Who Actually Benefits From a Higher Minimum Wage?

The facts.

Also--

Bolstering Reconciliation Case, Study Shows $15 Wage Would Boost Federal Budget By $65 Billion

Quote of the Day -- On Labor

Brilliant woman.

“The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all... 

The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands - the ownership and control of their livelihoods - are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.”

― Helen Keller, Rebel Lives: Helen Keller

Links:

Helen Keller - Wikipedia

Helen Keller Biography - Biography.com

Helen Keller Biography - American Foundation for the Blind

The Former Republican Party

May we have THIS Republican Party back?

PLEASE??

What Trump's Proposed Economic Plans Already Did To Kansas and Oklahoma

Donald Trump's plans of cutting taxes further for businesses and corporations and the already-wealthy have already, famously been tried before. Heck, we've seen this for some time, right next door in Kansas, since 2012 and Governor Sam Brownback's and the Republican's "trickle down economics."

Kansas expects budget shortfall 

around $350 million this fiscal year

As if that isn't and hasn't been horrible enough, check out what the rocket scientist Republicans have done in their beloved red state Oklahoma.

Oklahoma budget hole nearly $900 million

And besides these plans, of cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations, Mr. Trump also wants to beef up our military and their budget, as though they don't waste millions and billions enough already.

Trump appears to subtweet Putin as both express desire to beef up nuclear capabilities

US Army fudged its accounts by trillions 

of dollars, auditor finds

So get ready, America. Those pesky, hard-headed Republicans, with their ideas of shoveling yet more money to corporations and again, the already-wealthy and the military are now coming at the entire nation.

God help us all.

And thanks, Republicans, once again, in advance!

Explaining America and Middle-Class Support for Republicans

I held off one day, in an effort for us all to maybe just simply enjoy Thanksgiving to post something about this terrific article I found yesterday.

Here’s how delusional nostalgia is killing the white working class

There's a great deal of good information here, backed by scientific, sociological studies but I'll just point out a few of the best highlights:

A new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute finds there are a few things you can count on about those who believe America’s best days are behind us. They are overwhelmingly white, and if you dig a bit deeper and examine the socioeconomics, often working class. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they stubbornly believe white people are subject to the same levels of racism as black and other people of color. They think the U.S. was a better place in the 1950s, when Jim Crow was law, immigrants were overwhelmingly European, women knew their place, and gay people were essentially invisible.

In tandem with the findings of another recent study revealing middle-age, working-class white Americans are the only group in the country whose health and mortality rates are worsening, the survey offers more than just a look at the ideas and attitudes that characterize a slice of the population. It provides a possible diagnosis for what ails, and may very well be killing, an entire demographic.

There have been previous indications—scientific, sociological, and anecdotal—of some of PRRI’s findings. A 2011 Tufts University survey showed white Americans believe they actually experience more racism than African Americans, and a Pew survey from the same year found non-college-educated, working-class whites are the least hopeful group in the country about the future. The rightwing rallying cry to “Make America Great Again” (a recycled political slogan that is now the property of Donald Trump) is proof that a decent portion of white voters think America was at its best when fewer citizens had civil and political rights, at some arbitrary point in this country’s rich history of morally indefensible state-sanctioned injustice, violence and oppression. One cannot avoid noticing that the current culture wars, full of incoming attacks from the right on nearly every civil and human rights gain of the last 60 years, are being fought with renewed vigor by those who want to turn back the hands of time.

Really, this explains so much.

It explains why some people from my own, very deeply middle-class family would buy off on the Republican Party, its platform and so many of the things that come out of the Right Wing. It's just sad. But additionally, it's frustrating, even to the point, at their worst, frightening. 

What's also scary and even odd is that these people of the middle-, lower- and working classes who hold these views and vote Right Wing and Republican are also so very deeply proud of their membership in the Right Wing and Republican Party and so proud of their views. And along with being proud, they're also very emotional about their views and opinions and that's where hate and disdain for others with opposing views and even racism can and do, too frequently, jump in.

