President Obama met with the nation’s top financial regulators last week, to urge for rulings associated with the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform law passed more than three years ago. It was the first time the president convened a sit down with each regulator since 2011.
According to a White House statement, Obama “stressed the need to expeditiously finish implementing the critical remaining portions of Wall Street Reform to ensure we are able to prevent the type of financial harm that lead to the Great Recession from ever happening again.” [...]
Fast food workers in over 50 cities across the nation are striking on Thursday in what organizers are touting as the largest ever strike to hit the industry.
The workers are demanding $15 an hour and the right to unionize, continuing the calls and momentum of a series of strikes that first started in November of 2012.
Fast food companies keep employees at poverty-level wages while reaping billions of dollars in profits. It drives inequality, slows growth, and lowers living standards.
If I were a top executive in the retail or restaurant industries, or one of their hired guns in Washington, I'd be very nervous right now.
Tomorrow will see what may be the first-ever national strike against restaurant and retail chains, with workers expected to walk off the jobs in 35 cities -- including at retail giants like Sears, Macy's, and Walmart.
As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs today, it is remarkable to note how the challenges faced by activists 50 years ago are so similar to those we face today. But instead of being deflated by this reality, and progress has been made for sure, this anniversary is an invaluable reminder of how change can be made.
Long after he left the governorship of Alabama, George Wallace -- the leading segregationist of the Jim Crow era -- apologized and repented for his racism. Among the statements he regretted was his famous vow in his 1963 inaugural address: "segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."
It was Wallace's escalation of the civil rights battle in 1963, among other things, that brought 200,000 marchers to Washington.
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, an event usually associated with the fight for civil rights and integration, but one that also put economic opportunity and equality at its forefront. As a historian, I know we enjoy stories of change over time. Some insist we can’t have history without it. Thus, it seems fitting to ask: what has changed in economic inequality for Black America over the last half century?
"Not only the absence of oppression but the presence of opportunity"
In his speech at the Lincoln Memorial the President movingly honored the sacrifice and commitment of the people who marched on Washington fifty years ago today. He was emphatic in noting that the progress has been immense, an accomplishment that belongs not only to the leaders of the movement but the ordinary people who “never appeared in the history books.”
In the spring of 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, to join sanitation workers seeking better pay, fairer treatment and the right to form a union.
I was with Dr. King as he stood with workers, all African-American, all fighting years of labor repression and wages that relegated them to poverty. Dr. King was assassinated on that trip to Memphis. His death, just as the images of workers carrying signs reading, "I am a man," is forever seared in my memory.
If we comparison shop for clothes and cars, why can't we do the same for something as serious as prices for the most common medical procedures? Until very recently, these prices were a closely guarded secret, secluded in a unwieldy, outdated government database that interested researchers had to pay to access. This secrecy has a variety of consequences for all Americans, but particularly the uninsured.
Fifty years after the "dream" of racial equality invoked by Martin Luther King at the March on Washington, the reality is that African-Americans still suffer the most unemployment.
Government statistics show the overall US unemployment rate stood at 7.4 percent in July.
But while whites had a jobless rate of 6.6 percent last month, the rate was nearly double for blacks at 12.6 percent.
By comparison, the Hispanic, or Latino, minority fared better, with 9.1 percent unemployed.
On Friday, Paul Krugman dealt with financial market price bubbles, focusing specifically on emerging markets. He takes on the issue of bubble creation as a result of aggressive Fed loose money policy of the recent past. He correctly points out that the emerging markets situation is really one of a series of bubbles (commercial real estate, Asian securities, dot-com, residential real estate), referred to by George Soros as a “super bubble,” that has roiled through the economy since the 1980s.
If you don't like unions, pray for tight labor markets. Because when labor is scarce, the law of supply and demand raises wages and workers don't have big incentives to unionize. It's when market's aren't tight that unions become a must-have for workers seeking more pay.
That insight explains a lot about the growing wave of fast-food strikes over the past year. The biggest strike yet is scheduled for this Thursday, August 29. These strikes are rapidly becoming the most significant labor activism in years, if not decades.
The Cato Institute came out with a big study recently that argues the familiar point that generous welfare payments undermine incentives to work. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities promptly replied with a four-page paper rebutting key aspects of the report.
Right now, eager 18-year-olds from across the country are tweeting with bravado photos of their newly postered dorm rooms and scanning with private fear their freshmen class schedules. They're embarking on a journey to capture their piece of the American Dream.
You know the drill — we have a dysfunctional political system and a gridlocked Congress. The House is firmly in the grip of a band of Republican maniacs and the Senate, though technically Democratic, requires a virtually impossible filibuster-proof majority to get anything passed.
So we should just throw up our hands and admit that nothing productive can be done in Washington until we get a Democratic Congress, right?
On the eve of a march to commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, labor and civil rights activists are calling on President Barack Obama to honor King with an executive order that would raise wages for as many as two million workers.
One of the most poignant calls came Wednesday from Alvin Turner, a veteran of the famous 1968 Memphis garbage workers strike. Recalling a recent face-to-face meeting with Obama, Turner said “he told me personally he was working hard for the little man. If he don’t sign, he’ll disappoint me badly.”
While the official anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom isn’t until Wed, August 28th, a rally will be held this Saturday, August 24th at the Lincoln Memorial starting at 8 a.m. The rally will be followed by a march to the Martin Luther King memorial. Saturday’s rally is part of a week-long lead up to the 50th anniversary march.
