Media

Airports are doing it. Big retailers are doing it. Cities are getting in on the action too.

If you believe David Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise has a fresh and sweeping vision for saving conservatism from the dustbin of history. That's odd, because when I read the supposedly groundbreaking article in Commentary magazine by AEI's Arthur Brooks about poverty and opportunity, his vision didn't seem so radically new to me.

Detroit's Emergency Manager, Kevyn Orr, has filed a “plan of adjustment” with the court in the largest municipal bankruptcy in history. It includes some troubling news, some hopeful news and leaves out important items that should be known before a final plan for moving forward is settled.

The odds that Republican House Speaker John Boehner will allow a vote on raising the minimum wage remain as low as ever, but some large retailers are already raising the wage on their own initiative. On Wednesday, clothing chain Gap Inc. announced it would be raising its base wage from $9 to $10 per hour next year, directly benefiting as much as 72% of its hourly workforce.

Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would increase the price of a $16 product at Walmart, such as the typical DVD, by just a cent if all of the extra costs were passed on to consumers, according to an analysis by an economist for Bloomberg News. [...]

Last I checked, we lived in a populist moment: Americans deeply distrust large institutions such as government, corporations, and banks. The public's distrust of concentrated power also extends to the news media, with Gallup polling showing that over half of Americans have little or no trust in the media's ability to report news fairly or accurately. Trust in the media actually hit an all-time low in 2012. 

Walmart currently does not support raising the federal minimum wage. However, considering the company's lackluster performance over the past few months, perhaps it's time to take a stand.

The good folks at Demos, led by the redoubtable Liz Kennedy, have produced yet another study, this one outlining strategies to roll back the laws passed out in the country aimed at restricting the franchise of groups of people that conservatives and Republicans would rather not have voting, thank you very much.

Walmart is denying a Bloomberg report that said the nation's largest private employer is considering supporting an increase in the minimum wage.

"We are not at all considering this," Walmart spokesman David Tovar told The Huffington Post Wednesday afternoon, just after Bloomberg published the story. [...]