Fast-food workers will walk off the job in 100 cities today, protesting the not-terribly-coincidental nexus of high corporate profits and sub-living standard wages for workers. The worst I can say about these one-day strikes is that they're not finishing the job right now -- as evidenced by pro-corporate flacks whining about "labor groups." We'll know these strikes are doing really well when these same flacks start squealing COMMUNISM SOCIALISM NAZISM KENYAN ANTI-COLONIALISM!!!!!
Surprise, surprise: one-third of America's bank tellers rely on public assistance to get by, says U-Cal Berkeley's Labor Center, resulting in almost $1 billion annually in, essentially, a subsidy to banksters. And dig the "senior financial analyst" at bankrate.com, telling us that when profit margins are "squeezed" by "an increasing amount of bank regulation," then "you have to make tough decisions." For other people, he must mean, since bankster CEOs aren't exactly making diddly-squat.
R.J. Eskow writes that the Republicans are stepping right into a trap by slamming the Affordable Care Act -- because they're inadvertently slamming what's essentially a free-market-based health care reform. It's a pretty thorough argument, full of nuggets you can use on your Tea Party uncle at the Christmas dinner table if you're so inclined, but I'd feel more confident about its explanatory power if the "liberal" media had been vigorously reporting the problems the Administration's had outsourcing the website's building to private contractors, or the "Medicare exchange" Paul Ryan wants to set up, or even that the Affordable Care Act was born in a right-wing think tank over twenty years ago.
Citizens for Tax Justice advocates either reforming research tax credits or letting them expire. Major problems with the tax credit, per CTJ: laws and regulations define "research" too broadly, and allow corporations to deduct too much research they would have done without the tax credit anyway. This, in a land where we still don't have a cure for cancer, where most of our research seems to go into making our cell phones cooler or spying on citizens more efficiently -- but a lemon-lime shaving cream "earns" a tax deduction.
Finally, The New Republic assesses Scott Walker's chances of winning the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination, and, sadly, they're right -- he can unite the teabaggers and the religious right and the corporations über alles wings of the party like no one else can, plus his political skills are not "an open question" as TNR says, because he's already proven himself a terrific BS artist who can punch and counterpunch on an even keel. So where is hope? That he somehow loses his gubernatorial re-election in 2014, that the various investigations into his ethical dealings finally bear fruit, that the teabaggers stage a tantrum of unprecedented size during the primaries, that the elites try to unite under the banner of someone even more under the radar like Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval, or that Democrats actually nominate someone who can win for a better reason than "I'm not an ogre." I wouldn't lay money on any of these.
Comments