A 1911 photo of "breaker boys." Starting around 1866 in the United States, impurities
were removed from coal by breakers, most of them between the ages of 8 and 12.
They worked 10 hours a day, six days a week, perched on wooden seats above
conveyor belts or wooden chutes, picking slate and other unwanted items from the coal.
Robert Reich writes
Why the Economy is Still Failing Most Americans:
The Commerce Department reported last Friday that the economy grew at a 4.6 percent annual rate in the second quarter of the year.
So what? The median household’s income continues to drop.
Median household income is now 8 percent below what it was in 2007, adjusted for inflation. It’s 11 percent below its level in 2000.
It used to be that economic expansions improved the incomes of the bottom 90 percent more than the top 10 percent.
But starting with the “Reagan” recovery of 1982 to 1990, the benefits of economic growth during expansions have gone mostly to the top 10 percent.
Since the current recovery began in 2009, all economic gains have gone to the top 10 percent. The bottom 90 percent has lost ground.
We’re in the first economic upturn on record in which 90 percent of Americans have become worse off.
Why did the playing field start to tilt against the middle class in the Reagan recovery, and why has it tilted further ever since?
Don’t blame globalization. Other advanced nations facing the same global competition have managed to preserve middle class wages. Germany’s median wage is now higher than America’s.
One factor here has been a sharp decline in union membership. In the mid 1970s, 25 percent of the private-sector workforce was unionized.
Then came the Reagan revolution. By the end of the 1980s, only 17 percent of the private workforce was unionized. Today, fewer than 7 percent of the nation’s private-sector workers belong to a union.
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2013—The Counteroffensive on the War on Poverty:
On Jan. 8, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson, in his state of the union address, declared a “War on Poverty.” At the time the poverty rate in the United States was 19 percent. Today that number is 15 percent; however, those two numbers do not tell the complete story.
If you were to listen to the right-wing noise machine you would think the War on Poverty was an abject failure. April 11, 2012, and I am sure many times before and after that date, the CATO institute published an article that concluded with, "[O]ur current $1 trillion War on Poverty is a failure."
The only reason that the CATO institute is able to say those words is because of self-fulfilling prophecy. Prior to Ronald Reagan coming to office the poverty rate in the United States was 11.4 percent. Under his guidance the poverty rate climbed to 15 percent after a State of the Union address in which he said:
In the welfare culture, the breakdown of the family, the most basic support system, has reached crisis proportions — in female and child poverty, child abandonment, horrible crimes and deteriorating schools. After hundreds of billions of dollars in poverty programs, the plight of the poor grows more painful. But the waste in dollars and cents pales before the most tragic loss — the sinful waste of human spirit and potential. |
With his Welfare Cadillac meme and his absolute lies about poverty in America Ronald Reagan began dismantling the safety net – a safety net that saves children from starvation, a safety net that gives hope of a better tomorrow.
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Tweet of the Day
Fox contributor complains that in AP history curriculum, there's "a whole section on slavery and how evil we are"
http://t.co/...
— @mmfa
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show: We've reached that point at which corporations can have a religion and are entitled to unlimited political speech, but employees can be fired for running for public office.
Greg Dworkin handled the domestic news part of our show today. In Digital America, newspaper reads you! The latest Senate polling and predicting. The government's back in the game, ponying up for grants to fund studies of violent deaths. Catching up on Hong Kong. Then it's back to Saud-ish Arabia once again, this time to get a better handle on the apparent paradox of the Saudis & ISIS. Plus this side note: our ISIS costs are mounting.
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