Here's one part of the studies that's exceptionally disturbing, if not frightening:

The 2015 American Values Survey reaffirms the myopic outlook of an astounding portion of the country. Researchers, who polled nearly 2,700 adults from every state and Washington, D.C., found that 43 percent of Americans overall believe racial bigotry against whites has become a problem on par with discrimination against black people and other people of color...

It goes on:

On “reverse racism,” half of white Americans overall agree “discrimination against whites is as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.”

This certainly explains things I see even out of our own Kansas City and St. Louis and Springfield, let alone across the nation.

In all, it's stunning. What I don't know is how we change this. I don't know how we educate and inform people of how our nation actually is, today, let alone the total picture of our nation's history that got us to today, to where we are today. These people are adults, after all. They certainly aren't going back to any classroom to study American history they need to know, let alone any current events or civics or sociology classes that could get them up to speed with how things actually are, especially for people of other races in our country.

And in the meantime, Fox and Breitbart and Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh are out there spreading untruths and emotionalism and ugly opinions and racism and all kinds of ugliness and negativity. Making things worse--worst, really--there's a Right Wing, racist, hating nutjob, Donald Trump, who's in first place in opinion polls in next year's presidential race.

Usually, I can end these things with hope.

Additional link:  Why Does the (White) Lower Middle Class Vote Republican?

Karl Marx --- And the Wall Street Journal?

There is what I think to be a pretty good, if brief and fairly light article in none other than Right Wing-owned, Rupert Murdoch's own Wall Street Journal, describing where America and Americans are today, financially and socially:

The Middle-Class Squeeze

Seeing it, I was pretty stunned.

It recognizes that America's middle class is struggling, shrinking, in fact, along with what got us here, where it stands in history and what we should maybe do to correct our financial, national problems. It begins with this sub-line heading:

Over the past few decades, the Western World has increasingly become a society of "have lesses," if not yet of "have nots." 

They already had me right there, just with that opening, recognizing that the middle-, lower- and working-classes were being crushed with our economic system in that business-supporting rag. But then they go on to outdo themselves:

If Western countries want to disprove the dire forecasts of Karl Marx, we must think creatively about how to make the middle class more prosperous and secure.

They had me at "Karl Marx."

Some of the article:

In the U.S. and Britain, the percentage of citizens owning stocks or houses is well down from the late 1980s. In Britain, the average age for buying a first home is now 31 (and many more people than before depend on “the bank of Mom and Dad” to help them do so). In the mid-’80s, it was 27. My own children, who started work in London in the last two years, earn a little less, in real terms, than I did when I began in 1979, yet house prices are 15 times higher. We have become a society of “have lesses,” if not yet of “have nots.”

In a few lines of work, earnings have shot forward. In 1982, only seven U.K. financial executives were receiving six-figure salaries. Today, tens of thousands are (an enormous increase, even allowing for inflation). The situation is very different for the middle-ranking civil servant, attorney, doctor, teacher or small-business owner. Many middle-class families now depend absolutely on the income of both parents in a way that was unusual even as late as the 1980s...

The author asks an important question, an extremely important one;

What is the use of capitalism if its rewards go to the few and its risks are dumped on the many?

And here is where the under-rated, discounted and even disregarded, if brilliant Karl Marx comes in:

Where might one find a useful analysis of what is happening today in the market democracies of the West? How about this: “The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie.”

Or this: “Modern bourgeois society…is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the power of the nether world which he has called up by his spells.” 

Or this: “The productive forces no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property: on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions…[and] they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.”

The celebrated bearded communists had argued that capitalism would reduce all of society to only two classes: the prosperous bourgeoisie, who owned the capital, and the impoverished proletariat, who contributed their labor.

Who, today, is able to say this isn't precisely what's happening and what's been happening here in America? Who can honestly deny this? It's incontrovertible.

