John Schmitt on increasing the minimum wage, unionization, and the European welfare state

Just posted my most recent podcast interview.

This week I spoke with John Schmitt, a senior economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. Be sure to check out his most recent op-ed, The Bogus Case Against the Minimum Wage Hike   as well as past columns which can be found here.  He has worked on a number of useful studies, papers, and reports which are very accessible and worth a look. 

Oh and he tweets.

*** Apologies to John and listeners for slight edit-- one of my dogs thoughtfully interjected agreement while John was speaking about the real world being a lot more messy than economic theory. Eh, so is blogging.

 

Martin Luther King Jr. on "Right to Work" laws

Occupy Geriatrics: Seniors in Walkers Shut Down San Francisco Bank of America

- San Francisco News

​What some healthy and spry Occupy Movements across the nation couldn't quite accomplish, San Francisco geriatrics have! 

KCBS reports that a small group of senior citizens between the ages of 69 and 82 successfully shut down a Bank of America in Bernal Heights on Thursday with nothing more than walkers and oxygen tanks. That's right: No shouting, chanting, tear gas, or window-smashing.

Who Killed Economic Growth? - YouTube

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The only chart you'll need to kill the "Obama the job killer" meme

Paul Krugman has the goods:

Greg Sargent is rightly outraged by Romney’s claim that Obama is a job destroyer:

Romney’s claim that two million jobs were lost under the Obama presidency is based on the idea that there’s been a net loss of jobs since he took office. In other words, Romney is taking into account the fact that the economy continued hemorraghing jobs at a furious rate after Obama took office — before Obama’s stimulus passed. But the figures show that once it became law, monthly job loss declined over time, and turned around in the spring of 2010, after which the private sector added jobs for over 20 straight months, totaling around 2.2 million of them.

I think this benefits from a figure:

Does this look to you like a president who “lost jobs”, or like a president who inherited an economy in free fall? You can accuse Obama of not doing enough to promote recovery — and I have (although the biggest villain here was Romney’s own party). But to claim that Obama caused the job loss is indefensible.

 

Help Wanted: Has anyone seen anything about this "left-wing, radical socialist Barack Obama"

when did center right become radical left.dib Download this file

HELP WANTED: Has anyone seen anything about this "left-wing, radical socialist Barack Obama" that Michele Bachmann keeps talking about?  I'd like to vote for him. Unfortunately, only one I know of is a center-right moderate who looks and sounds more like Ronald Reagan than Che Guevara. #media #fail

Our current dysfunctional prison system is a giant reminder of the failures of the Reagan Revolution

'Be patient and never to give up the struggle': an Interview with Tommy McKearney | Solidarity

Prisons everywhere are a barometer of a society’s level of development and the huge prison population in the US is a sad reflection on that country’s lack of well-being. Most recent swift increases in US prisoner numbers coincided with the enormous transfer of wealth from middle to top that came from the Reagan led neo-liberal agenda. The privileged elite found it necessary to contain the inevitable unrest and discontent by criminalising and imprisoning it and thus the increase in numbers.

Hopefully here in Georgia the General Assembly will start to reform our broken prison system during the upcoming session.   There is talk of it [Georgia rethinks its prison stance AJC.com] but lets see if those who brought the dysfunction can clean it up....

Obama Signs Defense Bill Allowing for Indefinite Detention of U.S. Citizens Without Trial

Democracy Now:

President Barack Obama has signed into law a $662 billion military spending bill that authorizes the government to indefinitely detain American citizens without trial. In a signing statement attached to the bill, Obama said he was signing the bill even though he had "serious reservations" with parts of the bill dealing with detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists. Sections of the bill were opposed by key members of the Obama administration including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, FBI Director Robert Mueller and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Human rights groups assailed Obama for backing down on his initial threat to veto the legislation. Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch said, "President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in U.S. law." Chris Anders of the American Civil Liberties Union has also been a vocal critic of the legislation. He recently appeared on Democracy Now!

Chris Anders, American Civil Liberties Union: "This is so broadly written, it would become a permanent feature of United States law, so that 10 years, 20 years down the road, any president could still use this power to have the military pick up people and indefinitely detain them without charge or trial, potentially for years, potentially for life.”

Taxpayers Spending 1 Billion Dollars on Georgia Prisons - YouTube

Chris Hedges "The American Empire Is Over & The Descent Is Going To Be Horrifying" - YouTube

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