Time Magazine- Opinion. How America's Elite Lost Their Grip
https://time.com/5735384/capitalism-reckoning-elitism-in-america-2019/
https://time.com/5735384/capitalism-reckoning-elitism-in-america-2019/
Monday, December 16, 2019
Resistance- California Fights Back
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Wednesday, December 11, 2019
Great Employment Numbers: 44% of Fully Employed Make $18,000 a Year or Less
Great Employment Numbers: 44% of Fully Employed Make $18,000 a Year or Less: Beneath the rosy employment report lives a reality of low-paying part-time and temporary work with no benefits or security.
Why we don't have healthcare for all.
We could have paid for health care for all in the U.S., and child care for all infants
with the money that was stolen by corruption in Afghanistan.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/world/asia/afghanistan-war-documents-takeaways.html
with the money that was stolen by corruption in Afghanistan.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/world/asia/afghanistan-war-documents-takeaways.html
“We were given money, told to spend it, and we did — without reason,” the unidentified official told investigators in a 2016 interview. An unidentified contractor reported being told to give out $3 million each day for projects in a single Afghan district.
Corruption Is Endemic
With that much money flowing into Afghanistan, it was perhaps inevitable that some of it would line local leaders’ pockets.
The documents describe American officials ignoring widespread skimming by the Afghan government that, ultimately, undermined the war strategy. One retired Army colonel who advised three American generals said that the problem persisted not just among judges and security officials, but became a “kleptocracy” throughout the government of former President Hamid Karzai.
Tuesday, December 10, 2019
U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement—Weak tea, at best
News from EPI › U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement—Weak tea, at best: The revised U.S.—Mexico—Canada Agreement (USMCA), announced today by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and endorsed by the AFL-CIO, represents a significant improvement on the draft agreement first released in 2017. Negotiators for labor and House Democrats strengthened the provisions on labor rights, environmental standards, and the enforcement of these rules, and also removed costly and egregious…
Sunday, December 8, 2019
Trump Cripples World Trade Organization
Trump Cripples World Trade Organization
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/business/trump-trade-war-wto.html?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/business/trump-trade-war-wto.html?
Tuesday, December 3, 2019
Friday, November 29, 2019
Economic Update: Teaching Economics – A Revolutionary Approach
Economic Update: Teaching Economics – A Revolutionary Approach: This week: Updates on Kshama Sawant’s reelection victory in the Seattle City Council race; the obesity problem's costs and causes in the U.S.; critiquing libertarian arguments in favor of capitalism;Prof. Wolff interviews Dr. Amy S. Cramer, a Professor of Economics at Pima Community College in Arizona about her accessible education project "Voices on the Economy."
Start at 16 min.
Start at 16 min.
Thursday, November 28, 2019
Tuesday, November 26, 2019
Monday, November 25, 2019
Killing NAFTA Softly
Killing NAFTA Softly: Despite continual rumors that a deal on the update to the North American trade agreement is imminent, House Democrats and Trump are far apart.
Friday, November 22, 2019
Thursday, November 21, 2019
Los Angeles Has More Empty Houses Than Homeless People ?
same source
https://laist.com/2019/11/20/los-angeles-housing-vacancy-homeless.php
And, a 100,000 empty homes in the SF Bay Area, with large homeless population.
https://m.sfgate.com/realestate/article/An-estimated-100-000-homes-are-sitting-empty-in-13692007.php?
And, a 100,000 empty homes in the SF Bay Area, with large homeless population.
https://m.sfgate.com/realestate/article/An-estimated-100-000-homes-are-sitting-empty-in-13692007.php?
Tuesday, November 19, 2019
The Green New Deal: Lessons from Chico California
NAOMI _KLEIN
Forged in Fire: California’s Lessons for a Green New Deal
Naomi Klein
November 7 2019, 6:00 a.m.
Flames climb trees as the Camp Fire tears through Paradise, Calif., on Nov. 8, 2018.
Photo: Noah Berger/AP
WE WERE JUST TAKING PICTURES. Of the ash, stray bricks, and weeds. Of twisted metal and charred patio furniture. Of the pine trees still standing on the edge of the lots, their towering trunks now charcoal black. Of the lonely white brick fireplace in the middle of it all, the only surviving structure, metal pokers hanging expectantly by the grate.