Is that not what's been happening in the last at least 30 years? I can't count the number of articles and news segments pointing out how the "people at the top", the "1%", with hedge fund managers as the best example, have been getting many more millions upon millions of dollars and wealth and riches while, again, the middle-, lower- and working classes have seen their costs escalate but wages stagnate---shrink, in fact.

And here is where the article and the Pope's visit, this week, to our shores coincidentally converge:

The relationship between money and morality, on which the middle-class order depends, has been seriously compromised over the past decade.

I'm not advocating Communism here by any means. While I think Karl Marx was correct in his writing, I also know Mr. Marx didn't take into account the human factors, especially the factor of just sheer greed, let alone the love of power. Communism would only work in a perfect world. Would that we were so lucky.

But the fact is, what we have going on in America now and what we've had doing on financially, fiscally and economically is precisely what Karl Marx and Friederich Engels described in their famous-through-the-ages "The Communist Manifesto."

The author of the article ends it very well and correctly:

...Marx did have an insight about the disproportionate power of the ownership of capital. The owner of capital decides where money goes, whereas the people who sell only their labor lack that power. This makes it hard for society to be shaped in their interests. In recent years, that disproportion has reached destructive levels, so if we don’t want to be a Marxist society, we need to put it right.

What we need to do as a nation, through our government is get our government back for the people. We have to end the Supreme Court's Citizen United ruling and end campaign contributions--both--so we can then begin to put back into place the simplest of rules to keep corporations and the already-wealthy, and the greedy and power-hungry among them, from crushing these 3 classes (middle, lower and working) with rules and government that only works for them.

We have to get the government back for the people.

Links:  Believe it or not: Karl Marx is making a comeback

Marx Was Right: Five Ways Karl Marx Predicted 2014

Happy Labor Day

Kansas City's Google and Google's Kansas City, in the news

The story:

Google Fiber: The digital divide won't be crossed digitally

GOOGLE FIBER IN KANSAS CITY APARTMENTS

Although Google Fiber offers free Internet service (in exchange for a $300, one-time installation fee), it hasn’t done much to expand Internet access in Kansas City. A big part of the reason is that many poor people live in apartments and few landlords in poor areas have signed up for service. The green dots show apartments with Google Fiber in Kansas City. The darker areas have higher poverty rates. The red line is Troost Avenue,

Here, in the article, they have a terrific, detailed map of Kansas City showing where Google Fiber is, in what apartments and areas, with Troost as the dividing line.

Wiring a poor neighborhood for speed may be necessary to expand online access, but Kansas City's experience demonstrates it's not sufficient. Bringing more people online, at ever-faster speeds, will be somewhat harder and requires educating people one at a time on how to use computers and where to find access.

"The digital divide is not going to be closed digitally," said Michael Liimatta, president of Connecting for Good, a nonprofit working to expand online access in the Kansas City area.

Google has taken pains to reach out to a diverse section of Kansas City, running its fiber into low-income areas and sponsoring a "digital inclusion fund" to overcome gaps in connectivity. Its discount service – which offers modestly speedy connections at 5 megabits per second instead of its flagship "gigabit" service – seemed like it might broaden the web's reach to segments of the population yet to be connected.

Civic leaders and activists say it hasn't worked out that way, at least not yet.

A survey commissioned this fall by The Wall Street Journal found that just 15 percent of residents in low-income areas of Kansas City subscribe to Google Fiber, and just 5 percent are using the discount option. By comparison, more than half the homes in upper-income neighborhoods were taking Google Fiber.

It should be no surprise, really, I don't think. In the first place, it's a huge job, connecting all these people, this city. And then to try to be fair to a group, the poor, scattered all over the city? It's daunting, at least. Google doesn't exist as a charity, as a non-profit. It seems Google has made and is trying to make a good faith effort to bring truly high speed internet to those with less. I say again, hese results shouldn't be a big surprise. I give them credit for trying, first, but for more than just trying. They committed. They've done at least some of this getting the internet out to the less economicallly gifted.

