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Viewing Economics NEWS articles 226 through 300 of 414
- The share of national income going to wages and salaries is at the lowest level since 1929 -- the year that kicked off the Great Depression. The share going to after-tax corporate profits, which heavily benefit wealthy Americans through increased dividends and capital gains, is at the highest level since 1929. - When he was a student at Harvard Business School, a young George W. Bush told one of his professors that "poor people are poor because they're lazy." It's their own fault. Tell that to those 13 million babies.
- General Motors’ plan to eliminate 30,000 hourly jobs by 2008, announced Monday in Detroit, will have devastating consequences for cities in the United States and Canada, and its ripple effects will hit working class communities throughout the two countries. - Two nonprofit groups sign deal to aid low-income residents
- The Average American Owes $9,000
- Top executives now make more in a day than the average worker makes in a year. - A GOP Scrooge Xmas
- US unions, weakened by public apathy and internal splits, are fighting back with an online database that accuses corporate supremos of lining their own pockets while grinding down their employees. - A subsidiary of the Venezuelan national oil company will ship 12 million gallons of discounted home-heating oil to local charities and 45,000 low-income families in Massachusetts next month under a deal arranged by US Representative William D. Delahunt, a local nonprofit energy corporation, and Venezuela's president, White House critic Hugo Chávez. - High health care costs and lack of low-cost housing exacerbate poverty and this can be seen as a human rights abuse, concluded a 17-day fact-finding mission by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights... - Eliminate the current $126 billion tax subsidy. Use the money instead as a down payment on a universal and affordable system of health insurance – available to everyone regardless of how much they earn, where they work, or even whether they have a job. - Workers in the United States are far more nervous about losing their jobs than they were six months ago and are now among the least confident employees among the world's leading economies.
- The American empire is an energy junkie in its death throes, punching for new veins and final fixes, knowing that the supplies of its drug of choice -- cheap oil -- are virtually depleted. - Is 80,000 the maximum number of people we can feed in the richest country on earth?! Meanwhile, we are spending $6 billion a month to kill Iraqis in their homes and cities.
- A survey finds that of employers who do plan to give bonuses, few plan to give cold cash.
- It was an incredible revelation last week that the second largest oil field in the world is exhausted and past its peak output. Yet that is what the Kuwait Oil Company revealed about its Burgan field. - ...the peaking and decline of world oil production are inevitable events -- and on that there is scarcely any debate; only the timing is uncertain. Forecast dates for the peak range from this year to 2035.
- Just because technology makes it possible for us to work 10 times faster than we used to doesn't mean we should do it. The body may be able to withstand the strain -- for a while -- but the spirit isn't meant to flail away uselessly on the commercial gerbil wheel. The boys in corporate don't want you to hear this because the more they can suck out of you, the lower their costs and the higher their profit margin.
- The brutal colonial war in Iraq is but the flip slide of the war at home against workers, immigrants, and other oppressed people.
- High levels of illiteracy are hindering attempts to erase world poverty, the United Nations education agency warns.
- Congressional leaders say it's time to get serious about the deficit, so they cut $36-billion in spending on the country's working poor. And then they give the wealthy $70-billion more in tax breaks. - ...average pay for an hour's work has less purchasing power than it had four years ago ..
- In Bushzarro world, neoliberal schemes to steal natural resources and reduce millions of people to slaves are portrayed as “good for jobs” (or jobs that pay 60 cents an hour or less) and “quality of life” (so long as the slaves don’t mind eking out a radically diminished existence in sprawling, crime-wracked barrios, spending half of their income on clean drinking water). - "This is not a war on drugs. It's a war on people."
- If the multi-millionaire CEOs, who have bled their firms in order to fill their own pockets, and the vulture speculators and asset-strippers move to close plants and destroy the livelihoods of tens of thousands of working people—their companies should be transformed into publicly owned and democratically controlled enterprises. - Militant industrial action must be tied to the struggle to build a new party of the international working class that is committed to radically reorganizing the world economy so that the technological revolution can be used to improve the life of all, not slash jobs, speed up production and swell the profits squeezed from working people.
