Tag Archive for "Economy"

Posts Tagged Economy

President Obama gave the best economic speech of his presidency and you probably missed it

Yesterday, President Obama gave what will likely go down as one of the best speeches of his presidency and you probably missed it because you were out living life, working hard, and making magic happen. President Obama is finally on offense with regards to Obamacare, after months of the breathless, “The Web site is broken!” stories that dominated the headlines. His speech at the THE ARC in D.C. was focused on the problem of income inequality, which he called the “defining challenge of our time.” The president focused on the message that every American should be able to work hard and get ahead. The Republicans normally attack this messaging as “class warfare” but given that the Obamacare website is ...

By Madeleine Schwartz • 11 years ago

Not Oprah’s Book Club: Coming Up Short

Ed. note: This is a guest post from Madeleine Schwartz. Madeleine is a freelance writer who has written for The Believer, Dissent Magazine, and The New Inquiry, among other publications.

To read most pieces on Millennials, you would think that everyone born between 1981 and 2000 was white, wealthy, and facing a wonderful world of choice. Articles describe a selfish generation unable to commit, or young people who waltz from one experience to another without giving back. Absent is any description of the youth who fall outside of the narrow band of privilege.

Jennifer Silva’s Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty fills this gap. Silva, a post-doctoral fellow in sociology at Harvard, interviewed 100 working-class men and women over the ...

Ed. note: This is a guest post from Madeleine Schwartz. Madeleine is a freelance writer who has written for The Believer, Dissent Magazine, and The New Inquiry, among other publications.

To read most pieces on Millennials, you would ...

By Mychal Denzel Smith • 11 years ago

Washington D.C. tries to stop Wal-Mart from ruining its city

Wal-Mart’s plot for world domination has hit a snag, as its plan to open six of its low-price, low-wage, high-exploitation retail stores in the nation’s capital is meeting resistance from local lawmakers.

The D.C. Council introduced a bill that would, according to The Washington Post, require “retailers with corporate sales of $1 billion or more and operating in spaces 75,000 square feet or larger to pay their employees no less than $12.50 an hour. The city’s minimum wage is $8.25.” This obviously doesn’t fit Wal-Mart’s wildly successful business model of only paying their employees enough to be able to afford to shop at Wal-Mart.

It’s still possible the corporation will be able to get away with business as usual; Mayor Vincent ...

The D.C. Council introduced a ...

By Maya Dusenbery • 11 years ago

Chart of the Day: Only 30 percent of new jobs have gone to women

According to these NYT charts, of the 5.3 million jobs added during the economic recovery over the last few years, only 30 percent of them went to women. In part, that’s because more jobs held by men were lost in the recession (remember the endless talk about the “hecession“?) But, Pat Garfola notes at ThinkProgress, “austerity is also contributing to this problem, as government job losses disproportionately hurt women.”

And the gender skew to the recovery has meant that the decades-long trend of women making up an ever-increasing portion of the workforce has stalled for the first time since the ’50s. In fact, a smaller percentage of women over 20 are working today than at the bottom of the ...

By Syreeta McFadden • 12 years ago

Women veterans’ battle with unemployment goes unnoticed

Media Matter’s Lisa Reed connects a couple of dots from last night’s debate as the economy took a complementary role to the foreign policy discussion. Particularly, a close examination of the challenges women veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan face in this economic climate. And while the state of veteran affairs continues to have a male face, the condition of women veterans remains underreported. Last month’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reports:

Nearly one out of five women who served in the military at home or abroad during the two wars is now without a job, the new BLS statistics show. As the U.S. troop drawdown continues in Afghanistan, the unemployment rate for post-9/11 female vets surged to 19.9 percent in September, compared to ...

By Syreeta McFadden • 12 years ago

93% economic recovery gains went to the top 1%. 1% still gives Obama shade.

Super rich feel victimized by the Obama Administration, Chrystia Freeland writes:

Evident throughout the letter is a sense of victimization prevalent among so many of America’s wealthiest people. In an extreme version of this, the rich feel that they have become the new, vilified underclass. T. J. Rodgers, a libertarian and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has taken to comparing Barack Obama’s treatment of the rich to the oppression of ethnic minorities—an approach, he says, that the President, as an African-American, should be particularly sensitive to. Clifford S. Asness, the founding partner of the hedge fund AQR Capital Management, wrote an open letter to the President in 2009, after Obama blamed “a small group of speculators” for Chrysler’s bankruptcy. Asness suggested ...

Super rich feel victimized by the Obama Administration, Chrystia Freeland writes:

Evident throughout the letter is a sense of victimization prevalent among so many of America’s wealthiest people. In an extreme version of this, the rich feel ...

By Katie Halper • 12 years ago

Infographic: Women still make less money!

If you’re one of those people worried about the collapse of traditional society and nostalgic for the days when women knew their place… you probably won’t be reading Feministing. But if you did, you’d be thrilled to see this infographic from The National Journal, showing that women make less than men — they even make up 44% of the workforce!

By Vanessa • 12 years ago

Latino and black community twice as likely as whites to be affected by housing crisis

This isn’t surprising or new news to many of us, but important to document nonetheless. Think Progress brings our attention to a report just released by the Center on Responsible Lending which reveals that the Latino and black community are nearly twice as likely as whites to have been affected by the foreclosure crisis:

Although the majority of the people affected overall by the crisis were white, one-quarter of all black and Latino borrowers in the U.S. have lost their homes or are currently in trouble of losing them:

Although the majority of affected borrowers have been white, African-American and Latino borrowers are almost twice as likely to have been impacted by the crisis. Approximately one ...