It's a lot more than AT&T is doing or has ever done.

The Seven Biggest Economic Lies (guest post)

The Seven Biggest Economic Lies from economist Robert Reich:

1. Tax cuts for the rich trickle down to everyone else. 

Baloney. 

Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both sliced taxes on the rich and what happened? Most Americans' wages (measured by the real median wage) began flattening under Reagan and has dropped since George W. Bush. Trickle-down economics is a cruel joke.

2. Higher taxes on the rich would hurt the economy and slow job growth. 

False. 

From the end of World War II until 1981, the richest Americans faced a top marginal tax rate of 70 percent or above. Under Dwight Eisenhower it was 91 percent. Even after all deductions and credits, the top taxes on the very rich were far higher than they've been since. Yet the economy grew faster during those years than it has since. (Don't believe small businesses would be hurt by a higher marginal tax; fewer than 2 percent of small business owners are in the highest tax bracket.)

3. Shrinking government generates more jobs. 

Wrong again. 

It means fewer government workers -- everyone from teachers, fire fighters, police officers, and social workers at the state and local levels to safety inspectors and military personnel at the federal. And fewer government contractors, who would employ fewer private-sector workers. According to Moody's economist Mark Zandi (a campaign advisor to John McCain), the $61 billion in spending cuts proposed by the House GOP will cost the economy 700,000 jobs this year and next.

4. Cutting the budget deficit now is more important than boosting the economy. 

Untrue. 

With so many Americans out of work, budget cuts now will shrink the economy. They'll increase unemployment and reduce tax revenues. That will worsen the ratio of the debt to the total economy. The first priority must be getting jobs and growth back by boosting the economy. Only then, when jobs and growth are returning vigorously, should we turn to cutting the deficit.

5. Medicare and Medicaid are the major drivers of budget deficits. 

Wrong. 

Medicare and Medicaid spending is rising quickly, to be sure. But that's because the nation's health-care costs are rising so fast. One of the best ways of slowing these costs is to use Medicare and Medicaid's bargaining power over drug companies and hospitals to reduce costs, and to move from a fee-for-service system to a fee-for-healthy outcomes system. And since Medicare has far lower administrative costs than private health insurers, we should make Medicare available to everyone.

6. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. 

Don't believe it. 

Social Security is solvent for the next 26 years. It could be solvent for the next century if we raised the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security payroll tax. That ceiling is now $106,800.

7. It's unfair that lower-income Americans don't pay income tax. 

Wrong. 

There's nothing unfair about it. Lower-income Americans pay out a larger share of their paychecks in payroll taxes, sales taxes, user fees, and tolls than everyone else.

They're "Job Creators", all right

The Blatant Immorality of America's Economic System (guest post)

When Republicans talk about morality, they talk about God and redemption. But they don't mention the immorality of one in five of American children being impoverished, of cuts in food stamps that are causing many to go hungry, and of reduced education funding that’s condemning them to lousy schools. They don't talk about the immorality of declining worker incomes when corporations are making record profits and CEOs are taking home record pay. They leave out the immorality of billionaires flooding our democracy with money to elect candidates that will make them even richer. We are in a moral crisis but it has nothing to do with private redemption. It is a crisis of public morality, and the redemption of America.

--Robert Reich, American political economist, professor, author, and political commentator

Celebrating May Day, all right

Yes, you can bet a lot of us are celebrating "May Day", May 1 today. But it's not just all about the flowers and Springtime.