- "...we have shown how the workers can run the companies, and this means we can run society as well."
- During the recent corporate globalization inspired economic downturns in Argentina's recuperated factory movement shows that in a matter of months even after being slogged and flailed their whole lives through, even when they are barely literate or are illiterate, working people can take up tasks supposedly beyond their ken and accomplish them honorably and effectively. Likewise, Argentina's occupied factories display the powerful spontaneous desire of people who haven't been socialized into elitist mindsets to earn equitably and to apportion power fairly rather than dominate or be dominated. - Over one-tenth of the United States population faced "food insecurity" last year, continuing a five-year trend in growing hunger and household food shortages. - Make the poor pay. That’s the slogan that George W. Bush and the politicians seem to have adopted for their latest budget proposals.
- His property in demand, former waiter raises asking price to $1.2 million
- How Wall Street uses thought-weapons of manipulation to fleece common investors. - ...50 cents an hour in the Depression translates into $7.89 per hour in today's dollars.
- They don't know about it yet, but they'll soon find out!
- U.S. senators -- who draw salaries of $162,100 a year and enjoy a raft of perks -- have rejected a minimum wage hike from $5.15 an hour to $6.25 for blue-collar workers. - The Senate decided yesterday the money was not there for a substantial spending boost for the federal home heating program, deflecting arguments that soaring energy prices could force the poor to choose between heat and food this winter. - The House Agriculture Committee approved budget cuts Friday that would take food stamps away from an estimated 300,000 people and could cut off school lunches and breakfasts for 40,000 children - American workers expect and deserve fair pay for hard work and clean noses, not pay for pulse, pretenses, or pilfering. If workers performed as badly as CEOs, they’d be fired or "outsourced"—not enticed with stock options, country club memberships, and cash bonuses just to grace the executive suite with their presence.
- How much longer can the imbalances in the world economy continue to grow before they give rise to a major crisis? - Fastest Decline in Real Wages on Record - "Traditionally in the Latin market, I would say players sign for about 5 to 10 cents on the dollar compared to their US counterparts." - Deer hunting season is just starting up in much of the northern United States. But the Bush administration has already declared open season on 43 million Americans who depend on Medicare, as the drug and insurance industries join the Medicare prescription drug gold rush. - It's all about oil.
- Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp., BP PLC, ConocoPhillips Co., and Royal Dutch Shell PLC are expected to report a $9 billion, or 46 percent, increase in their combined third-quarter profits, according to analysts’ estimates... - As important as the Supreme Court, a cornerstone of the bourgeois state, is for the US ruling elite, the Federal Reserve Board is regarded with even more deference within the upper echelons of the corporate and financial establishment.
- In the United States, the land of the seersucker suit, or milk and honey,... you are now free to earn less money, get poorer, work longer hours and die younger. - Raw capitalism’s solution to our present situation is being enacted in front of us: grab everything you can before it’s gone. If it doesn’t result in the physical destruction of our planet, it’s going to be the end of the middle class, and of anything worthy of being called civilization. - Wal-Mart's Walton family now has 771,287 times more money than the median U.S. household. What gives?
- How Chapter 11 Is Demolishing Employee Expectations - The degeneration of the American trade unions has long been a repugnant spectacle with tragic consequences for the working class. But the events of the last week in Detroit have underscored a basic rule of thumb: never underestimate how low the labor bureaucracy can descend in its services to corporate America. - Workers across BC were walking off the job in solidarity with their fellow HEU workers. A general strike was looming on the labor horizon. As the pressure was rising on the government, the HEU leaders reached a suspect backroom deal that effectively stalled a labor showdown with the BC government. - The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. set forth the goal. Civil rights and union membership were to be intertwined. The labor movement, Dr. King wrote in 1958, "must concentrate its powerful forces on bringing economic emancipation to white and Negro by organizing them together in social equality." - The PayPal user agreement makes clear you’ve signed your privacy away when you become a PayPal user. You’ve also given PayPal the right to determine which of your e-commerce transactions are acceptable or unacceptable, as defined by PayPal.
