Tag Archives: class warfare

Chicago fast-food and retail workers go on strike to raise minimum wage to $15.00

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Chicago fast-food and retail workers begin mass walkout  – Hundreds of fast food and retail employees in Chicago began a mass walkout Wednesday morning, calling for the city’s minimum wage to be raised to $15 an hour. WLS-TV reported that the protest, organized by the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago (WOCC), included employees from national store chains ranging from McDonald’s to Sears to Victoria’s Secret, most of whom currently make $8.25 an hour, a wage that WOCC members said forces workers to use social service programs like RentAid to make ends meet. “We need wages that we can survive on and support our families,” said committee member Lorraine Sanchez. “These are poverty wages and homelessness wages, and our workers are working two or three jobs, supporting families.”

NBC Chicago – The Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago campaign says many of the 275,000 men and women working in Chicago’s fast food and retail outlets can’t afford things like food, clothing and rent on the minimum $8.25 an hour that most of them make. Some say they rely on public assistance for health care for their children while others say bills are piling up. [...] The group says their companies make more than $4 billion a year on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile and in the Loop yet workers’ wages remain too low to live in the city.

Chicago Tribune – A study last year by the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group, found that most of the jobs gained since the early 2010 — 58 percent — paid $12 an hour or less. It also found that the workers earning $14 to just over $21 per hour suffered the biggest losses during the recession and that hiring at that pay grade has lagged during the recovery.

But those six- and seven-figure executive bonuses keep growing every year! 

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Blake Fall-Conroy, “Minimum Wage Machine,” 2008-2010 (via andrewfishman) – This machine allows anyone to work for minimum wage for as long as they like. Turning the crank on the side releases one penny every 4.97 seconds, for a total of $7.25 per hour. This corresponds to minimum wage for a person in New York. This piece is brilliant on multiple levels, particularly as social commentary. Without a doubt, most people who started operating the machine for fun would quickly grow disheartened and stop when realizing just how little they’re earning by turning this mindless crank. A person would then conceivably realize that this is what nearly two million people in the United States do every day at much harder jobs than turning a crank. This turns the piece into a simple, yet effective argument for raising the minimum wage.

Minimum wage vs. CEO pay: things that never increase vs. things that increase exponentially

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“Working folks shouldn’t have to wait year after year for the minimum wage to go up, while CEO pay has never been higher. So here’s an idea that Governor Romney and I actually agreed on last year: let’s tie the minimum wage to the cost of living, so it finally becomes a wage you can live on.” — PRESIDENT OBAMA

In his State of the Union address last night, President Obama surprised Washington with a bold plan to raise the federal minimum wage, arguing that “in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty.”

“Today, a full-time worker making the minimum wage earns $14,500 a year. Even with the tax relief we’ve put in place, a family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty line. That’s wrong.”

His proposal would guarantee workers at least $9.00 an hour by 2015—a 25 percent increase over the current $7.25—and index the minimum to inflation so that wages grow in tandem with rising prices. That would allow a full-time worker making the minimum wage to earn $18,720 a year—more than enough to support a family of three, according to the government’s official poverty guidelines.

via benjaminlandy

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CEOs make 380 times what the average worker receives in pay. Imagine the comparison to minimum wage workers: 2011 average CEO pay / compensation: $12,935,475 — average American worker pay: $34,053.

AFL-CIO: The ratio of CEO-to-worker pay between CEOs of the S&P 500 Index companies and U.S. workers widened to 380 times in 2011 from 343 times in 2010.[2] Back in 1980, the average large company CEO only received 42 times the average worker’s pay.[3]

CEOs supposedly deserve all this money for increasing shareholder value. However, while the average CEO pay increased 13.9 percent at S&P 500 Index companies in 2011, the S&P 500 Index ended the year at the same level as it started.

…In 2011, average wages increased just 2.8 percent and average worker pay totaled $34,053.[4]

Stand with Walmart employees on Black Friday: do not shop at Walmart

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image: nohelp

Robert Reich: Why You Shouldn’t Shop at Walmart on Friday

A half century ago America’s largest private-sector employer was General Motors, whose full-time workers earned an average hourly wage of around $50, in today’s dollars, including health and pension benefits.

Today, America’s largest employer is Walmart, whose average employee earns $8.81 an hour. A third of Walmart’s employees work less than 28 hours per week and don’t qualify for benefits.

There are many reasons for the difference – including globalization and technological changes that have shrunk employment in American manufacturing while enlarging it in sectors involving personal services, such as retail.

