Obama only briefly mentioned fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in last Tuesday's State of the Union speech, depicting the trade agreement as part of his bipartisan outreach to the GOP, while claiming it would boost U.S. exports.
Have you seen the economic recovery? I haven’t either. But it is bound to be around here somewhere, because the National Bureau of Economic Research spotted it in June 2009, four and one-half years ago.
In America today there is a crisis. That crisis is economic inequality. The U.S. workforce has been blamed and dismissed for the growing gap between rich and poor. Much effort has gone into blaming the victim. Americans have been called fat, lazy and stupid along with the never ending drumbeat claim U.S. workers are uneducated and do not have enough technological skills.
A woman named Dawn Hughey had worked at a Dollar General store for just four months when she was named "manager" of a store in the Detroit suburbs in 2009. Having recently moved home after a stint in California, Hughey had hoped the new honorific title (and its accompanying annual salary) would help her start a new life in Michigan. But like other managers in America's booming dollar store industry, Hughey quickly came to realize she was a manager in name only.
One of my most popular columns was about escaping from the Matrix existence in which Americans live. It is a world of disinformation and misinformation in which facts are fiction, and abstract theories are substituted for empirical reality.
Official government statistics are make-believe. The government makes inflation and unemployment disappear by how it defines inflation and unemployment, and it makes the economy grow by how it defines Gross Domestic Product. The definitional basis determines the statistical result.
In a speech last Wednesday President Obama said, "Over the past 40 months, our businesses have created 7.2 million new jobs. This year, we are off to our strongest private-sector job growth since 1999."
But is that really true? And one also has to wonder...just what kind of jobs have those businesses been creating over the past 40 months? It's not always about the quantity, but the quality as well.
The change in the skill (educational) level of jobs being moved abroad has led some to wonder whether the offshoring of service, unlike production, activities will result in college graduates facing a dwindling supply of entry-level jobs that have traditionally served as stepping-stones to higher skilled and higher paying positions. The notion that offshoring depresses job growth in the United States appears to underlie support among some policymakers for measures meant to encourage U.S. firms to expand employment domestically rather than abroad.
Once again our daily barrage of economic injustice news is overwhelming. From lobbyist lies to interest rate swap rigging to killing workers by the hundreds to our best and brightest working jobs flipping burgers, here are some quick economic news shorts that you don't want to miss.
The Dow hit a record high yet for most of America this means little. While some fawn and fan over the high rise stock market, here are some stories that actually matter to real people with real lives.
There is a complete disconnect in Washington from the quiet desperation of American lives. While politicians chatter talking points and claim lobbyists' agendas are somehow sane economic and labor policy, a full 23% of Americans have been fired in the last four years.
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