With the Dow Jones industrial average flirting with a record high, the split between American workers and the companies that employ them is widening and could worsen in the next few months as federal budget cuts take hold.
Repeal Sequestration to Disarm Hostage Takers
Growing income inequality—approaching now obscene levels—is not simply a ‘moral outrage’. It not only represents a gross violation of historically held American values or reasonable equality for all. It is a condition that has served, and continues to serve, as a major cause of the lack of sustained economic recovery in the US now for five years—as well as a major factor in explaining why the US continues today to drift toward another ‘double dip’ recession.
The White House released a report Sunday emphasizing the ways in which the cuts will hurt the middle class, but although important entitlement programs such as Medicaid, Social Security, and food stamps are exempt from sequestration, many programs for low-income families are on the chopping block. Here are 12 of them:
The American labor movement is once again facing a most controversial issue - the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. While labor leaders weigh the pros and cons of building KXL, they should keep in mind that the pipeline is as much a threat to our economy as it is to our planet. After a year of extreme weather - at an extreme cost to the economy - this age old jobs vs. environment debate is emerging as a false choice.
While some of the world's economic and political elite gathered in Davos, Switzerland for the annual World Economic Forum, a United Nations agency reported that there has been an increase in unemployment planet-wide of 28 million since the onset of the current economic crisis five years ago. One million jobs were lost in western capitalist economies last year alone and three million in the rest of the world.
In light of the report that the economy contracted in the last quarter of 2012 due partly to cutbacks, Ezra Klein notes that one man's big government socialism is another man's premature and destructive fiscal retrenchment.
Spread the word