A little reminder of one of the things that’s changed in the American economy in recent decades, from a great Economic Policy Institute roundup of information on corporate taxes:
Federal revenue contributed by corporate taxes has dropped by two-thirds over the last six decades—from 32.1 percent in 1952 to 10.8 percent in 2015. Corporations used to contribute $1 out of every $3 in federal revenue. Today, they contribute just $1 out of every $9—at a time when they have never been more profitable.
● Bank workers have been calling attention to tactics like the headline-grabbing ones at Wells Fargo for a while now.
● The Belabored podcast focuses on the recent general strike in India.
● Education Department terminates agency that allowed predatory for-profit colleges to thrive.
● I’m sorry, what? Virtual charter schools in New Mexico get more per-student funding than public schools. That is nauseating.
● Jersey Jazzman takes a close look at attrition rates in Massachusetts charter schools, an issue where—spoiler alert—voters are being misled about the public vs. charter comparison.
● When your boss is just going through the motions (of bargaining).
● Good news from the AFL-CIO:
One of our latest internal polls shows Trump has plummeted 12 points among union members in Ohio. From June to early September, he is now down from 44 to 32 percent. How bad is that? Trump is performing 5 points worse than Mitt Romney who received 37 percent of the union vote in Ohio.
● Interesting: the AFL-CIO is backing the Dakota Access Pipeline, because jobs, while AFL-CIO constituency groups including the A. Phillip Randolph Institute, the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, the Coalition of Labor Union Women, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, and Pride at Work are opposing it.
● The invaluable Charles Pierce:
If Massachusetts has done charters better than, say, Ohio or Florida, it is because the state has exercised the excellent, rigorous oversight that he mentions, and the cap has been an essential part of that oversight. The current campaign to eliminate the cap is not being done to benefit poor children. It is being waged to benefit the charter school industry, which wants to demolish that excellent, rigorous oversight with which Chait claims to be so impressed because it stands in the way of that industry's profits.
(Yes, I am going to keep talking and talking about the Massachusetts charter cap. It kills me that I can’t vote on that question, having temporarily moved away.)
● Workers Independent News: