Employment

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – Conservatives in both political parties want citizens to believe opposition to an increase in the minimum wage is a simple matter of supply and demand economics. If government regulators increase the price of hamburger, consumers will buy less hamamburger. Increase the price (wages) of labor and businesses […]

Development

Yes we need the $1.9 Trillion Stimulus: Real Unemployment is 3 times what they’re telling us

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – As Congress gets set to debate the Biden Pandemic relief package, one of the favorite Republican lines is the contention that an economic recovery is already well underway. Pouring more money into an accelerating economy is likely to induce seventies style inflation. It is time, they argue, […]

Employment

Can Biden’s $15/ hr Minimum Wage begin restoring Working Class trust?

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – Watch CNN almost any time lately and one is inundated with scenes of the lethal riots in the Capitol. And in an era when every man or woman is their own video journalist new and often terrifying footage is released on a continuing basis. Along with footage […]

Donald Trump

Biden to invoke Defense Production Act for Vaccine manufacture. Trump? Playing Golf at Mar-a-Lago

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Will Feuer at CNBC reports that Joe Biden will invoke the Defense Production Act to ramp up the manufacture of more doses of the coronavirus vaccine. You may ask yourself, why has this not already been done? Trump said on December 9 that he “might” invoke the Korea War-era act, […]

China

How incompetent Boob Trump took down America and launched the Chinese Century

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The twentieth century was dubbed “the American Century” in 1941 by Time magazine publisher Henry Luce. Luce hoped that Americans would abandon their isolationism and seek international allies, joining against the Axis in WW II. It was then more wishful thinking on his part than reality, but his wish arguably […]

Debt

Austerity Terrors: Congress Stimulus Package Finally Passes – but it is Too Little, Too Late

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – 900 billion dollars is a big amount, Apparently one trillion is a whole order of magnitude greater. Or at least the number is so terrifying that politicians bend heaven and earth to avoid being connected with trillion dollar expenditures. And this allergic reaction is bipartisan. In the […]

Employment

Mitch McConnell Wants to Let Corporations Kill You

Thom Hartmann

( Otherwords.org ) – The Senate GOP leader’s refusal to pass COVID-19 aid without corporate immunity should be the scandal of the year. By Thom Hartmann | December 16, 2020 Probably the most under-reported story of the year has been how Mitch McConnell is holding Americans hostage in exchange for letting big corporations kill Americans […]

Employment

A Tsunami of Evictions: Pandemic Housing Markets are about to be hammered, even Middle Class is Endangered

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – Twelve million unemployed people are set to lose all their benefits at the end of December. And about 19 million people are currently unable to pay their rent, with the CDC’s moratorium on evictions set to expire on New Year’s Day. Mainstream media persist in speaking of […]

Debt

The Great American Moonshot: Now we Need a Vaccine for Poverty, Inequality and Racism

Liz Theoharis

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Martin Luther King, Jr., offered this all-too-relevant comment on his moment in his 1967 speech “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?”: “The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the […]