But one reason, closely related to this seismic shift, is the decline of labor unions in the United States. In the 1950s, over a third of private-sector workers belonged to a union. Today fewer than 7 percent do. As a result, the typical American worker no longer has the bargaining clout to get a sizeable share of corporate profits.

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Walmart earned $16 billion last year (it just reported a 9 percent increase in earnings in the third quarter of 2012, to $3.6 billion), the lion’s share of which went instead to Walmart’s shareholders — including the family of its founder, Sam Walton, who earned on their Walmart stock more than the combined earnings of the bottom 40 percent of American workers.

Is this about to change? Despite decades of failed unionization attempts, Walmart workers are planning to strike or conduct some other form of protest outside at least 1,000 locations across the United States this Friday – so-called “Black Friday,” the biggest shopping day in America when the Christmas holiday buying season begins.

…

But if retail workers got a raise, would consumers have to pay higher prices to make up for it? A new study by the think tank Demos reports that raising the salary of all full-time workers at large retailers to $25,000 per year would lift more than 700,000 people out of poverty, at a cost of only a 1 percent price increase for customers.

And, in the end, retailers would benefit. According to the study, the cost of the wage increases to major retailers would be $20.8 billion — about one percent of the sector’s $2.17 trillion in total annual sales. But the study also estimates the increased purchasing power of lower-wage workers as a result of the pay raises would generate $4 billion to $5 billion in additional retail sales.

Continue reading….


changewalmart: From ArtistsVsWalmart.Tumblr.com


via: christopherstreet

Walmart’s employees aren’t compensated with a living wage or benefits, so we — the taxpayers — pick up the tab for what their greedy owners won’t pay for: food, shelter, medical care, etc.

This situation has worked out really well for CEO Michael Duke, upper management, and the Walton children for decades — but it hasn’t worked out so great for the rest of us.

What’s wrong with America? Walmart ethics.

Poor Mitt: a hologram for president

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“Romney is so inordinately proud of his enormous wealth, which he mentions at every opportunity, that he apparently assumed it would command unquestioned respect from the masses. He’s been actively running for president for six years, but – even to the amazement of Fox News – it never occurred to him that it might not be terribly appealing to American voters that a potential president hoards his millions in the tax shelters of Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. Or that an election year in the midst of an economic recession might not be the moment to spend $12 million renovating his beach house in California, complete with an elevator for his cars. Or that perhaps his wife should have been encouraged to take up another hobby besides $400,000 dressage horses.”

— Eliot Weinberger: A Hologram for President  (via: azspot)

Jon Stewart and Joseph Stiglitz on inequality in America

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source: sandandglass

Joseph Stiglitz

4.6% — that’s your aggrievement, your entitlement, your socialism, your class warfare

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Kevin Drum would like to remind everyone what the outrage from the top elite is all about:

“I just want everyone to be absolutely clear on what this “narrative of aggrievement” is all about. It’s about Obama’s proposal that the marginal tax rate on income over $400,000 should rise from 35% to 39.6%. That’s your aggrievement. That’s your entitlement. That’s your socialism. That’s your class warfare. An increase in the top marginal tax rate of 4.6 percentage points. Four. Point. Six. This is what America’s most prosperous citizens are up in arms about. This is why Barack Obama is an enemy of capitalism. These are the spiteful shackles he proposes to use to subjugate America’s engines of job creation. It’s the reason America’s wealthiest citizens are so frightened about the future of their country. 4.6 percentage points. Just let that sink in.”

Chrystia Freeland piles on:

“The president is arguing that what works for the top of the United States isn’t working for the middle, and that is a criticism the country’s lionized elite hasn’t heard from its leader in a very long time.”

More on the Republican budget plan analysis: Obama’s plan vs the GOP plan

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More on that Republican budget plan analysis from Think Progress:

Here’s the breakdown of how much each income group would receive in tax cuts under the respective plans. The GOP plan would give millionaires an additional $50,000 annually, while taxing the lowest-income Americans $150 more than Obama’s plan:

Under the GOP plan, nearly one-third of the total benefit goes to the richest 1 percent, while just 11 percent of the benefit of Obama’s plan does:

Of course, both of these plans entail spending huge amounts of money to extend tax cuts that didn’t deliver on their economic promise. But under the GOP plan, an even larger percentage of that money would be dumped straight into the hands of those at the top of the income scale.

Paul Ryan’s budget: the middle class should pay more tax and the wealthiest should pay less

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What could the Republicans want to distract the public’s attention from with this Eric Holder / contempt business? How about this:

Brian Buetler explains a new analysis of Paul Ryan’s budget (which was endorsed by Mitt Romney), by Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee, with the help of data from the Tax Policy Center:

Republicans want the broad middle class to pay more taxes than they currently do, and the upper class to pay significantly less.

[...] Republicans want to dramatically lower the top tax rate and eliminate brackets so there are only two — one at 25 percent, one at 10 percent. That would put a huge amount of cash in the pockets of high income earners. For middle class earners, it’d be a much more modest sum. To make the plan revenue neutral, Ryan claims Republicans would close myriad loopholes that disproportionately benefit the upper-middle and upper classes — he just won’t say which ones.

The rub is that Ryan’s tax cuts are expensive and to pay for ithem he’d likely have to clawback the biggest middle-class tax benefits — like the mortgage interest deduction, and the tax exclusion on employer health benefits — such that the net effect for people making less than $200,000 would be a higher annual tax burden. The plan redistributes wealth upwards.

The Washington Post: Middle class would face higher taxes under Republican plan: The report, prepared by Senate Democrats and reviewed by nonpartisan tax experts, marks the first attempt to quantify the trade-offs inherent in the GOP tax package, which would replace the current tax structure with two brackets — 25 percent and 10 percent — and cut the top rate from 35 percent.Those changes would benefit virtually every taxpayer, but they also would reduce federal tax collections by about $4.5 trillion over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. To avoid increasing the national debt by that amount, GOP leaders such as House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (Wis.) have pledged to get rid of all the special-interest loopholes and tax shelters that litter the code.

Ezra Klein: The economy is not recovering. It is, if anything, unrecovering.

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THE STIMULUS SHOULD HAVE BEEN BIGGER. AND LONGER. There should have been massive debt forgiveness. There should have been policies enacted to save jobs and to create them,. And the Federal Reserve should have been more aggressive. From Ezra Klein:

Let’s begin with the stimulus. It needed to be bigger. But there were two problems with bigger: Congress wouldn’t have gone for it, and the administration probably couldn’t have spent it effectively. Tax cuts, which can be done quickly and at any size, aren’t very stimulative because they get saved rather than spent. And infrastructure investment, which is very stimulative, can’t be ramped up quickly.

But it could have been longer. The stimulus was a two-year shot, and it was too small even before we knew that the recession was larger than it initially appeared. The administration wrongly figured that if it needed more, Congress would be happy to comply. That was a costly miscalculation.

If the White House had better understood the likely length of the recession and designed the stimulus funds to be spent over four years, it could have included a larger and smarter infrastructure component and tied the size and duration of the tax cuts, unemployment benefits and state and local aid to the unemployment rate.

[...] The game changer, however, would have been massive debt forgiveness. This could have been done through a federal program to purchase troubled mortgages and give homeowners better rates, as John McCain proposed late in the 2008 campaign, or by nationalizing the banks and taking the bad debts off their books, or some other option. But the politics of using taxpayer dollars to pay off mortgages were horrible. How do you explain to people who decided against buying homes they couldn’t afford that they’re now paying the mortgages of those who made the opposite decision?

Fundamentally, the stimulus was an attempt to grow our way out of the recession, and our housing policies were an attempt to reduce the debt that was keeping us in the recession. It was what I call “offensive policy.” In retrospect, however, we could have used more “defensive policy.” We were so focused on getting out of the crisis that we ignored some of the policies that would have helped us endure it.

Chief among these were policies to either save jobs or create them directly. In the first case, we could have taken a page out of the German playbook and launched a program to pay employers who cut hours rather than fired workers. In the second case, the government could have provided more help to state and local governments, which have lost more than 500,000 jobs, and tried direct-employment schemes like Christina Romer’s idea to hire 100,000 teacher’s aides.

Finally, the Federal Reserve acted with extraordinary speed and aggressiveness to prevent the crisis from becoming a calamity. The Fed has been more tentative in its efforts to speed the recovery. Read more…

IN OTHER WORDS, DURING THE FINANCIAL CRISIS the one percenters were taken care of with federal tax money while 99 percent were not. Now the one percenters are directing the 99 percent to find their bootstraps — as usual.

Wall St rebound

 

The one thing money can’t buy: an understanding that the fate of the 1% is bound to how the 99% lives

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MAYBE THIS WILL BE REMEMBERED AS THE AWAKENING for American plutocrats and multinational corporations — a very slow, painful awakening, surely.

