Media

Does $9.04 an hour sound like a lot of money to you? Probably not. But it's a $1.79 more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 and, starting January 1, $9.04 be the new minimum wage in Washington State.

Seven other states will also be raising their minimum wages on January 1. As the Economic Policy Insitute reports:

Lots of us hate Christmas shopping, so it's nice to have some moral support for these Grinch-like sentiments from an organized campaign called Buy Nothing Christmas. This group has lots of ideas about how to celebrate Christmas without a pile of Chinese-made presents that, chances are, the recipents don't even want.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who calls himself “America’s toughest Sheriff”, claims that harassing Latino immigrants is good for America. His actions, however, are pretty far from what America is all about.

How long do working mothers stay home after having their first child? If you guessed the answer might be 12 weeks (not an unreasonable assumption, since that’s the amount of time allotted by our national family leave law), you’d be sadly mistaken. According to recently released census numbers, a majority of mothers who worked during pregnancy go back before that, some way before. More than a quarter are at work within two months of giving birth and one in 10—more than half a million women each year—go back to their jobs in four weeks or less.

We are at a crossroads: do we choose economic growth or environmental sustainability?

Not two weeks after September 11, 2001, when the stock market was still all over the map and plans for and unfunded war in the offing, President Bush famously told Americans to "[d]o your business around the country" and

Multinational corporations have pushing hard over the last year for a repatriation tax holiday that would allow them to bring foreign profits back to the U.S. at a very low tax rate. They argue that such a giveaway would be a boon to the economy because those accrued profits -- over $1 trillion -- are now "trapped" overseas and can't be used for productive purposes here in the United States.