of two posted pictures of her 18-inch auburn mane on www.buyandsellhair.com, asking at least $1,000 and receiving responses within hours. Hare, who also considered selling her breast milk, joins others exploring unconventional ways to make ends meet as the four-year-old economic expansion struggles to invigorate the labor market and stimulate incomes.
In all but two quarters since the beginning of 2011, “hair,” “eggs,” or “kidney” have been among the top four autofill results for the Google search query, “I want to sell my…,” according to Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at New York-based ConvergEx Group, which provides brokerage and trading-related services for institutional investors. While Americans can legally sell hair, breast milk and eggs, the sale and purchase of a kidney in the U.S. is against the law.
“The fact that people even explore it indicates that there are still a lot of people worried about their financial outlook,” said Colas, who tracks off-the-grid economic indicators. “This is very much unlike every other recovery that we’ve had. It’s going to be a slow-grinding, very frustrating recovery.”
