Paul Buchheit at Nation of Change lists all the ways corporations really owe us. Right-wingers like to say we owe them -- that without corporations giving us jobs out of the goodness of their hearts, we'd all be screwed -- but fact is, without taxpayer money still funding the majority of all basic research in America and the vast majority of research conducted at universities, they'd be screwed. I don't need to literally be paid back for that, as Mr. Buchheit suggests -- I'd just like corporate titans to stop pretending they don't need us more than we need them.
Arkansas minimum wage worker talks to Washington Post about the minimum wage, then gets fired -- without having said anything mean about her job or her employer, even. Her boss relates the story of her firing differently, but he also said he'd sue if the writer published the article, and may have tried to disguise his voice in an attempt to evade further questioning from the Post. It'd be comic if it weren't, you know, tragic.
Well-funded special interest groups (including ALEC) push states to repeal "prevailing wage" laws. Prevailing wage laws prevent governments from driving wages downward by offering to pay workers less in a locality than other workers get. Noting that the Davis-Bacon Act was sponsored by two Republican Congressmen and signed by a Republican President (none of these from the party's progressive wing, either), you kind of have to wonder why any self-respecting conservative would support giving government more power to outbid contractors and drive wages down. Naturally, the answer would be, "a conservative wouldn't" -- but a reactionary corporatist would.
Medicare Part D spent $4.5 billion on Hepatitis C drugs last year, which ordinarily wouldn't be bad news, since Hep C had no cure until 2013. But ProPublica ominously intones that Medicare spent "taxpayer money," which is, like, its job -- sure, it spent a lot more on Hep C drugs in 2014 than in 2013, and drugs are often ridiculously-expensive when they're new and even more so when they're life-saving, but we shouldn't have had to wait until paragraph 24 to be reminded that the law creating Medicare Part D prevented Medicare from negotiating better drug prices.
Finally, the incomparable Ta-Nehisi Coates describes some of the history behind the deliberate creation of ghettoes in Chicago during the 1960s, and the Federal Housing Authority's complicity therein. If you're familiar with redlining, none of this will particularly surprise you, but it's nonetheless a crushingly sad story of "black people playing by the rules," then "effectively declared outside the law and thus preyed upon."
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