Category: National Issues
CEOs Are Making 335 Times More Than Their Workers: Report
The following article by Mary Thompson with CNBC appeared on the NBC News website on May 18, 2016:
The average pay for an S&P 500 CEO was $12.4 million in 2015, or 335 times the pay of a rank-and-file worker, according to a new report from the AFL-CIO.
That gap is actually narrower than the one posted in 2014, when CEOs earned $13.5 million, or 373 times the pay of the average worker.
The 2015 AFL-CIO Executive PayWatch compares average compensation of S&P 500 CEOs with the average pay of nonsupervisory workers as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nonsupervisory workers earned $36,875 in 2015.
The survey also compared CEO pay to that of union workers. Here the gap between CEO and average worker pay was less at just more than 242 times, while the typical CEO earned more than 819 times what a worker earning minimum wage would take home in a year. Continue reading “CEOs Are Making 335 Times More Than Their Workers: Report”
Rocks record Totten Glacier’s rapid retreat history
The following article by Jonathan Amos appears on the BBC.com website on May 19, 2016:
Unchecked climate change could put Antarctica’s huge Totten Glacier into an unstable configuration over the coming centuries, a study has warned.
If that happens, the ice loss could push up global oceans by 2m, or more.
The claim is based on an assessment of the rocks underlying the ice stream.
Scientists tell the journal Nature that should the front of the glacier retreat about 150km from its current position, it will then enter a runaway reversal that takes it 200-250km further inland. Continue reading “Rocks record Totten Glacier’s rapid retreat history”
New Religious Freedom Bills Legitimize Discrimination
The following article by Cynthia Tucker Haynes appeared on the National Memo website on April 9, 2016:
You’d think history might serve as a guide for the politicians and preachers — good Christians all, of course — who have chosen to use the Bible to bolster their bigotry against people they’ve placed outside the magic circle. We’ve seen this before, and it didn’t turn out well for those who claimed a mantle of righteousness. Yet onward they march.
Mississippi recently passed a “religious freedom” law designed to provide legal cover for those who wish to discriminate against gays and lesbians. The law is quite specific, allowing government clerks to refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and protecting businesses that refuse to serve them.
Does this ring any bells? Do any of these people remember Jim Crow, a system of legalized oppression that stunted Mississippi for generations and whose legacy the state is still struggling to overcome? Continue reading “New Religious Freedom Bills Legitimize Discrimination”
Seven Years Late, Media Elites Finally Acknowledge GOP’s Radical Ways
The following article by Eric Boehlert appeared on the Media Matters website March 29, 2016:
Now they tell us the Republican Party is to blame? That the Obama years haven’t been gummed up by Both Sides Are To Blame obstruction?
The truth is, anyone with clear vision recognized a long time ago that the GOP has transformed itself since 2009 into an increasingly radical political party, one built on complete and total obstruction. It’s a party designed to make governing difficult, if not impossible, and one that plotted seven years ago to shred decades of Beltway protocol and oppose every inch of Obama’s two terms. (“If he was for it, we had to be against it,” former Republican Ohio Sen. George Voinovich once explained.) Continue reading “Seven Years Late, Media Elites Finally Acknowledge GOP’s Radical Ways”
State Legislators taking direction from RNC on right to discriminate laws
Last week, North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory signed an extreme new law that blocks local governments from expanding protections for members of the LGBT community. Unfortunately, North Carolina isn’t the only state where “Right to Discriminate” laws are being enacted. While these discriminatory measures against members of the LGBT community are being passed in legislatures across the country, it is important to remember that they are officially supported and furthered by the national Republican Party.
Just a month ago, a resolution was passed and approved by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus condemning “government overreach” of the Obama administration’s interpretation of Title IX, which prohibits discrimination against transgender students. It said:
“The Republican National Committee calls on the Department of Education to rescind its interpretation of Title IX that wrongly includes facility use issues by transgender students. Continue reading “State Legislators taking direction from RNC on right to discriminate laws”
Republican Islamophobia Is Creating Tens Of Thousands Of New Muslim Voters
The following article by Rory Mondshein appeared on the National Memo’s website March 13, 2016:
Over the past few months, we’ve seen nearly the entire Republican Party coalesce around the rhetoric that Donald Trump pioneered just a few months ago: one massive hyperventilation over immigration, trade, and above all, Islam. No matter how much they’ve disavowed Mr. Trump’s language — some of them haven’t at all — nearly every Republican governor and every candidate for president echoed Trump’s language on monitoring or excluding Syrian refugeesafter the Paris terrorist attacks. Most followed suit when it came to a religious test on domestic surveillance.
Since announcing his candidacy in June, Mr. Trump has claimed that Muslims celebrated 9/11 by the thousands in New York and New Jersey and that “Islam hates us.” Trump has used Islamophobic rhetoric to justify his policy proposals, which include a Muslim travel ban, a national registry to identify Muslim-Americans, and greater governmental surveillance on Muslims, including on mosques, in the style of the NYPD. Continue reading “Republican Islamophobia Is Creating Tens Of Thousands Of New Muslim Voters”
History Repeats Itself
Here’s a television commercial from 1965 for President Lyndon Johnson. Sound like anything we’re seeing/hearing these days?
No, raising the local minimum wage doesn’t hurt local businesses
The following article by Jared Bernstein and Ben Spielberg appeared on the Washington Post website on February 26, 2016:
Jared Bernstein, a former chief economist to Vice President Biden, is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the author of “The Reconnection Agenda: Reuniting Growth and Prosperity.” Ben Spielberg works on issues related to inequality, economic opportunity and full employment at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the nation’s first minimum-wage law. It set the wage at $0.25 an hour and covered only a fifth of the workforce. Speaking to the country the night before he signed the bill, Roosevelt told listeners to “not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day” tell them “that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry.”
Last August, almost 80 years later, the city council of Birmingham, Ala., voted 7 to 0 (with one abstention) to become the first city in the Deep South to enact a minimum wage above today’s federal level of $7.25. The ordinance planned an increase to $8.50 per hour by July 2016, with a second increase to $10.10 set for July 2017.
In response, state lawmakers leapt from “calamity-howling” to obstructionism. The Alabama legislature this past week passed a bill designed to block Birmingham and other cities not just from raising the local wage floor but also from mandating benefits such as paid sick leave. Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard (R) insists that the bill isn’t about the policies themselves but about preventing “all sorts of problems” that arise when cities are allowed to set their own minimum wages, presumably because there’s nothing preventing local businesses from relocating to avoid the higher labor costs engendered by an increase. Continue reading “No, raising the local minimum wage doesn’t hurt local businesses”
‘Browning Of America’ Is Tearing The GOP Apart
The following article by Cynthia Tucker Haynes appears on the National Memo website February 20, 2016:
Before Pope Francis spoke a single word at the Mexican border, Donald Trump had — quite predictably — denounced the pontiff’s message. The real estate mogul and former reality-TV star has built his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination on an ugly nativism, so the moment was tailor-made for him.
The counter-messaging only escalated after the pontiff told reporters that anyone who wants to build a border wall, as Trump has infamously proposed, “is not Christian.” That prompted a retort from Trump, of course: “For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful,” he said.
(If the pontiff’s remarks were recorded correctly, he didn’t say Trump isn’t “a” Christian. In other words, he didn’t question the faith to which Trump ascribes; rather, the pope described Trump’s behavior as failing to follow Christian principles.) Continue reading “‘Browning Of America’ Is Tearing The GOP Apart”