The class warfare the rich don’t understand (via gonzodave)

Is this a class war? Yes, probably. And it’s one of those really long wars, the kind that goes on forever. But in this latest battle, there’s little doubt who fired the first shot. When the financial crisis hit, the Masters of the Universe evaded responsibility and defiantly demanded more sacrifice from their victims. They enlisted their favoured politicians to hold the people hostage and then complained about being unloved despite their crimes. They have won all the early skirmishes – but the people are gathering their forces and starting to fight back.

“The top 1 per cent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 per cent live Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 per cent eventually do learn. Too Late.” — Joseph Stiglitz

DESPITE THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE being kicked into high gear on behalf of the Masters of the Universe — with the hackneyed right wing arguments about “punishing success” or jealousy and sour grapes — there is one simple fact at the foundation of the Occupy Wall Street protests: In America the 99 percent are greater than the 1 percent but are asked to sacrifice more and are given less.

liberalsarecool: When corporations comprising an entire industry fail, and need to be bailed out by taxpayers, there is simply no way of calling it capitalism. Come up with a new word because it is not capitalism.

Related:

#OccupyWallStreet BY THE NUMBERS: What’s actually “too big to fail” … 1% or 99%?

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AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka at the Take Back The American Dream summit:

Trumka said of Republicans, “If they want to have a debate on class warfare, we’ll have that debate,” because “It wasn’t our class that started the war on working Americans.”

Trumka used his time to illustrate many of the examples of what he termed the “strange morality” of the modern economy, from mass layoffs at Bank of America despite record profits to narratives in which “the jobless are blamed for the unemployment crisis.” He also noted that, “The years from 1997-2010 represented the first protracted decline in family income since the Great Depression.”

Yet, referring to the many debates in Washington this year, he asked “When are we going to recognize that this crisis is a jobs crisis, not a debt crisis?”

When it comes to the supercommitee charged with resolving said debt crisis, Trumka offered his take to great effect: “We’ll fight anyone from any party that tries to cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefits.”

[...] Trumka returned to the meat of his speech and his obvious rhetorical preferences: the economic crisis. “Americans want to work,” he intoned, “and we won’t stop fighting, shoving, pushing and kicking until every single one is back to work.”

And lest his opponents try to argue that “‘Government can’t create jobs,’” he promised his response would be, “‘Just you watch, we’ll make government create jobs.’”

To the Republican party and the 1% they represent:

“I think it’s dangerous, this class warfare.” — Mitt Romney on #OccupyWallStreet

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(via: The Caucus) Not coincidentally, Mittens has become a favorite of Wall Street donors.

image: divineirony

Senator Bernie Sanders’ Guide to Corporate Freeloaders

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Image via Think Progress

And it’s not like they’re creating jobs…

Bernie Sanders has a great idea:

Under Sanders’ legislation, a 5.4 percent tax on income of more than $1 million a year would yield up to $50 billion annually for the U.S. Treasury.

The same legislation would end tax breaks for big oil and gas companies. That provision would yield about $3.5 billion a year in new revenue.

Sanders voted yesterday against a House-passed spending bill that slashed Head Start, Pell grants, community health centers, LIHEAP, the Social Security Administration and many other programs that are vitally important to millions of middle-class families.

“The Republicans wanted to move toward a balanced budget solely on the backs of the middle class and some of the most vulnerable people in this country, but didn’t ask the wealthiest people, who are becoming much wealthier, to contribute one penny in shared sacrifice.”

I don’t think it’s out of line to ask the wealthy to start contributing their fair share.They’ve been raking it in at the expense of everyone else for over a decade.

Do you think this is something the Teaparty ‘patriots’ teabaggers will address at their rally on Capitol Hill today? Me neither.

The Republican Strategy: Wisconsin, the federal budget, patriotism, and class warfare

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Robert Reich:

The Republican strategy is to split the vast middle and working class – pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don’t believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class.

By splitting working America along these lines, Republicans hope to deflect attention from the big story. That’s the increasing share of total income and wealth going to the richest 1 percent while the jobs and wages of everyone else languish.

Republicans would rather no one notice their campaign to generate further tax cuts for the rich – making the Bush tax cuts permanent, further reducing the estate tax, and allowing the wealthy to shift ever more of their income into capital gains taxed at 15 percent.

The strategy has three parts…

The best illustration of the Republican strategy is this chart:

Here’s exactly what Robert Reich is talking about.

Yay, “Capitalism!” Over past 30 years, 64% of wealth redistributed to the top 10%

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What “trickled down” to the remaining 90% of Americans again?

The Rich Getting Richer in One Chart (Ezra Klein)

technipol:

The Rich Getting Richer in One Chart (Ezra Klein)

Think about that for a minute: 64 percent of all income growth since 1979 has gone to the top 10 percent.

Source.