“Get the hell off my property!”
The words came bellowing from a burly man who had just pulled up to the pile of ash that once was his home in Paradise, California. As he shouted a litany of complaints, it became clear that his rage wasn’t only reserved for us trespassers — and there have been plenty who have gone to Paradise to gaze at the eerie emptiness where a thriving community once stood, before it was decimated by California’s deadliest fire one year ago.
The target was myriad forces that had conspired to twist the knife, again and again, on his already wrenching property loss — from the insurance company that wouldn’t pay up, to the county that wouldn’t let him clean up, to the state that wanted his (now contaminated) well to be sealed up. His rage was also directed at the absence of decent temporary housing for fire victims like him, not to mention the electric utility that had started the blaze and was still evading responsibility.
When the complaints petered out, I approached the man to introduce myself and apologize for our intrusion. But as I got closer, I felt his volatility: I have been in many disaster-struck communities and know how quickly the gale-force of emotion these events churn up can direct itself at the closest available target. We wished him luck and left.
The encounter was a reminder of the kind of stress that is in the air in the parts of California recently scorched by fire, as well as in the communities that have welcomed thousands of newly homeless neighbors to towns now bursting at the seams. The intersecting hardships experienced by so many in the region also explain why, days before the one-year anniversary of the deadly Camp Fire that burned down Paradise and killed 86 people, local politicians in neighboring Chico unveiled a plan calling for the small city to adopt its own Green New Deal.
Like its national inspiration, the Chico Green New Deal framework marries rapid decarbonization targets with calls for more affordable housing; a safe and sustainable food system; investments in “clean, 21st century” public transit; green jobs creation, including projects earmarked for the poorest residents; and much more.
Chico shows that there is no way to cope with climate breakdown without a simultaneous shift to a very different kind of economy.
“Your city council has heard the call of its community that has resounded locally and across the nation,” saidChico Vice Mayor Alex Brown when the plan was announced. “We are choosing to walk the walk of this movement and to take the leadership being demanded of us.” In an interview, Brown told me that the Camp Fire’s impact on both Paradise and Chico was a glimpse of the future unless action is taken to both radically lower emissions and build “communities that are more resilient to these shifts.” Brown is well aware that a small city like hers isn’t going to make much of a dent in global emissions. But, she said, “We can demonstrate what a Green New Deal looks like at the local level.”
The Chico plan is one of many similar local initiatives that have sprung up in the year since the Sunrise Movement occupied the office of then-prospective House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with young demonstrators demanding that the Democratic Party embrace a sweeping Green New Deal to meet the twin crises of climate disruption and deepening inequality. Since then, as the Green New Deal proposal has picked up momentum in the Democratic primaries, several states and big cities have unveiled their own frameworks, including Maine and Seattle, where city council recently passed a resolution that included the city’s most ambitious climate justice targets to date. It also pledged to create an oversight board to hold the city to its commitments, a body that will be made up of representatives from communities directly impacted by racial, economic, and environmental injustice, as well as climate experts and representatives from trade unions and green groups.
And yet the contribution now coming from humble Chico — a scrappy northern California college town with a population of approximately 100,000 — may be the most politically significant. Because the Chico Green New Deal is based directly on this region’s hard-won experience of living through the 2018 inferno; it was forged, quite literally, in fire.
Ever since the Green New Deal landed on the political map, liberals have attacked it for its supposedly impractical scope and ambition. Fighting poverty, racism, and homelessness are worthy goals, we have been told — but what do they have to do with lowering greenhouse gas emissions? Surely a carbon-centric approach — like a simple tax or cap-and-trade and some narrow regulations on polluters — would be more likely to succeed. And besides, connecting greenhouse-gas reductions with building a fairer society just confirms Republican beliefs that climate change is a vast left-wing plot: Better to focus exclusively on pollution and worry about the rest down the road. Conservative Chico city council members have gone on the offensive against the Green New Deal with precisely this kind of attack.
An aerial view of a destroyed neighborhood in Paradise, Calif., on Oct. 21, 2019, one year after the Camp Fire.
Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Yet Chico’s lived experience over the past year is a devastating rebuke to this line of criticism. As the community that housed the vast majority of people displaced by the Camp Fire, Chico shows that there is no way to cope with climate breakdown without a simultaneous shift to a very different kind of economy, one that is willing to make major nonmarket investments in housing, transit, health (including mental health), water, electricity, and more.
Friday, November 15, 2019
Thursday, November 14, 2019
Friday, November 1, 2019
U.S. Heartland in a Recession - Again
What We Can Do
From Ken's Class
- A class member asked me last week “If you’re gone one week, can you find the films online to catch-up?” Yes, in most cases, see below.
- Week #1 “Inequality for All” w/ Robert Reich >
Amazon Prime > https://www.amazon.com/Inequality-All-Robert-Reich/dp/B00H3L4QOA/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1538346596&sr=1-1&keywords=inequality+for+all Rent $3.99 Buy $7.99
Google Play > https://play.google.com/store/movies/details/Inequality_For_All?id=2DQYNdrr-ns&hl=en Rent HD $3.99 Buy HD $7.99
- Week #2 “American Winter >
Amazon Prime > https://www.amazon.com/American-Winter-Liesl-Wendt/dp/B00TPZKA5Q/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1426102593&sr=8-1&keywords=american+winter Rent HD $4.99 Buy HD $10.99
- Week #3 “A Place at the Table” >
Amazon > https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B00BN4ZF98/ref=pd_cbs_318_4 Rent HD $3.99 Buy HD $12.99
- Week #4 “Heist: Who Sole the American Dream?” >
YouTube > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcBuBgz6RAY ?
Distrify > http://www.heist-themovie.com/ Buy HD from $3.99
Netflix > https://dvd.netflix.com/Subscribe/Signup/Register?videoid=70251215&dsrc=DVDWEB_KEYART_MDP_RENTBTN Subscription
Ø Week #5 “Citizen U.S.A.”
Amazon > https://www.amazon.com/Citizen-USA-50-State-Roadtrip/dp/B0062RY30I/ref=sr_1_3?gclid=CjwKCAjw_uDsBRAMEiwAaFiHa2Yk4FEVyLBssSeF-HPeMEh0AVuzlaflB7JTtuJT_hfufpxiR9VCZRoCA_YQAvD_BwE&hvadid=233528788507&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9032529&hvnetw=s&hvpos=1t1&hvqmt=b&hvrand=13050606563773686196&hvtargid=aud-647006051489%3Akwd-646015143&hydadcr=9330_10314398&keywords=citizen+usa&qid=1570296970&sr=8-3 Buy used from $5.00, Buy new from $16.33
Amazon Prime > https://www.amazon.com/Citizen-U-S-State-Road/dp/B01MRNWZ7D/ref=sr_1_1?gclid=CjwKCAjw_uDsBRAMEiwAaFiHa2Yk4FEVyLBssSeF-HPeMEh0AVuzlaflB7JTtuJT_hfufpxiR9VCZRoCA_YQAvD_BwE&hvadid=233528788507&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9032529&hvnetw=s&hvpos=1t1&hvqmt=b&hvrand=13050606563773686196&hvtargid=aud-647006051489%3Akwd-646015143&hydadcr=9330_10314398&keywords=citizen+usa&qid=1570297050&sr=8-1 Rent HD $3.99, Buy HD $9.99
HBO > https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/citizen-usa-a-50-state-road-trip Subscription
Ø Week #6 Angela Glover Blackwell on the American Dream April 13, 2012 (45:26)http://billmoyers.com/segment/angela-glover-blackwell-on-the-american-dream/
Ø Week #7 “The House I Live In” >
+ Google Play https://play.google.com/store/movies/details/THE_HOUSE_I_LIVE_IN_FilmBuff?id=QsBDvxy5qQY&hl=en_US Rent 1.99, Buy HD $9.99
+ Microsoft Store https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/the-house-i-live-in/8d6kgwzl5g51?activetab=pivot%3aoverviewtab Rent $4.99, Buy $12.99
Capitalism as the problem.
- Five myths about capitalism - Maybe greed isn’t so good.
Myth No. 1 - Greed, natural human instinct, makes markets work.
Myth No. 2 – Corporations must be run to maximize value for shareholders.
Myth No. 3 – Workers’ pay is an objective measure of economic contribution.
