Portside

Companies want a massive expansion of visa holders so they can pay them less. This is about powerful companies pursuing lower wages. "Immigration helps America. People who come here to pursue their dreams and aspire to be citizens strengthen our country. America's unions embrace immigrants and new citizens. We worry about corporations firing or passing over qualified American workers in order to import temporary foreign workers at lower wages." (AFL-CIO)

The "deficit problem" is man-made. The deficit is now down 60 percent as a percent of gross domestic product. It is down more than the deficit hawks Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles asked for. This rapid reduction is seriously hurting the economy and jobs, but demands for cuts continue. It is time for Congress and the President to "pivot" to focusing on our real problems: the jobs gap, the wage gap and the trade gap.

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So often there's an apparent conflict between jobs and the environment. There's a way to resolve our differences. Every environmental campaign should have a jobs program and every jobs program should be designed to address our climate catastrophe.

Extending the current model of free trade agreements is at odds with a factory renaissance. The trickle of reshoring has raised public hopes, as well as valid doubts about the infallible wisdom the stampede offshore with little appreciation of the needs or potential of. A real renaissance in American manufacturing will require energetic, high-road government intervention with an eye to innovation, not simply fatter paychecks in Guangzhou province.

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First, a terrible jobs report, then a Democratic President offers a budget that proposes cuts to Social Security and Medicare. What they actually heard was Austerity 2013 - U.S. style. President Obama's offering up a cut in Social Security (make no mistake, that's what it is) contravenes promises he has previously made about not undermining the program and a recent flat out pledge by Vice-President Joe Biden that it would not happen.

“If the cost of compliance to our rules outweighs the penalties for breaking them, companies just take a ‘catch me if you can’ approach to worker safety and health,” he said. And serious violations of the rules should not be misdemeanors, he said, but felonies, much like insider trading, tax crimes and antitrust violations. -- David Michaels, OSHA director