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Full Employment And Path To Shared Prosperity

There are many policies that can reduce inequality, but there is none as straightforward conceptually and as difficult politically as full employment. The basic point is simple: at low rates of unemployment, the demand for labor allows workers at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution to achieve gains in hourly wages, annual hours of work, and thus income. Levels of unemployment are not the gift or curse of the gods; they are the result of conscious economic policy. The decision to tolerate high rates of unemployment is a choice. It is one that has enor-mous implications not just for the millions of people who are needlessly unemployed or underemployed but also for tens of millions of workers in the bottom half of the wage distribution whose bar-gaining power is undermined by high unemployment.

Americans Without Rights

Over sixty five million people in the US, perhaps a fifth of our sisters and brothers, are not enjoying the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” promised when the Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 4, 1776. They are about twenty percent of our US population. This July 4 can be an opportunity to remember them and rededicate ourselves and our country to making these promises real for all people in the US. More than two million people are in our jails and prisons making the US the world leader in incarceration, according to the Sentencing Project, a 500% increase in the last 30 years. Four million more people are on probation and parole, reports the US Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Stop Persecuting Bowe Bergdahl

When you go through the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) School there are a number of things that are literally beaten into you. You are hit in the face and slammed against walls. Rifle butts and barrels strike you in the head. You are placed in small wooden boxes and deprived of food and sleep, and some of you are water-boarded (yes, it is torture). But the most important and beneficial aspects of the training are the psychological pressures and forces you are subjected to. You are taught what you should expect and what it is you should do to mentally survive captivity as a prisoner of war. You learn through practice to depend on your fellow prisoners and, most importantly, to hold fast in your faith and the knowledge your country will never forget you and the United States will always come for you.

Climate Action Could Deliver 48 Million Jobs

LONDON: A new international campaign, Unions4Climate action, has been launched at the World Congress of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) this week. The movement aims to draw attention to the potential of the low carbon economy, with a focus on green job creation. More than 50 trade unions across the globe are demanding that governments deliver an ambitious climate agreement at the UNFCCC 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris next year. The international gathering is the deadline for determining the post 2020 climate framework and widely recognized as a crucial meeting for delivering meaningful climate action. Józef Niemiec, Deputy General Secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), commented: “The ETUC urges governments to agree to an ambitious and legally binding agreement in Paris next year. A global framework, built on common but differentiated responsibilities, is the cornerstone of the just transition we are calling for.” The leaders of the unions involved in the campaign are arguing that acting on climate change will lead to an industrial revolution which will create new jobs for the millions of workers they represent.

Jill Stein On Global Climate Convergence & Green New Deal

Jill Stein was the Green Party's 2012 candidate for President of the United States. She is an organizer, physician, and pioneering environmental-health advocate. She has helped lead initiatives promoting healthy communities, local green economies and stronger democracy - including campaign finance reform, green jobs, racially-just redistricting, and the cleanup of incinerators, coal plants, and toxic-pesticides. She now helps organize the Global Climate Convergence for People, Planet and Peace over Profit, an education and direct action campaign beginning Spring 2014 with an "Earth Day to May Day" wave of action, across the US and beyond. The Convergence provides collaboration across fronts of struggle and national borders to harness the transformative power we already possess as thousands of justice movements, rising up against the global assault on our economy, ecology, peace and democracy.

Solidarity, Occupation, Action: Creating Jobs For The Quiet Revolution

This is not for historians to fact check or to reexamine through a historical lens. This is simply about what is happening right now, in this moment, around the globe, in just a small number of movements. It is a partial response to the question: Is another world really possible? How do you argue with a network? The movements organized within them do not proceed by oppositions. One of the basic characteristics of the network is that no two nodes face each other in contradiction: rather, they are always triangulated by a third, and then a fourth, and then by an indefinite number of others in the web. The movements displace contradictions and operate instead in a kind of alchemy, or sea-change. The flow of the movements transform traditional fixed positions; networks impose their force through a kind of irresistible undertow. An Open Letter to 3.5% of You If you are reading this, or in the case of the author here, writing this, we are all inclusively participating 100% in society. We have a lot in common, you and I, and yet we are all as unique as we are individual. Research of hundreds of resistance movements shows that no resistance movement in the last 100 years has failed when 3.5 percent of the population participates.

