Middle America is smoldering. For too long, average citizens worked harder and produced more, yet corporations cut pay and benefits, off-shored community-sustaining factories, killed family-supporting jobs and crushed opportunity. GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump stokes that fire by urging Americans to blame anyone but corporations and...
This Thanksgiving, in dining rooms across America, the turkey will be smaller, the stuffing more meager, the pumpkin pie sliced thinner. Gratitude will be given. But roiling just below the surface, for far too many families, will be economic anxiety. The vast majority of working Americans...
Over the past several weeks, as Alcoa and Century cut aluminum production nationwide, James Markus, a 23-year-veteran aluminum worker, acutely felt the pain of those laid off. That’s because just two years ago, in October of 2013, Markus and 750 fellow aluminum workers lost their jobs...
Americans who once earned family-supporting wages working in factories, foundries and mills across this country began destroying themselves at a shocking rate five years after implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). That’s because such deals – schemes exactly like the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership...
Workers received a terrifying message last week, one far more bone-chilling than Halloween ghouls or Freddie Krueger. It was this: Retirement security is only for CEOs, not for workers. Two sources delivered this frightening news. One was a dozen Republican presidential candidates insisting during last week’s...
As Vice President Joe Biden announced his decision last week not to run for president, he talked about dreams denied, possibilities foreclosed. He wasn’t speaking of his own aspirations, though. He conveyed absolutely no bitterness about relinquishing the potential to serve as president. Instead, he voiced deep...
Some terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the 12-nation trade proposal completed last week, are so repulsive that the New Zealand trade minister who helped negotiate the scheme described accepting them as swallowing dead rats. Here’s what New Zealand Minister Tim Groser said: “On the hardest...
Republicans and the rich guys who imposed 35 years of stagnant wages on American workers now offer a prescription for easing this pain! Their solution for robber-baron-level income inequality is not the obvious: Give workers raises. They don’t want to increase the minimum wage, which would...
Last week, Scott Walker one-upped the gang of GOP presidential candidates all jostling for the coveted Republican title of Best Billionaire Bootlicker. He accomplished that by announcing with pomp and fanfare that, unlike those other Republican pansies, a President Walker wouldn’t stop at crushing labor unions....