This is the May Day we're celebrating:

L

36 Reasons Why You Should Thank a Union (even if you don't belong to one):

-Weekends

-All Breaks at Work, including your Lunch Breaks

-Paid Vacation 

-FMLA

-Sick Leave

-Social Security

-Minimum Wage

-Civil Rights Act/Title VII (Prohibits Employer Discrimination)

-8-Hour Work Day

-Overtime Pay

-Child Labor Laws

-Occupational Safety & Health Act (OSHA)

-40 Hour Work Week

-Worker’s Compensation (Worker’s Comp)

-Unemployment Insurance

-Pensions

-Workplace Safety Standards and Regulations

-Employer Health Care Insurance

-Collective Bargaining Rights for Employees

-Wrongful Termination Laws

-Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967

-Whistleblower Protection Laws

-Employee Polygraph Protect Act (Prohibits Employer from using a lie detector test on an employee)

-Veteran’s Employment and Training Services (VETS)

-Compensation increases and Evaluations (Raises)

-Sexual Harassment Laws

-Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA)

-Holiday Pay

-Employer Dental, Life, and Vision Insurance

-Privacy Rights

-Pregnancy and Parental Leave

-Military Leave

-The Right to Strike

-Public Education for Children

-Equal Pay Acts of 1963 & 2011 (Requires employers pay men and women equally for the same amount of work)

-Laws Ending Sweatshops in the United States

Via AFL-CIO --> http://bit.ly/R6QxXd

Why we need government more than ever

There are two terrific articles in The New York Times today, both brief and both on technology.

The first is

The Most Dangerous Word in Tech

It is about how we have taken innovation to its extreme and we're "innovating" beyond human needs and with not enough or no concern for what said "innovation" might mean for or do to, we humans.  A bit from the article:

We treat innovation like an impersonal force, and a ceaseless outcome of entrepreneurship in tech. If we displace people or distort our culture with innovations that, say, wipe out local bookstores or measure every moment in a warehouse worker’s day, it is the price of a generally beneficial force.

Increasingly, however, economists and social thinkers are challenging the conventional wisdom on innovation.

It goes on to point out that government laid the groundwork for and even began a great deal of the technologies and technological breakthroughs, yet business then privatizes those technologies and reaps all the monetary benefits, thus keeping them from the people and the society. This makes for yet one more way more and more of the wealth of the entire nation, the entire society is whisked away for and to the top "1%", the wealthy or already-wealthy of the society. Clearly this is neither fair or beneficial for that entire society, for the people.

Finally, it also points out that we're far more interested in that "innovating" and concentrating, especially in business, on greater and greater speed and on shorter term investing, as companies, industries and corporations. Clearly that's been a trend that's been building over the last several decades and time and again it's proven itself very short-sighted and even harmful to the very companies it's supposed to be helping, let alone to the people these companies and industries are supposed to be serving, let alone, again, the overall nation, the country, as a larger group.

The second article, again, from today's Times‎, is about a new book: 

A Talk With Simon Head, Author of 'Mindless: Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans'

Simon Head thinks the world has become good for computers, but bad for most humans.

In warehouses run by Amazon and Walmart, he says, workers are monitored by machines, their work output determined by performance optimization programs. At financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, traders and managers depend so heavily on algorithms that they abdicate personal responsibility for events like the subprime mortgage crisis.

The problem isn’t just the machines, however; it’s what machines do to thinking. In his book, “Mindless: Why Smarter Machines are Making Dumber Humans,” Mr. Head bemoans a triumph of computer-led systems thinking and so-called “scientific management.”

These have led to “misindustrialization,” he writes, in which service workers’ emotions are manipulated to optimize retail sales, and Oxford dons are judged by a “research excellence framework” that compels them to publish nonsense to meet irrelevant standards.

And this is why I point out we need government even more now, today, and for two huge reasons.

First, all the industrialization and innovation and dependence on computers and technology is making us, in the business world and so, in the nation and world, overall, far more controlled by those machines and "productivity" and "innovation" so the human factor is being pushed out of the picture, if not ignored altogether.  That can be nothing but dangerous for the people on a small scale but also, in the bigger picture, for, again, the entire nation. We need government and rules to more control the direction of "progress" so all that innovation and technology and progress serves the people instead of the people serving the productivity.