Myth No. 4 – Equality of opportunity is all people need to climb the economic ladder.
Myth No. 5 – Making the economy fairer will make it smaller and less prosperous.
By Steven Pearlstein - Steven Pearlstein, a Washington Post economics columnist and the Robinson professor of public affairs at George Mason University, is the author of “Can American Capitalism Survive?” September 28, 2018
SOLUTIONS for Wall Street and Capitalism Abuses:
- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Financial_Protection_Bureau
- What Should Be Done? Charles Ferguson - author of the Inside Job: The Financiers Who Pulled Off the Heist of the Century
Bring the financial sector under control:
- Reform, and tightly regulate, compensation structures at the individual, corporate, and industry levels.
- Break up the largest banks.
- Greatly strengthen the power and political independence of regulation and white-collar criminal law enforcement.
- Tax financial transactions.
- Tax financial sector income fairly.
- Close loopholes for activities such as “innovations” designed for tax avoidance or for betting against one’s own securities.
Natural result of proper re-regulation of the financial sector:
- Reduce its size, concentration & political power.
Many benefits:
- Increasing the supply of talented people for more productive activities.
- Reducing the pressures for political corruption.
Control the impact of money on politics:
- Lobbying and political contributions should be heavily taxed .
- Government and regulator salaries should be raised sharply, in return for strict prohibitions on revolving-door behavior.
- Some form of public campaign financing for political campaigns should be mandatory.
Reform the tax system:
- Both the individual and corporate, so as to raise revenues, increase fairness, and mitigate against the forms of hereditary and financial oligarchies.
- Extremely high estate taxes are one important element of this, as is the fair taxation of very high financial sector incomes.
Greatly strengthen antitrust policy and the regulation of corporate governance
- Antitrust policy and analysis have fallen victim to corruption in two ways:
- The corruption of U.S. government policy through campaign finance, lobbying, and revolving-door hiring.
- The corruption of the economics discipline that supplies the economic analysis, and the personnel, behind antitrust decisions.
Ø In the areas of industrial organization, regulation, corporate governance, and antitrust theory, the economics discipline doesn’t just need reform; it needs a five-organ transplant and a yearlong stay at a reeducation camp.
- More generally, America needs to figure out how to keep large, mature industries from going the way of General Motors, U.S. Steel, AT&T, Microsoft, or for that matter Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, either by deep reforms in corporate governance, by breaking up large and stagnant companies, or by creating other mechanisms for new entry in mature industries.
Improve educational opportunity and quality is fundamental.
- A country cannot compete economically, elect wise leaders, or call itself a fair society if it has a 25 percent school drop rate, or if only the wealthy can attend good schools. Here, there is a fairness issue that not even a bank CEO can openly deny. If there is one thing that nearly everyone can agree on, it is that all children deserve a fair chance. If a child is born in a poor area, or to drug-addicted parents, it isn’t the baby’s fault. And yet the way we handle school funding, child nutrition, foster care, and child poverty remain shameful, especially in the U.S., and if anything, threaten to become more so. Beyond this, a well-educated population yields a far happier, more prosperous society. As it stands, we are wasting a startlingly high fraction of our people, in ways that are painful and very expensive.
Create a truly universally accessible, high-speed broadband Internet infrastructure, both wireline and wireless.
- Broadband deployment should be viewed in much the same terms that a government deploys a national road system. If anything, broadband deployment is more important than transport, as a way to decrease foreign strategy dependence, insure security, and reduce global warning.
- Week #9 Capitalism & Wall Street MS Power Point presentation slides: Please see the attached slides from Week #4.
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
The Debt and Economists
Selective deficit hysteria has done immense damage.