- The assumption, clearly, is that America will be a happily car-crazed society forever and that nothing might interfere with that.
- On Wednesday, the US Senate rejected a proposal to raise the national minimum wage from its current level of $5.15 per hour. As a result, it is unlikely that the minimum wage will be raised this year, making 2005 the eighth straight year in which the wage has remained unchanged.
- It is an axiomatic principle that if you don't have a Middle Class, you can't have a genuine democracy! The Middle Class, like the fractious U.S. Labor Movement, is fading fast from the scene, thanks to our insane "Free Trade" policies, which only benefit a select and greedy few.
- Those with the highest incomes and the most expensive homes (including second homes) get the largest subsidy.
- French oil giant Total SA, amid rising oil and natural-gas prices, is considering building a nuclear power plant to extract ultraheavy oil from the vast oil-sand fields of western Canada.
- At least 80 percent of low-income Americans who need civil legal assistance do not receive any, in part because legal aid offices in this country are so stretched that they routinely turn away qualified prospective clients, a new study shows. - "Water is a fundamental human right and must be made universally available to all people. Unlike the public water delivery, the market system distributes on the basis of the ability to pay -- those who have the ability to pay have access to quality water, those who are unable to pay go without."
- "This winter a significantly larger number of applicants are expected than last year to request assistance in paying their energy bills, but President Bush has proposed cutting assistance programs from $2.2 billion to $2.0 billion. These programs that assist in paying energy bills are particularly critical for the elderly, disabled, and children."
- To fight poverty the government will have to switch from attacking workers to siding with them.
- While President George W. Bush continues to assert that Americans would be better off with Social Security in private hands, a new study shows that privatization of the country's 70-year-old benefit program would drive millions of people into poverty.
- ...Bush wants to rape the poor and middle class further, with his new tax plans that have been overseen by Connie Mack, a non-intellect, but a bootlicker of the lowest sort.
- The report said gender equality and better reproductive health could save the lives of two million women and 30 million children over the next decade - and help lift millions around the world out of poverty. - The number of personal bankruptcy filings is soaring as the effective date nears for a new law making it harder for consumers to seek protection from debtors.
- A group of Peruvian indigenous farmers have prepared an extensively researched counter to a Canadian move to revive 'terminator' seeds.
- Free Trade stands for almost everything wrong on the planet. As the Free Trade noose tightens, more revolutionary activity will occur until the strangling grip is broken completely or until the despotism of obscenely wealthy and criminal oligarchs feeding off an increasingly destitute and dehumanized world population wins its final triumph. - ...rapidly increasing in importance is control of Iraq to facilitate military control of the world's only remaining source of cheap, conventional oil in the coming peak oil endgame.
- To rescue Delphi Corp. from imminent bankruptcy, the auto parts giant's 24,000 United Auto Workers members are supposed to take massive wage cuts, benefit givebacks and myriad concessions that self-respecting union leaders would never accept, much less ask their members to ratify.
- The Big One isn't the long-predicted California earthquake or even a hurricane named Katrina. The genuine big one will arrive with a deafening pop, the sound of the real estate bubble bursting. - The federal Coalition government has announced plans to allow employers to further exploit young workers and apprentices, just as SA Unions released a report showing many young workers on individual contracts already receive shoddy pay, conditions and treatment in the workplace. - Two weeks before a new, more restrictive national bankruptcy law goes into effect, financially strapped Americans are rushing to file for protection from their creditors, with filings climbing to an unprecedented average of 13,000 a day last week. - Call it the outsourcing of food. Following in the footsteps of blue-collar workers and, more recently, white-collar employees, the U.S.'s two million farmers face the prospect of being offshored as well.
- Four decades after a U.S. president declared war on poverty, more than 37 million people in the world's richest country are officially classified as poor and their number has been on the rise for years.
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