Second, with the coroporatization of America and the world, combined with the wealthy people's and corporation's ability to buy the legislation they want, that will benefit them and their companies, through the very legal but very corrupting campaign contributions, all this gives them strong, nearly unfettered ability to have virtually everything headed in their way so more and more pressure is but on business, those corporations and so, us, the people, for more and more innovation, more and more "productivity", more and more "progress", all at the expense of the people, the worker, the man and woman on the street. The emphasis remains on profits for the companies--and so, the wealthy--people be damned.

That does not make for a healthy, even workable society. No way.

So we need government to not only keep those "at the controls" of society honest--no small feat in itself--but also to keep the wealthy and companies and corporations doing what's best for the larger society and nation, as a whole.

Do I think this will happen?

Absolutely not.  And for a few reasons here.

1) Government and laws never have kept up with technology and advances in industrialization. Government virtually always comes in afterward--long afterward--after there has been a collapse or tragedy of some kind and cleans up the mess. There is no better nor more recent example of this than the 2008 financial meltdown that nearly took America's and the world's economies down;

2) That "innovation" described above is hurtling forward at ever faster speeds, leaving government and our representatives ever further behind;

3) As long as we allow "campaign contributions", it leaves those with great deals of money--again, the wealthy and corporations--virtually if not truly in control of the very government that is supposed to be there to protect the people and nation.

It's all a Libertarian's and Republican's and Right Winger's dream.

It's also the dream of any anarchist.

I don't have my hopes up.

Anyone overly concerned or worried about "big government" in the US, in my eyes, doesn't see what's happened in the last several decades and of late. The "big boys" are in control and they don't like or want "big government" in any way, shape or form and they're getting just what they want, just what they're paying for.

Have a nice Sunday, y'all.

Link:  McCutcheon v. FEC: The 1% versus the .1%

Powerful stupid coming out of Jefferson City

The Republicans at the statehouse in Jefferson City seem to be outdoing themselves this week:

New attack on Obamacare filed in Missouri Legislature

JEFFERSON CITY • Missouri would strike another blow against the federal Affordable Care Act under a bill filed by state Sen. John Lamping, R-Ladue.

The bill would suspend insurance companies’ state licenses if they accepted subsidies offered by the federal government to help pay health insurance premiums for low- and middle-income Missourians.

Forget that we have the most expensive health care system in the world.

Forget that more people have worse health outcomes from this outrageous system than the other top 16 industrialized nations.

Forget that more people go bankrupt in this nation with health care expenses than with any other cause.

Forget all that.

Just go to Jefferson City and vote for your political party. Vote the party line. Create bills and vote against the people of your very state and nation.

Yeah.  Great idea.  This, ladies and gentlemen, is what the Republican Party, both nationally and state by state, are trying to achieve---

And we're the ones being held hostage.

America, 2008 to today

Seriously, people.

Sheesh.

The article and development Americans need to be aware of

A few days ago I wrote about how corporations are crushing the American middle class with their wages below a true, living wage.  Today, further proof, in this article:

How the Temps Who Power Corporate Giants Are Getting Crushed

Instead of paying a good, true, living wage wherein a person could pay the rent and keep food on the table and have health care for their family and live a decent life with self-respect, corporations and companies are, instead, hiring for more and more part-time positions or, worse, as in this case, and only hiring "temps"--temporary workers who only get a small, temporary wage with no benefits whatever.

A bit from the article:

In cities all across the country, workers stand on street corners, line up in alleys or wait in a neon-lit beauty salon for rickety vans to whisk them off to warehouses miles away. Some vans are so packed that to get to work, people must squat on milk crates, sit on the laps of passengers they do not know or sometimes lie on the floor, the other workers’ feet on top of them.
 
This is not Mexico. It is not Guatemala or Honduras. This is Chicago, New Jersey, Boston.
 
