Category Archives: Economy

Economy, safety net

The Critical Battleground of Social Security

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Study: Half of Seniors at Risk for Poverty

Photo credit: Alliance for Retired Americans

By James Parks

Progressive America Rising via AFL-CIO Blog

Here’s one big reason congressional Republicans and the deficit hawks are dead wrong about cutting Social Security [1] benefits: According to a new study, nearly half (47.4 percent) of all Americans between the ages of 60 and 90 will experience at least one year of poverty or near poverty and seniors of color are twice as likely to be affected.

The study by Mark Rank, a professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis, shows that 58 percent of seniors between 60 and 84 will, at some point, not have enough liquid assets to allow them to weather an unanticipated expense or downturn in income.

But if you are a senior who is black or unmarried or have less than a high school education, the likelihood that you will be poor at some point increases dramatically. Rank found that although 32.7 percent of white older Americans will experience at least one year below the official poverty line, the percentage for black older Americans was nearly double at 64.6 percent.

Continue reading The Critical Battleground of Social Security →

Economy, labor, trade unions

UE Workers Want to Takeover Gasket Plant

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Boston-Area Union Will Block

Factory Auction to Save Jobs

By Jane Slaughter
solidarityeconomy.net

via Labor Notes

Nov. 29, 2010 – In a move to save factory jobs that evokes shades of the ’30s, the United Electrical Workers [1] are asking supporters to block a December 14 auction of presses and equipment from a plant south of Boston. The UE is calling for mass picketing and blockading of entrances to the 80-year-old plant if necessary.

Esterline Technologies Corp. of Bellevue, Washington, has refused to hold off on selling the equipment till another buyer can be found. The union’s request to buy the closed plant, which would create an employee-owned factory, has been ignored.

“They told us a year ago they did not want the presses or equipment,” said UE Local 204 President Scott Marques. “But they would rather junk them than sell them to us.”

The plant makes crucial door-seals and silicone gaskets for aircraft. Esterline is consolidating operations in Southern California and in Mexico.

Continue reading UE Workers Want to Takeover Gasket Plant →

Economy, unemployment

Where Do Jobs Come From? Hint: Not A Simple Answer

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Businesses Do Not Create Jobs

By Dave Johnson
Beaver County Blue
via Campaign for America’s Future
Nov 11, 2010

Businesses do not create jobs. In fact, the way our economy is structured the incentive is for businesses to get rid of as many jobs as they can.

Demand Creates Jobs

A job is created when demand for goods or services is greater than the existing ability to provide them. When there is a demand, people will see the need and fill it. Either someone will start filling the demand alone, or form a new business to fill it or an existing provider of the good or service will add employees as needed. (Actually a job can be created by a business, a government, a non-profit organization or just a person doing the job, depending on the nature of the good or service that is required.)

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Economy, unemployment

The Unemployed Are Beginning to Get Organized

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Can The Jobless Become A Political Force?

 

From Huffington Post

Sept 22, 2010

Labor activists are hoping the nation’s nearly 15 million unemployed can be a political force in the upcoming midterm elections.

“We’re convinced that the jobless, the unemployed, are the swing vote of the 2010 midterms and if they know who their tormentors are, they will swing really hard left,” said Rick Sloan in an interview with HuffPost. To that end, Sloan, who is a spokesman for the International Association of Machinists, started a “Union of Unemployed” with a website that he says gets 35,000 visitors a month. He created a web ad and is organizing a pre-rally for unemployed folks before the One Nation Working Together rally on Oct. 2.

“These folks are registered and, for a great number of them they were the surge voters of 2008,” he said. “They were younger, they were black, they were Latino, they were blue-collar without high school, and they were college educated. That’s what the demographics of the Obama surge vote looked like. And they have suffered disproportionately in this recession.”

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Economy, Environment

The Truth Is Coming Out On the Need to Regulate Gas Drilling

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‘Gasland’ Film Sweeping Pennsylvania

‘A force to be reckoned with’

 

Sunday, September 05, 2010

News from Cumberland, Harrisburg, York

The movie “Gasland” — about the environmental hazards of drilling and “fracking” shale for natural gas — has become a national sensation.

The documentary has aired repeatedly on HBO in recent months. Critics, including some Pennsylvania government officials, say it’s a piece of propaganda riddled with inaccuracies. Fans say it opened their eyes to what really happens when drillers come to town.

Either way, it has become a force to be reckoned with in the ongoing political debate over Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania. The film will be shown outdoors Tuesday in Reservoir Park.

Director Josh Fox is a native of Wayne County, and much of the film focuses on Pennsylvania problems and policies. In an interview last week, Fox spoke about the film’s impact.

Continue reading The Truth Is Coming Out On the Need to Regulate Gas Drilling →

antiwar, Economy

We Need Jobs, Not War – For Real

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Obama on Iraq’s ‘Ending’:

A Speech for Endless War

September 6, 2010

By Norman Solomon

Beaver County Peace Links via Z-Net 

On the last night of August, the president used an Oval Office speech to boost a policy of perpetual war.

Hours later, the New York Times front page offered a credulous gloss for the end of “the seven-year American combat mission in Iraq.” The first sentence of the coverage described the speech as saying “that it is now time to turn to pressing problems at home.” The story went on to assert that Obama “used the moment to emphasize that he sees his primary job as addressing the weak economy and other domestic issues — and to make clear that he intends to begin disengaging from the war in Afghanistan next summer.”

But the speech gave no real indication of a shift in priorities from making war to creating jobs. And the oratory “made clear” only the repetition of vague vows to “begin” disengaging from the Afghanistan war next summer. In fact, top administration officials have been signaling that only token military withdrawals are apt to occur in mid-2011, and Obama said nothing to the contrary.

While now trumpeting the nobility of an Iraq war effort that he’d initially disparaged as “dumb,” Barack Obama is polishing a halo over the Afghanistan war, which he touts as very smart. In the process, the Oval Office speech declared that every U.S. war — no matter how mendacious or horrific — is worthy of veneration.

Continue reading We Need Jobs, Not War – For Real →

Economy, social security

Message to Altmire: Cutting Social Security Is Both Dishonest and Whacko

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Simpson’s ‘Tits’ Are the Least of It

 

By Robert Kuttner

Beaver County Blue via The American Prospect

When you think about it, Alan (“Tits”) Simpson is the ideal jester to deflect attention from the bigger joke — the fiscal reform commission itself. The problem is less Simpson’s dopey comments and more the idiocy of the rest of the commission.

Given what is happening to the real economy in the real world, the prospect of a double-dip recession and the prospect of a lost decade of high unemployment, the idea that the bigger menace is Social Security is just whacko. Let’s recall that Social Security is in surplus until 2037!

Yet the idea that the road to recovery leads though cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and other social outlays that are keeping the depression from worsening, if anything, is gaining traction among opinion elites.

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Economy, labor, Right Wing

Grab the Pitchforks, It’s the Workers and the Unemployed vs. Glen Beck, the GOP and the Banksters

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USW Pres. Leo Gerard

Jobless Organize to Remove

Republican Royalists From Their Jobs

By Leo Gerard
President, United Steel Workers

Aug. 25, 201 – Glenn Beck made it official on Fox News last week: He’s seeking the office of 21st Century Marie Antoinette.

The queen of France, beheaded during the revolution, attained infamy for insensitivity toward hungry peasants. Glenn Beck, the Fox talk show host, achieved celebrity for his callousness toward unemployed Americans.

Beck leads a pack of royalist Republicans who have spent the summer mocking, vilifying and denigrating the nation’s 14.5 million unemployed workers. It is the moneyed class smacking down the working class in an attempt to disempower and disenfranchise them. Dispirited workers are less likely to vote – which could give Beck and his gang of royalist Republicans control of Congress.

The unemployed, like France’s 18th Century peasants, are fighting back, however. The Union of the Unemployed and Working America are organizing the jobless to vote this fall and to demand help from lawmakers. They’re not out to behead Beck and the royalist Republicans, just dethrone them.

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Economy, Environment, labor

UAW Joins with Steelworkers on Green Jobs Bus Tour, Arrives in Pittsburgh Aug. 30

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Auto Union Joins Labor,

Green Groups on Climate Bill Push

By Ben Geman

Beaver County Blue via TheHill.com

08/23/10 – The United Auto Workers is the latest union to join the BlueGreen Alliance, which unites labor and environmental groups pushing for greenhouse gas limits and other policies to create “green” jobs.
The UAW — also known as the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America — claims to have more than 390,000 active members.

“UAW members produce best-in-class cars and trucks, key vehicle components, and top quality heavy-duty trucks, and we know that we can rebuild the American auto industry by building cleaner, more efficient vehicles — and developing the technologies that will get us there,” UAW President Bob King said in a statement Monday about joining the BlueGreen Alliance.

“We have enormous opportunities to revitalize this industry, and the American economy, by embracing the clean energy economy of the future,” he said.

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Economy, labor, Right Wing

Unemployment Problem Solved Dept: Tea Party Candidate Wants to Bring Back ‘The Poor House’ and Expand Prison Jobs

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Oliver Twist Asks for ‘More’

Tea Party Candidate Says Move The Poor To Prison

From The Raw Story and the AP

via Beaver County Blue

[ Note from John Leonard: When I was growing up for many years, Pleasant Drive in Potter Twp. Beaver Co.  Pa was  called Poorhouse Run Road because the Poorhouse was located on what is now the property of Horse Head Industries.   Looks like some Republicans want to resurrect some bad parts of history.  Their families should be the first to enter into the new ideas they seek. ]

If elected governor of New York, Tea Party Republican Carl Paladino wouldn’t criminalize being poor, per se.  That would be unconstitional.  He’d just rather see them “voluntarily” move into state prisons where they could work on improving, among other things, their “personal hygiene”.

Paladino is competing for the Republican nomination with former U.S. Rep. Rick Lazio.  The primary is Sept. 14th and Paladino has campaigned hard to the right of Lazio.  He’s routinely argued that New York’s social services encourage illegal immigrants and the poor to come to live in New York. 

According to Paladino his poor-to-prison plan is modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps, a federal program that paid young unemployed men during the Great Depression to plant trees, build roads and develop parks.  Paladino’s program would be open to long-term welfare recipients and to people who had lost their jobs during the recession. 
Paladino is proposing to consolidate prison facilities and using the vacant ones into dormitory style housing where they could work for the state in some military or public works capacity in exchange for a receipt of benefits.

Continue reading Unemployment Problem Solved Dept: Tea Party Candidate Wants to Bring Back ‘The Poor House’ and Expand Prison Jobs →