A May Day 2014 Lament For American Labor

Today, May 1, 2014, is International Labor Day. It is worth summing up how well American workers—and their unions—have fared over the past year; since the so-called economic recovery began in mid-2009; and for the recent decades preceding. What’s happened to jobs, wages and incomes, health and retirement security, and other indicators of the quality of life for the more than 100 million non-supervisory wage and salary earners—the core of the working class in America—over the past decade and especially since 2009? What a summary of the facts tell us is as follows: *While jobs have been created for managers, supervisors, and highly skilled business and technical professionals since 2009, job levels for the core of the American working class—the category of the more than 100 million ‘Production & Non-Supervisory Workers’—is still 11 million below 2007 pre-recession levels. Manufacturing jobs are still 1.4 million fewer today than in 2007, and Construction jobs 1.3 million fewer.

Let Them Eat Symbols: Obama’s Plan For Long-Term Unemployed

Today the principle strategic challenge for U.S. radicalism is grounded in the question of whether or not the left can overcome its’ ideological and organizational fragmentation in order to develop a counter-narrative and a minimum program of opposition to neoliberalism. It is clear that without uncompromisingly radical organizations and a language of opposition that pierces the ideological fog that obscures the class bias of the state and state policies, working people and the poor will continue to be marginalized, ignored and eventually disappeared as they fall through the gaping holes in the social safety net. This is already happening to African Americans in places like Detroit, the South Side of Chicago and other parts of the country as a result of their new status as an economically “redundant” population.

Where Is Labor’s Opposition To Cuts In Food Stamps, Unemployment?

On January 29, by a 251-166 margin, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to cut food stamp funding by $8.6 billion over a 10-year period. 89 Democrats joined 162 Republicans to bring about this result. "They are gutting a program to provide food for hungry people to pay for corporate welfare," said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York Coalition Against Hunger. Anti-hunger advocates like Berg say crop insurance expansion would come at the expense of millions of people who depend on food stamps. "This vote is a tragic, heartless and economically counterproductive departure from America's bipartisan history of fighting hunger," Berg said. "Members of Congress who voted for this should be ashamed."

Obama And Friends Discover Inequality

More recent, damning revelations about the extent of growing inequality go back to 2002 at least—long before the politicians and the more well known liberal economists acknowledged it. In 2002 University of California, Berkeley economist, Emmanuel Saez, began publishing his analyses of IRS income data, since all pre-existing sources of income inequality by the government and business more or less obfuscated the true picture. Saez has updated his ground-breaking results periodically ever since. Most of what is reported and published about the income gains of the wealthiest 1% are from his researches. This writer relied heavily on Saez’s data in his 2004 book, ‘The War At Home: The Corporate Offensive From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush’, which attempted to identify the various policies since the late 1970s that have been largely responsible for the inequality shift that Saez so well documented in 2002.

Baltimore Algebra Project Needs Help To Close Gap

Apathetic. Oblivious. Uneducated. Lazy. Irresponsible. Materialistic. Apolitical. THAT'S NOT US!! We are Conscious. Political. Passionate. Persistent. Challenging. Effective. We are The Baltimore Algebra Project. We are youth-run. We are entrepreneurs. We are activist. We are democratic. We run our own non-profit. The Baltimore Algebra Project up-ends expectations. We have paid youth like ourselves more than $2 million in wages for math tutoring and student advocacy in the last 10 years. WE NEED YOUR HELP!

PHOTOESSAY: Banners Dropped On US Trade Office, Stop The TPP

Photographer and editor Ellen Davidson tells the story of the banner drop at the office of the US Trade Representative on Monday, Sept. 23. The banner drop followed the Stop Fast Track Action Camp and was done to protest and expose the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership that is nearing the end of negotiations. The TPP is an agreement that provides a back door to the stalled WTO agenda. Unlike past trade agreements, the text of the TPP has been classified as secret. More than 600 corporate advisers have live time access to the text as it is being negotiated while members of Congress have restricted access, the media has been on a virtual blackout about it and the public only knows what has been leaked and what industry groups are reporting. President Obama has requested Fast Track from Congress which allow him to sign the agreement and later send it to Congress for an up or down vote.

Don’t Take our Post Office Away: Saving the US Postal Service with Jim Sauber

Economist Jim Sauber who serves as Chief of Staff to the President of the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC)
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