By Paul Krugman
Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as an Op-Ed columnist. He is distinguished professor in the Graduate Center Economics Ph.D. program and distinguished scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center at the City University of New York. In addition, he is professor emeritus of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. More
Monday, October 28, 2019
Economist - Medicare for All will save us each money
Make No Mistake: Medicare for All Would Cut Taxes for Most Americans Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman October 25, 2019 The Guardian Not only would universal healthcare reduce taxes for most people, it would also lead to the biggest take-home pay raise in a generation for most workers  Supporters of Medicare for All are Right, Yana Paskova/Reuters The debate about healthcare has been at the center of the Democratic primaries, yet it is hard to make sense of the conversation. For some, public universal health insurance – such as Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All bill – would involve massive tax increases for the middle class. For others, it’s the opposite: Medicare for All would cut costs for most Americans. Who is right? The starting point of any intelligent conversation about health in America must be that it’s a cost for all of us – and a massive one. The United States spends close to 20% of its national income on health. Elderly Americans and low-income families are covered by public insurance programs (Medicare and Medicaid, respectively), funded by tax dollars (payroll taxes and general government revenue). The rest of the population must obtain coverage by a private company, which they typically get via their employers. Insurance, in that case, is funded by non-tax payments: health insurance premiums. Although they are not officially called taxes, insurance premiums paid by employers are just like taxes – but taxes paid to private insurers instead of paid to the government. Like payroll taxes, they reduce your wage. Like taxes, they are mandatory, or quasi-mandatory. Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, it has become compulsory to be insured, and employers with more than 50 full-time workers are required to enroll their workers in a health insurance plan. A frequent objection to calling health insurance premiums a tax is that people have some choice. Can’t the poor, the argument goes, enroll in cheap health plans? If you start calling health insurance premiums a tax, then shouldn’t we also call spending on food and clothes a tax? This argument, however, is wrong, because cheap healthcare does not exist. There are cheap meals, there are cheap clothes, but there is no cheap way to treat your heart attack, to cure your cancer, or to give birth. Cheap health insurance means no healthcare when you need it. All wealthy nations, even those that try hard to control costs, spend 10% of their national income on health – the equivalent of $7,500 a year per adult in the United States. The view that healthcare services are like haircuts or restaurant meals – services for which there is a product tailored to any budget – is a myth. Healthcare is like education: everybody needs it, regardless of their budget, but it’s expensive. That’s why all advanced economies, except the United States, fund it through taxation. |
Friday, October 25, 2019
Tax Loophole Gave Oil Companies $$ Billions
Government Loophole Gave Oil Companies $18 Billion Windfall
Tuesday, October 15, 2019
Sunday, October 13, 2019
Tax Our Way Back to Justice
How to Tax Our Way Back to Justice
It is absurd that the working class is now paying higher tax rates than the richest people in America.
By Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman
The authors are economists at the University of California, Berkeley.
· Oct. 11, 2019
Wednesday, October 9, 2019
Public Option for Health Care ?
The ‘Public Option’ on Health Care Is a Poison Pill
Some Democratic candidates are pushing it as a free-choice version of Medicare for All. That’s good rhetoric but bad policy.
https://www.thenation.com/article/insurance-health-care-medicare/
Thursday, September 26, 2019
Saturday, September 21, 2019
What’s at Stake in the General Motors Strike ?
Only a strong movement can put the management of capitalism on the political agenda.
Dissent's Fall 2019 issue, with a special section, Left Paths in Rural America, is out October 7. Subscribe to get your copy.
For almost one week, 49,000 General Motors (GM) workers have been on strike. The strike could have a big impact on U.S. politics and work life, but if so, it will have to break with the patterns of conflict and accommodation so long entrenched in a once iconic industry.
A General Motors strike used to send shock waves throughout the economy. In the fall of 1970 when 400,000 members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) shuttered nearly 100 GM factories for more than two months, the U.S. economy shrank by more than 2 percent, forcing President Nixon and his advisors to contemplate wage and price controls, eventually imposed in August of 1971. In those days, the U.S. auto industry was unquestionably one of world capitalism’s “commanding heights,” and General Motors the biggest and most emulated large corporation in the industrialized world.
Today the UAW has once again shut down General Motors, still the largest North American producer of automobiles. But if the workers on the picket line are to have a large impact on the U.S. economy, it will come in the realm of politics, policy, and culture, and not through economic leverage. GM is still a profitable auto corporation, but much diminished, and its thirty-three manufacturing plants (and twenty-two parts distribution warehouses) are concentrated in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana.
