While the Great Recession started only a few years ago, journalist and playwright Barbara Garson argues that “the trouble actually started decades earlier.”
In a piece for the Los Angeles Times , Garson tells America's workers to do their patriotic duty and ask for a raise.
Workers under the age of 34 face higher unemployment rates than older workers and make up nearly half of the currently unemployed . As student debt continues to build up —exceeding even credit card debt—and wages stagnate or fall for workers with or without a college degree, young workers are accruing less wealth than their parents —perhaps the first time in U.S. history when a generation has failed to do better than its parents. Young workers struggle to find work and often take jobs that are below their education and skill level or bounce from contract to unpaid internship to temp job without the stability of a full-time regular job but with all the long hours and hard work.
In case you missed it, here are some important reads from the past week:
Election Day is behind us now (someone please tell Rep. Allen West [R-Fla.]), and there’s plenty to be happy about. Nov. 6, 2012, brought a wave of victories for working families and the defeat of some seriously scary candidates backed by billionaires and their deep pockets.
America's workers refused to let their voices be silenced by the nearly $1.5 billion in independent spending that poured into the election and nearly every candidate backed by Karl Rove’s Crossroads conglomerate lost. It’s tempting in this atmosphere to say that Citizens United didn’t matter after all, and that unlimited spending isn’t a problem in U.S. politics. But let’s not jump to premature conclusions on the basis of a single election. Karl Rove isn’t going anywhere , and there’s no guarantee the GOP and its billionaires will make the same stupid missteps next time around.
Ladies and gentleman, meet the tax-dodging gazillionaires behind Fix the Debt, a billionaire-funded group of millionaire CEOs trying to take away your retirement security and raise your effective tax rate while lowering their own tax liability .
Fix the Debt bills itself as a “ non-partisan movement to put America on a better fiscal and economic path .” However, the group touts a non-specific tax plan that members are calling “ Simpson-Bowles Plus ,” a plan that cuts Social Security and Medicare benefits, guts tax credits and benefits that many working families rely on, widens tax incentives for corporations to offshore jobs and lowers tax rates for corporations and the wealthy. Basically, it’s a wish list for millionaire CEOs!
A 2007 Boston Globe report on college admissions data that has been making the rounds on Twitter lately reveals that “about 15 percent of freshmen enrolled at America's highly selective colleges are white teens who failed to meet their institutions' minimum admissions standards,” most of whom “are students who gained admission through their ties to people the institution wanted to keep happy, with alumni, donors, faculty members, administrators and politicians topping the list.”
Lately we’ve been talking about the vast amounts of money that the super-wealthy have been pouring into politics with the hope of buying elections for pro-corporations, anti-worker candidates who will further tip the scales of power against working people’s interests.
One of the key front groups for the 1 percent is Crossroads. “Crossroads” is actually multiple groups formed by former GOP operatives Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie, with the shared goal of electing anti-worker candidates. The most important entities within the Crossroads family are American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS .
We’ve been talking a lot lately about the current financial state of play in electoral politics. Despite the mega-finances poured into the current election cycle, working families have more power than they think—power at the polls.
It’s not just the presidential race that’s being flooded with money. Every political race—from your local sheriff to state and local judges to your state governors and legislators —is receiving more donations from an ever greedier financial elite.
Last week, we told you about how mega-donors are drowning out the voices of everyday folks in the presidential campaign. A small handful of people with the deepest of pockets have been shelling out more cash on this election than most of us will even see in our lifetime.
Via The Fix , we see that the Sunlight Foundation has a revealing, shocking analysis . As The Fix summarized, “One-hundredth of one percent of the American public is responsible for one-quarter of all the cash given to political campaigns.”
Some folks have been trying to make political hay with the easy availability of union financial information. As noted in an earlier post , however, The Wall Street Journal’s methodology in “discovering” the levels of labor union spending was fatally flawed and painted a false (and politically advantageous) picture.
And now Steven Law, the president of American Crossroads, a Republican super PAC, is using ridiculous fictions to try to defend the activities of the Karl Rove-backed group, claiming that the hundreds of millions of dollars that American Crossroads will spend on the election will somehow be dwarfed by what unions will spend.
It’s been four years since low-wage workers got a raise. Sign the petition to tell Congress it’s time to raise the minimum wage.
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