It’s lights out in Lorain on March 31. The town’s steel mill, site of a new electric arc furnace and $120 million investment, had given1,200 Ohioans good middle-class jobs this time last year. But by April, a relentless avalanche of underpriced Chinese steel will have shoved...
In the week before Valentine’s Day, United Technologies expressed its love for its devoted Indiana employees, workers whose labor had kept the corporation profitable, by informing 2,100 of them at two facilities that it was shipping their factories, their jobs, their communities’ resources to Mexico. A...
One percenters have it all, extra houses, extra cars, even an exclusive legal defense if they kill, “affluenza,” to keep them out of jail. But until last week, they felt unfairly denied access to the benefits of social welfare organizations, United Way, Habitat for Humanity and...
Donald Trump dares to say out loud what many people secretly think. It’s a dark secret some people never share because they know it’s so offensive. Sometimes they say it only when they feel safe, when they’re among like-minded family members or with friends trying to...
The people of Michigan hired themselves a GOP businessman to be governor in 2011. And what they got was children poisoned by public water in Flint. That is, what they got was a government run based on GOP business values. To line the pockets of CEOs and...
The GOP debate last week featured more immigrant bashing with the party’s front-runner, Donald Trump, reasserting his plan to construct a wall – this one a religious barrier preventing Muslims from getting into the country. Trump has mocked a disabled journalist and Asian speech patterns, demonized...
The grandest and most majestic first act of 2016 by the Republican majority in Congress was to take a meat clever and sever 17 million Americans from their Affordable Care Act health insurance. No chemo for you, cancer patients, the GOP declared. No plaster or slings...
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...