Media

Modest Pension Benefits Play Little Role in Financial Crisis

DETROIT — In their push for bankruptcy, Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr and other public figures are incorrectly looking at Detroit’s long-term debt—figures generated using aggressive and in some cases inaccurate assumptions—to the detriment of solving the City’s immediate cash-flow crisis and its long-term structural challenges, according to a report released Wednesday by Demos.

They just don’t want to let President Obama govern. That conclusion is hard to avoid after the last few months of shutdowns, threats, and now unprecedented obstruction in the Senate that culminated in the third filibuster in three weeks of President Obama’s judicial nominees.

As usual, comedian Stephen Colbert hit the nail on the head. “Walmart is taking care of its employees... Not living wage care, but can of peas care.” The late-night satirist was responding to a Cleveland Plain Dealer article finding that Walmart set up a Thanksgiving food drive to benefit its own needy employees.

“We are on strike today to have respect and dignity at work,” says Walter Melendez, one of approximately 40 Los Angeles port truck drivers who walked off the job at 5a.m. morning in protest of alleged unfair labor practices. The strikes featured the rolling “ambulatory pickets” that the truckers have excelled at—chasing down trucks as they leave the port and setting up picket lines in front of them.

In the past week, both a senior editor at Fortune magazine and the liberal think tank Demos have made similar proposals for how Walmart could greatly increase worker wages without harming its business prospects.

Today is World Toilet Day, which strikes me as a good moment to reflect on how government can radically improve people's daily lives.

We need to restore the positive concept of public goods that existed decades ago.

A historic $13 billion settlement is in the works between the federal government and JP Morgan -- the biggest-ever penalty for wrongdoing by a bank. 

But this settlement is unlikely to deter tomorrow's lawbreakers in finance, and here's why. 

A new brief by the national public policy organization Demos analyzes one way Walmart can raise worker pay to meet employees’ $25,000 benchmark target. A Higher Wage is Possible: How Walmart Can Invest in Its Workforce Without Costing Customers a Dime details how Walmart can give workers a raise by redirecting the funds spent annually on buying back shares of Walmart’s own company stock.