The people here are not day laborers looking for an odd job from a passing contractor. They are regular employees of temp agencies working in the supply chain of many of America’s largest companies – Walmart, Macy’s, Nike, Frito-Lay. They make our frozen pizzas, sort the recycling from our trash, cut our vegetables and clean our imported fish. They unload clothing and toys made overseas and pack them to fill our store shelves. They are as important to the global economy as shipping containers and Asian garment workers.

Many get by on minimum wage, renting rooms in rundown houses, eating dinners of beans and potatoes, and surviving on food banks and taxpayer-funded health care. They almost never get benefits and have little opportunity for advancement.

Across America, temporary work has become a mainstay of the economy, leading to the proliferation of what researchers have begun to call “temp towns.” They are often dense Latino neighborhoods teeming with temp agencies. Or they are cities where it has become nearly impossible even for whites and African-Americans with vocational training to find factory and warehouse work without first being directed to a temp firm.

This is no way to treat people.

This is no way to have or keep a middle class in America, either.

Worse, it's immoral.  It's vile.  It's bought of greed and short-sighted profit searching.

We need to stand up, we Americans.

Three important--very important--notes on America

Here they are:

There are far more poor and middle class Americans than rich.  If you continue building a society based on taking from the many to benefit the few, then we’re not going to have a nation much longer.

Rich people didn’t become rich by giving away their money, Trickle Down Economics is the biggest con our country has ever seen.

Decades ago we all paid a much higher tax percentage,  and our economic policies protected the people more than businesses.  During these times our nation saw historic growth and unheard of economic prosperity.  None of that was done by basing our policies on giving more to the rich.

Things to know.

Things to keep in mind.

Things to build on.

Link to original post: http://www.forwardprogressives.com/annoy-republicans/

The debacle that was and is the Hostess Company, Twinkies, Unions, the Working Class and Morality

The executives of the Hostess Company got a two-fer.

By wrecking and then selling the company, they got huge paychecks from being bought out and then they broke the union.

Of course, they wrecked and ruined many workers lives and finances and homes and home lives but what the heck?

What do they care?

They nothing but won.

For themselves.

And on top of it all, plenty of middle-class, working-class Americans think this is a good thing.

Shoot me now.

Links:

Hostess Twinkies Back on Shelves Soon, But Without Unions

http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/2013/04/twinkies-coming-back-but-this-time-union-free/

The unfair and unconscionable: Chaining Social Security to the CPI

President Obama offered chaining Social Security benefits to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), something you'd think only a Republican would do.

It's truly unfair to the point of immoral.

Please go to one or both of these sites and sign a petition to tell President Obama to not tie Social Security benefits to the CPI:

http://credo.actionkit.com/sign/obama_budget?referring_akid=7245.2093314.HxIzry&source=paste1

http://campaigns.dailykos.com/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=363

Thank you, in advance.

Advice to the less-well off, from one of the richest

Here's chutzpah for you, from the news last week. Maybe you saw it already:

World’s Richest Woman Says Poor Should Have Less Fun, Work Harder

Advice by the world’s wealthiest woman, Gina Rinehart, on how to become a millionaire has been slammed by an Australian MP, Bob Katter, who says she "left out the bit about daddy being a major cattle station owner”.

Mr Katter, an outspoken independent MP from north Queensland, joined a chorus of criticism across the country of Ms Rinehart’s claim that people jealous of the wealthy should "spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising”.
“[She] left out the bit about daddy being a major cattle station owner and the biggest mining magnate in Australia", Mr Katter said. “That "helps as well. She says here that the minimum average wage of $600 a week should be cut. This is coming from the world's richest woman.”

Mrs Rinehart, a mining heiress who capitalised on surging commodity prices and growing demand from China and India to build an iron ore empire worth an estimated £19 billion, wrote in her regular column in a resources magazine that Australia has lost its hard-working roots.

Reminds me of the old song:



Links: http://www.infowars.com/worlds-richest-woman-says-poor-should-have-less-fun-work-harder/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/9511505/Gina-Rinehart-criticised-for-jealous-poor-remarks.html