Economic Injustice

    By Sean Illing Vox (6/30/18) Robert Wuthnow, a sociologist at Princeton University, spent eight years interviewing Americans in small towns across the country. He had one goal: to understand why rural America is so angry with Washington. Wuthnow’s work resulted in a new book, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America. He argues that rural Americans are less concerned about economic issues and more concerned about Washington threatening the social fabric of small towns and causing a “moral decline” in the country as a whole. The problem, though, is that it’s never quite clear what that means or…

  Morning Edition / NPR (12/2/18) Miami Herald reporter Julie Brown discusses her investigative report on hedge fund manager Jeffrey Epstein, who sexually abused dozens of teenage girls but served only 13 months in a county jail. Link to Story and 5+-Minute Audio ***** Bombshell Investigation Reveals How Trump’s Secretary Of Labor Helped Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein Hide His Many Sex Crimes By Travis Getty The Raw Story (11/28/18) President Donald Trump’s secretary of labor struck a highly unusual deal when he was Miami’s top federal prosecutor to go easy on the well-connected multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein — and keep his sex crimes…

George W. Bush Started An Immoral War And Is Receiving The Now Besmirched ‘Liberty Medal’ By Will Bunch Philly.com (11/8/18) At least the timing is exquisite. Former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, are coming to Philadelphia on Sunday night to receive the National Constitution Center’s much-ballyhooed Liberty Medal, which is supposed to be earmarked for leaders “who have strived to secure the blessings of liberty to people around the globe.” This Veterans Day also marks the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I — the massive and utterly pointless global conflagration that killed tens of millions and alienated an…

  It’s our addiction to cheap goods and services that is, indirectly, putting these men into slavery. Assignment / BBC (11/17/18) Modern slaves are all around us and many of them are men. They work in factories and private homes, unseen and unheard. Zita Adamson tells the stories of some of these men as they arrive at the UK’s first safe house for male victims of modern slavery. She spent a year recording at the safe house, talking to men like Mo who ran away from a refugee camp in Bangladesh, only to be trafficked to London as a domestic…

    TED Talk (12/20/13) It’s amazing what a rigged game of Monopoly can reveal. In this entertaining but sobering talk, social psychologist Paul Piff shares his research into how people behave when they feel wealthy. (Hint: badly.) But while the problem of inequality is a complex and daunting challenge, there’s good news too. Link to 16-Minute Video

I was visited by a plumber repairing my heat registers. A typical blue collar guy with a full Boston accent. Intelligent, lucid and angry as hell. He brought up Trump I did not. It began by his explaining the crap pipes he has had to work with since NAFTA. In some detail he told a set of stories about how the pipes and boilers from China have ruined his business. He talked about how just removing a bolt or nut from a pipe ends up in broken pipe, destroyed threads and how boilers now give out so quickly. He talked…

  By Jim Pugh In These Times (9/28/18) In late August, the People’s Policy Project, a left-wing think tank run by economist and writer Matt Bruenig, released a proposal for the creation of a social wealth fund in the United States. Dubbed the American Solidarity Fund, the idea behind the proposal is to establish a pool of shared, public wealth that would be invested in the same way that private wealth is. Under this plan, every American adult would own a single “share” of the fund, and while no single person would be able to withdraw their share, they would receive…

  By Arwa Mahdawi The Guardian (10/5/18) If you are very clever and work very hard, you can achieve anything. We know this because successful people are always telling us so. They got where they are because of their work ethic: rich parents, the right connections and random chance had little to do with it. See, as exhibit one, man of the moment Brett Kavanaugh. You know, the judge who really likes beer and seems to hate women having autonomy over their reproductive systems. When Kavanaugh appeared before a committee to defend himself against accusations of sexual assault, in between sniffles he…

  By Libby Watson Splinter News (8/27/18) A new study by the Urban Institute published Tuesday found that 40 percent of Americans can’t meet at least one basic need—food, healthcare, housing, or utilities—even as the economy approaches nearly full employment with only a 4.4 percent unemployment rate. Remember this as the president boasts about the stock market, as he does frequently, without realizing it’s an indictment of his policies: The people the president cares about are making obscene amounts of cash while the rest of America is falling behind. The findings in the study reveal how widespread the struggle to meet basic needs is among Americans. Sixty…

  Democracy Now! (8/29/18) As the school year begins this week across the United States, the top student loan watchdog has resigned in protest, accusing the Trump administration of siding with powerful predatory lenders over student loan borrowers. Seth Frotman worked as student loan ombudsman under the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director, Mick Mulvaney. He wrote that under Mulvaney’s leadership, “the Bureau has abandoned the very consumers it is tasked by Congress with protecting.” This comes as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has proposed new rules that would cut an estimated $13 billion in federal student loan relief for people defrauded…

By Jake Johnson Common Dreams (8/28/18) If you are one of the thousands of Amazon employees who has been forced to rely on federal assistance programs like food stamps and Medicaid to survive because CEO Jeff Bezos—the richest man in the world—refuses to pay a living wage or provide adequate benefits, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wants to hear your story. Just days after announcing his plan to introduce legislation that would force Amazon and other large American corporations to “get off welfare” and pay a 100 percent tax on the public assistance their low-paid workers receive, Sanders put out a call on Monday for current or former…

  Apple’s business model rests on low wage-labor in China and gouging iPhone consumers in the U.S.  By Ralph Nader RalphNaderBlog (8/7/18) The New York Times screamed its Headline— “In 1997, Apple was 90 Days from Going Broke. On Thursday [Aug. 2, 2018], It Became the first publicly traded American company to be valued at…$1,000,000,000,000.” The first trillion dollar company! The boosters and commentators cheered, adding, “How High Could it Go?” In CEO’s Tim Cook’s announcement, we learned that there were $20 billion more of the shareholders money spent on wasteful stock buybacks. Stock buybacks enable fatter compensation metrics for Apple’s bosses (see Steven…

  By John M. Repp Common Dreams (6/15/18) Philip Alston is the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. He traveled to the United States last December to some of our most destitute communities such as Skid Row in LA, poor African American areas in the Alabama, impoverished coal communities in West Virginia and to Puerto Rico. He issued his report on June 1, 2018. It should be front page news. The report is a terrible indictment of our country and of the Trump Administration. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize winning economist told The Guardian“This administration inherited a bad situation with…

  Wisconsin Democracy Campaign (6/13/18) Owners and employees from about two dozen companies that received corporate welfare from the state in 2017 have contributed more than $800,000 to Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign. These companies were among the 59 businesses that were awarded nearly $3 billion in economic development tax credits and loans last year by the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. The giveaways were made so the companies would either locate or expand their operations in the state. Most of the recipients, 50 of 59 (or 85 percent), were businesses already located in Wisconsin. Owners and employees of 25 companies, which…