McDonald's announces that they'll hike their minimum wage for certain workers by a dollar over local minimum wage requirements. But the move would only affect some 10 percent of its workers -- the vast majority work at franchises, and thus McDonald's pretends its hands are tied. McDonald's will also offer five days of paid leave after one year of employment, which makes me wonder how many McDonald's employees stay that long.
New Hampshire clergy protest recent Republican budget proposals that would cut taxes for the wealthy and services for everyone, calling the proposals "immoral." Most religious Americans really are very good people -- it's just a few bad apples that give the rest of us a bad name, the kind of folk that would cut emergency services for domestic violence victims in half. And good for New Hampshire Voices for Faith that they invoke the Moral Monday movement down in North Carolina, where the state legislature is even more reactionary.
FAIR catches "liberal" media outlets falling for "ISIS plots" that don't actually involve ISIS. The plots involve ISIS wannabes, as well as federal agents pretending to be ISIS terrorists. I'm not against undercover agents, obviously, but you're free to wonder to what degree our efforts actually catch home-grown terrorists, versus growing them -- and you're equally free to wonder if growing them is the idea.
The Center for Effective Government issues a report cleverly entitled "Burning Our Bridges," describing how we could fund the massive infrastructure improvements America needs by taxing corporations fairly, rather than relying on pro-corporate gimmicks like tax amnesty "repatriation." A little more than two dozen corporations hold about half of the $2 trillion-plus that corporations shunt offshore to avoid taxation. Oh, and since the last tax amnesty about 10 years ago, their offshore profits increased fivefold. Folks who think tax amnesties are an "incentive" to do good must also be the people who think giving their kids cookies before homework is an "incentive" to do homework.
Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina says she's at least 90 percent sure she'll run for President. Because, she says, she has a "deep understanding of how the economy actually works," which may be true, in the sense that she nearly destroyed HP during her tenure and got paid $20 million to go away. She'll also hit a snag with the nativist wing of the party when they find out she wanted to expand the H-1B visa program, but I'd rather see her candidacy perish on her economic views, which made her rich but didn't do anyone else any good.
Finally, in a bit of good news, President Obama on Tuesday commuted the sentences of 22 prisoners, all of whom were serving lengthy sentences for non-violent drug offenses. We've advocated for such action, of course, and I won't criticize him for not doing more, at least not yet. He did appear to grant fewer pardons in his first term than his four predecessors did in their first terms -- and such frugal mercy has really endeared him to right-wingers, hasn't it?
Comments