Media

(NEW YORK) – Today, the Senate voted to put an end to one aspect of Washington’s gridlock by changing the rules governing the use of the filibuster for executive-branch appointees and most judicial nominations. Senate Republicans most recently filibustered three qualified judicial nominations to the bench of the D.C. Circuit Court. Demos President Miles Rapoport issued the following statement:

Remember President Obama's big proposal to streamline how the federal government promotes business and trade? No, you probably don't. That's because the proposal disappeared without a trace last year after meeting resistance from various powers that be and getting forgotten by the very president who offered it. Welcome to the dispiriting world of government reform.

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.

Walmart can easily afford to raise pay for its low-wage workers by $5.83 an hour, to an average wage of $14.89, a new report from progressive think tank Demos concludes. All the retail giant has to do is stop its massive stock buybacks—which only serve to enrich a shrinking pool of shareholders, not to improve productivity—and put that money toward its workers.

Walmart spends $7.6 billion a year buying back shares of its own stock:

So it turns out that Walmart could afford to give its workers a nice raise without jacking prices if it simply redirected profits now used to buy back its own stock to better reward its huge labor force -- the people, by the way, who make the profits possible. This is the finding of a Demos report published yesterday, one that echoes our earlier report on retail wages. 

Wal-Mart could afford to hike every U.S. employee’s hourly wage to at least $14.89 an hour just by not repurchasing its own stock, according to a new report from the progressive think tank Demos.

The 2007 economic crisis and the lingering stagnation it wrought has led economists, philosophers and policymakers to a profound rethinking of how we measure economic performance and social progress. As Joseph E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi write in the forward to their book, Mismeasuring Our Lives, during the run-up to the 2007 crisis, “the seemingly strong performance of some countries prior to the crisis (as predicted by GDP) was not sustainable and was based on “bubble” prices that exaggerated profits and output.”

Walmart, enmeshed in a debate over low wages highlighted by a food drive for employees at a Canton store, can significantly raise the salaries of sales clerks and other workers without having to find additional money for the pay hikes, says a research brief by a think tank.