Category: Minimum Wage
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A Fighter, and a Friend
Living in D.C., you can\’t help; crossing paths with some famous political names. In fact, you get used to it. But, as with most things, you never forget your first. And Ted Kennedy was my first. I was still new to D.C., having moved up from Georgia in the Summer of 1994 to work for…
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Colombia Trade Deal Is Derailed. Let\’s Keep It Off the Tracks
In August 2004, Hector Alino Martinez and three other Colombian trade unionists were dragged out of their homes and assassinated in the streets of Caño Seco. The men were among 96 unionists killed in Colombia that year. But supporters of Bush\’s drive to ram the Colombia Free Trade Agreement through Congress must think a few…
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Colombia Trade Deal Is Derailed. Let\’s Keep It Off the Tracks
In August 2004, Hector Alino Martinez and three other Colombian trade unionists were dragged out of their homes and assassinated in the streets of Caño Seco. The men were among 96 unionists killed in Colombia that year. But supporters of Bush\’s drive to ram the Colombia Free Trade Agreement through Congress must think a few…
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Forty Years Later, Still Far From the Mountaintop
“You know, Jesus reminded us in a magnificent parable one day that a man went to hell because he didn\’t see the poor. … And I come by here to say that America, too, is going to hell, if we don\’t use her wealth. If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to…
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The Mad, Mad Middle Class
You may not agree, as Sara Robinson provocatively suggests, that the country is primed for revolution. But there is no doubt that large numbers of middle-class people are mad, really mad, about the damage Bush-league conservatism has done to the country and to their futures. In fact, comments in a new Democracy Corps report, based…
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When Change Is Not Enough: The Seven Steps To Revolution
\”Those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.\” — John F. Kennedy There\’s one thing for sure: 2008 isn\’t anything like politics as usual. The corporate media (with their unerring eye for the obvious point) is fixated on the narrative that, for the first time ever, Americans will likely end this year with…
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Working through the Obstruction on Labor Day
It’s Labor Day and Congress is coming back into session. Time to step back to see where things stand, and what Congress can do about it. Start with the state of working America. It’s Labor Day after all, a holiday earned by organized labor and dedicated to working people. The Census Bureau just published new…
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An Overdue Pay Raise
With all of the talk about the conservative obstructionism in Congress that is keeping important bills from becoming law, Tuesday brings something worth celebrating: The federal minimum wage, which had been frozen at $5.15 an hour for almost 10 years, increases 70 cents an hour, to $5.85 cents an hour. The minimum wage increase is…
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Expose The Obstructionists
Americans elected a new Congress to get things done. But the conservative minority has chosen a strategy of obstruction in the Senate. They have used the threat of a filibuster to delay or block virtually every major initiative. Bills with majority support—raising the minimum wage, ethics reform, a date to remove troops from Iraq, revoking…
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Make Poverty A Priority
In little more than a decade after President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty,” President Ronald Reagan led the nation in the equivalent of a helicopter evacuation from the epicenter of the fight. Reagan and his band of conservatives also so poisoned the political discussion about poverty that even today many progressives dare not…