General Motors had sales of $147 billion last year, but the company has been shrinking for decades. It produces 17 percent of all vehicles in the United States, down from nearly 28 percent a couple of decades ago. For more than half a century it was the largest company in the nation and owned the number one spot on the Fortune 500 list of big corporations; today it stands at number thirteen behind Walmart, Exxon-Mobil, Apple, Amazon, and even Ford, its century old rival. GM went bankrupt in 2008 and had to be bailed out by the government. On a world scale, Volkswagen and Toyota sell more cars.
Unfortunately, the UAW is also much diminished from the days when President Walter Reuther could declare the million-member auto union the “vanguard in America.” (Knowing radicals, including an admiring C. Wright Mills, appreciated the Leninist flavor inherent in that phrase.) Factory closings, auto imports, and a general failure to organize new workers have reduced UAW membership in the auto industry to less than 200,000; the union’s official membership stands somewhat higher only because it has been able to organize a variety of other workers, including teaching assistants in California and some Midwestern state employees. The main problem—a truly existential one—has been the inability of the UAW to make inroads among the hundreds of thousands of Americans who work in the “transplant” parts and assembly plants that Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Kia, VW, Mercedes-Benz, and other foreign-based firms have built in Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and elsewhere in the mid-South. Fully half of all U.S. auto production is today non-union, a crippling debility for a labor organization that seeks to raise the general wage level in its industry, and a potent competitive argument that GM and Ford can hurl at UAW negotiators when they seek redress for a decade of plant closings and wage stagnation.
And then there is the corruption scandal that is destroying the credibility of the UAW leadership. At least six UAW officials have been charged with or convicted of graft, and last month the FBI searched the houses of President Gary Jones and former President Dennis Williams. Jones has been conspicuously absent from strike leadership; more consequential, reports the always well-informed Labor Notes, has been the failure of the UAW to really prepare the membership for a strike. There were few meetings or bulletins designed to keep members in the bargaining loop; not a button was distributed in the plants and there was little outreach to the public.
Selling Off the Public Sector _ Privitization
Everything Must Go: Selling Off and Selling Out the Public Sector
Wednesday, September 18, 2019
Saturday, September 14, 2019
Roots of the U.S.-China Trade Dispute
Roots of the U.S.-China Trade Conflict
https://portside.org/2019-09-05/roots-us-china-trade-conflict
Author: David Kotz
Date of source: September 1, 2019
Democratic Left (Democratic Socialists of America)
The most anti-worker president in recent memory slaps big tariffs on products made in China — in the name of protecting the jobs of American workers. Corporate lobbyists criticize the tariffs — but say we must get tough on China’s trade policies. Some Democratic senators warn Trump not to back down in trade negotiations with China.
What can socialists make of all this? To answer this question, let’s examine the background of the trade conflict and the reasons why it broke out recently.
China Rises
Beginning in 1978, the ruling Communist Party in China made a radical turn, called the “reform and opening.” Central planning was gradually replaced by a market economy. The previously closed economy was opened to trade with the capitalist countries. Privately owned companies came to predominate. However, a core of large state-owned enterprises remains, and the government actively regulates the economy. China’s economic system today bears some resemblance to the heavily state-regulated capitalist economies of Western Europe in the post-Second World War decades, although paired with a different political and social system ruled by the Communist Party.
When China started down this road, the U.S. government was enthusiastic and supportive. U.S. big business saw big profit opportunities in a growing China market. The reform and opening led to remarkably rapid economic growth, at about 10% per year for decades. U.S. business lobbied for China’s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001. Many U.S. companies set up shop in China, which has abundant low-wage (yet relatively healthy and well-educated) labor coming from a huge rural sector. China also has a business-friendly government, docile official trade unions, and a government that makes huge infrastructure investments in transportation and power that underpin the profitability of operating in the China market.
As “Made in China” labels proliferated in U.S. stores, many U.S. workers lost their jobs. Cheap imports from China, along with those from other low-wage countries, have played a role in driving down the real wages of U.S. workers since 1980. That did not concern the U.S. corporations that were boosting profits by moving production to China, nor did it bother the many sectors of U.S. business that purchased cheap inputs from China.
About Face
Read the entire piece here.
California Victory for Workers
A victory for working people, Gig Workers
https://www.vox.com/2019/9/11/20851034/california-ab-5-workers-labor-unions
https://www.vox.com/2019/9/11/20851034/california-ab-5-workers-labor-unions
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