labor

Cheese Whiz Wisconsin - Do Over Comes Up Short

Submitted by on

cheese whiz
Wisconsin Just Showed Us. You can call a do over on your reactionary votes from 2010. Hate your representative? Completely upset with the jobs crisis, now projected to continue ad infinitum?

Have a recall!

In the largest clustered recall ever, six Wisconsin State Senate Republicans faced a recall election and special interest money poured into the State:

Spending on the nine elections had reached $33 million, most of it from outside special interest groups. Interest group spending has far eclipsed the Wisconsin record of about $20 million set in 2008 elections that covered half the state Senate and all Assembly members.

The fight is over Governor Walker's war against organized labor in Wisconsin, along with his Tea party cohorts. His anti-labor legislation prompted a massive recall effort of State Senators who helped Walker push through his anti-labor agenda. The voter turnout is hitting Presidential election levels.

Why the Rich Love High Unemployment

Originally published in Truth Out


The headquarters of JPMorgan Chase in New York. A JPMorgan research report concludes that the current corporate profit recovery is more dependent on falling unit-labor costs than during any previous expansion.  (Photo: Jessica Ebelhar / The New York Times)

Christina Romer, former member of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisors, accuses the administration of "shamefully ignoring" the unemployed. Paul Krugman echoes her concerns, observing that Washington has lost interest in "the forgotten millions." America's unemployed have been ignored and forgotten, but they are far from superfluous. Over the last two years, out-of-work Americans have played a critical role in helping the richest one percent recover trillions in financial wealth.

Obama's advisers often congratulate themselves for avoiding another Great Depression - an assertion not amenable to serious analysis or debate. A better way to evaluate their claims is to compare the US economy to other rich countries over the last few years. 

On the basis of sustaining economic growth, the United States is doing better than nearly all advanced economies. From the first quarter of 2008 to the end of 2010, US gross domestic product (GDP) growth outperformed every G-7 country except Canada.

But when it comes to jobs, US policymakers fall short of their rosy self-evaluations. Despite the second-highest economic growth, Paul Wiseman of the Associated Press (AP) reports:

The U.S. job market remains the group's weakest. U.S. employment bottomed and started growing again a year ago, but there are still 5.4 percent fewer American jobs than in December 2007. That's a much sharper drop than in any other G-7 country.

Egyptians Revolt - Rubin's Folly and Labor Arbitrage

By Numerian
strikemahala.jpg

The forces of globalization are increasingly and in surprising places and ways under attack. Globalization did not happen by accident; it was the result of policies put in place by people with a particular agenda.

Matt Stoller, a former policy advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson, has posted this morning his insights into the Egyptian Revolution – insights that are quite different from the usual take on these events. They can be found here at the Naked Capitalism blog managed by Yves Smith.

Stoller dismisses the fanciful praise of social networks as a driving force behind the revolution – a story the mainstream media are plugging rigorously. He focuses instead on the participation of young men and women who labor anonymously in the new cheap-labor factory mills set up in Egypt under the direction of Gamal Mubarak, the president’s son and anointed successor. These are the workers who organized the first protests – who responded at great risk to the call for demonstrations, who continued to occupy Tahrir Square despite the provocations from the government, and whose focus on civil liberties was motivated by the repressive police tactics used by the government to enforce the discipline demanded by the mostly-foreign corporations that run the labor mills.

The Case for a V-shaped Jobs Recovery

It is almost universally received wisdom that when the turn comes, we will have a "jobless recovery" where GDP turns up anemically, but unemployment stubbornly rises. Indeed the most controversial notion in some parts of the econoblogosphere is that of the "jobless recovery." as in, can it truly be a "recovery" if the number of jobless Americans continues to increase? Much moreso than dry GDP figures, wages and employment are what matter to the average American. I too have generally accepted the idea that any GDP recovery would be jobless, such that in April I made a graph showing what an unemployment spike will look like if the recession bottoms this summer, but a "jobless recovery" similar to 1991 and 2001 ensues:

The Populist Pub is Open. Let's Talk Worst Case Scenarios!

 

Petit Julien welcomes you back to the Populist Pub.  

Nearly 18 months into this recession, skepticism is growing about what "recovery" might look like. We hear talk of "green shoots" in an economy that is being remade into another bubble economy, this time based on "government finance". Is it really "stimulating" to the real economy to inject massive amounts of liquidity into the financial system? This unprecedented intervention includes Federal Reserve Credit, Treasury borrowings, agency debt, mortgage-backed securities issued by GSEs, as well as increased involvement of the FDIC. The latest estimates of the size of this bubble is around $14 Trillion which, amazingly, dwarfs the mortgage finance bubble it replaces. The question many analysts ask is whether the FED will be able to withdraw liquidity from the system in the proper amounts and at the right time in order to avert the inevitable inflation when it begins. Ironically, the FED will then find itself in the familiar position of being trapped by the risk of bursting another historic bubble!

The Populist Pub is now open.

 

Petit Julien welcomes you back to the Populist Pub.  

Earlier this week, we passed a milestone of sorts. The Obama administration marked its first 100 days in office. In 1933, FDR, facing a full blown depression, made numerous and transformative changes in his first 100 days. Since then, the accomplishments of the first 100 days of every new administration have been symbolically compared. That is, until this year.

On Thursday, Day #101 of the Obama administration, Steve Lendman, author, blogger, radio co-host and activist, who lives in Chicago, wrote an excellent article contrasting the first 100 days of FDR to BHO. This was effectively a follow up to a scathing article he wrote two weeks earlier. In that article, published on April 18th, Steve Lendman was highly critical of the Obama economic team especially. It was provocatively titled Barack Obama: Crime Boss.

The Populist Pub is Now Open

Submitted by on

 

Petit Julien welcomes you back to the Populist Pub.  

As a nation, we are groping for some sense of hope that we are emerging from the economic morass. The ranks of the unemployed continue to swell and millions of working Americans and retirees worry that the economic tsunami may engulf them next. The government has enacted a dizzying array of bailouts and assistance plans aimed at stabilizing the banking industry, thereby clearing a path to recovery in the real economy.

There is plenty of criticism for the government's actions to date, much of which is centered on understanding what brought on the crisis in the first place. Many critics attribute the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 and the 2000 enactment of the Commodities Futures Modernization Act as the impetus for the wreckless financial gambling of the last 8 years. For sure, this is not wrong and various measures of reform are now working their way through the Congressional process.

However, in an excellent article published in the April edition of Harper's Magazine, Thomas Geoghegan argues that we have not focused enough on the big deregulation that precedes all other deregulation. For him it was the day that America changed. His essay is titled: Infinite Debt; How Unlimited Interest Rates Destroyed The Economy.

We Need a Revolution..... A Labor Rights Revolution

Help is on the way. Or so we've been told.

The stimulus legislation also extends the social safety net for those who are already unemployed by extending and improving unemployment benefits.

Under the terms of the deal, laid-off workers are eligible for as much as 33 weeks of extended unemployment benefits, including a $25 increase in weekly benefits.

Pages