San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

You are here: Home / Archives for Economy

To Protest Racist Comments and Policies, Walkout Planned for Trump’s Davos Speech

by

By Julia Conley / Common Dreams

Several attendees of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland are planning to walk out of President Donald Trump’s speech at the summit on Friday afternoon, in protest of his recent reported remarks about countries whose citizens he deems undesirable immigrants.

In an open letter, Business Leadership South Africa CEO Bonang Mohale denounced Trump’s alleged statement, confirmed by Republican and Democratic lawmakers, that more immigrants from “countries like Norway” should come to the U.S. instead of people from “shithole countries” such as Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations.

  [Read more…]

‘Billionaire Boom’: World’s Richest 1% Took 82% of All New Wealth in 2017, Bottom Half Got Zero, Zilch, Nada

by

By Jon Queally / Common Dreams

Call it the ‘Year of the Billionaire.’

In 2017, a new billionaire was created every two days and while 82 percent of all wealth created went to the top 1 percent of the world’s richest while zero percent—absolutely nothing—went to the poorest half of the global population.

That troubling information is included in Oxfam’s latest report on global inequality—titled Reward Work, Not Wealth (pdf)—released Monday. In addition to the above, the report details how skyrocketing wealth growth among the already rich coupled with stagnant wages and persistent poverty among the lowest economic rungs of society means that just 42 individuals now hold as much wealth as the 3.7 billion poorest people on the planet.   [Read more…]

A Powerful Economic Justice Movement Is Brewing, Even in This Dark Time

by

An American Democracy Movement is fighting brutal capitalism and the culture of blame.

By Frances Moore Lappé and Adam Eichen / AlterNet

In this tumultuous world, one thing seems certain: today’s dire threats to our democracy did not arise out of nowhere. Every culture thrives, or not, on whether its core narrative—the causation story we tell ourselves—enhances mutual gain or spurs division. And, the narrative driving today’s unfolding catastrophe feeds the latter.

It begins with a deep distrust of human nature.

Way back in 1651, philosopher Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan summed up our nature with the Latin proverb Homohominilupus, “Man is a wolf to his fellow man.” From this thought tradition, now reinforced through much of media and advertising, we absorb the notion that humans are essentially selfish, competitive, and materialistic. Yet, with this dim view of our nature, how can we possibly make society work? The dominant narrative has the answer: Just put self-interest to work.   [Read more…]

CamperForce – the Nomadic Workforce That Powers Amazon | Video Worth Watching

by

From the Vimeo website:

For nearly a decade, Amazon has recruited thousands of RVers for a seasonal labor unit called CamperForce.
Adapted from the book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder
Directed by Brett Story   [Read more…]

The Republican Lie About Debt Revealed | Video Worth Watching

by

All In’s Chris Hayes explains why we shouldn’t believe Republicans who say they care about debt. After pushing fiscal austerity under President Obama, stalling the recovery, Republicans abandoned debt concerns to pass their tax bill. In fact some have become so emboldened as to go on record with their duplicity. The New York Times quotes Representative Mark Walker (R-North Carolina) stating that “It’s a great talking point when you have an administration that’s Democrat-led. It’s a little different now that Republicans have both houses and the administration.” Could it be any clearer?   [Read more…]

Brian Alexander’s ‘Glass House’: Examining Industrial Grief in the Heartland

by

For those of us in California, the older industrial belt of the Midwest including Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania, is a world away from us regarding immigration issues.  Our state is doing what it can to protect its immigrants from attacks from the Trump administration. But if we want good national immigration reform anytime soon, what happens in upcoming election cycles in the Midwest is very important.

The Republican Party has bought the Trump base with its anti-immigrant, nativist politics that only grow more rabid by the day.  The only path to improve national immigration laws in the near future is through the Democratic Party winning back the Congress in 2018 or 2020 on a platform of inclusion.  

While President Trump was elected by a majority of white voters in every popular category, it was the white “swing” voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, that were a surprising part of Trump’s narrow margin of victory in those states last year.

What’s going on back there to make this happen?   [Read more…]

Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Ross, Putin’s son-in-law linked by the Paradise Papers | Video Worth Watching

by

Q: What do Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Putin’s son-in-law Kirill Shamalov and offshore islands have in common? A: The Paradise Papers. Here is Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman speaking with Frederik Obermaier, investigative reporter for the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and co-author of the Paradise Papers. Frederik discusses the techniques and consequences of the offshoring of wealth, and names some names of figures discovered as complicit. Among the names are two of the current administration’s cabinet: Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

On a somber note, Obermaier notes that this type of reporting is not without risk. A colleague, Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was part of the team working on the Panama Papers—an earlier much more limited release of records from the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca—was murdered in a bomb blast in early October. Her reporting had focused on the corruption of Maltese officials revealed in the Panama Papers and she had reported receiving death threats fifteen days before the fatal explosion.   [Read more…]

The Underlying Agenda of Trump’s Tax Reform

by

While there are convincing arguments being made about how the GOP’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act favors the rich and disses the poor, the real danger in this legislation lies in its underlying social engineering.

Forget about next year’s tax bill for a moment; this bill amounts to an assault on the aspirations and beliefs of most Americans.

The rich getting richer has broader implications. Our democracy is already in trouble, thanks to the Citizen’s United Supreme Court decision.  A small group of donors has become kingmakers, whose wealth drowns out other voices and induces politicians to live in a fundraising silo.   [Read more…]

Seven Reasons Trump’s Corporate Tax Cuts Make No Sense | Video Worth Watching

by

So, Trump’s tax plan is supposed to be a YUGE tax cut for the middle-class? Yeah, right! Robert Reich lays out the arguments against the kind of tax cut legislation that the current administration is pushing. Policies like these have been tried before and their track record is abysmal. And somehow deficits of upward of $1.5 trillion are no longer a problem? Get real!   [Read more…]

A Harvard Economist Asked 5,000 Americans to Chart the Distribution of Wealth in the U.S. – They Weren’t Even Close | Video Worth Watching

by

Do you think you have a good picture of how unequal the distribution of wealth is in the United States? A 2010 survey by Harvard economist Dan Ariely and Mike Norton asked 5,000 Americans to graph their understanding of how wealth is distributed in the United States, as well as what they thought an ideal distribution would look like. The results were eye-opening. This video graphically displays the perceived, the “ideal” and the actual (2010) distribution of wealth captured in this study. Admittedly the study is a bit dated now, but I would bet dollars to doughnuts that the distribution hasn’t gotten any more equitable, and in fact all signs point toward it having gotten substantially worse.   [Read more…]

Could Puerto Rico’s Water Supply Be the Next Target for Privitization? | Video Worth Watching

by

Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism provides numerous examples of corporations taking advantage of natural disasters to privatize public resources and utilities. Could Puerto Rico’s water supply be the next target?   [Read more…]

This Republican Farmer from Kansas is Calling for #NotOnePenny | Video Worth Watching

by

Remember in 2012 when Kansas Governor Sam Brownback launched his “live experiment” in conservative governance? Cutting taxes was going to spur growth and create jobs. So how did that work out? Meet Mike – a Republican farmer from Kansas who has experienced first-hand what happens when the GOP cuts taxes for the rich. Now, he’s calling for #NotOnePenny in tax cuts for the wealthy: notonepenny.org.   [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry