Yesterday, the Dow Jones stock index hit a new record high.
And the unemployment rate hit a new low, right? No?
Even today's radio business report from the Wall Street Journal noted that working people's pay still wasn't improving.
Only 24 Congressional Democrats have made a pledge [a promise for what that's worth] not to vote for cuts to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. That low number is in spite of huge public support for protecting those programs.
Thousands of working people who lost their homes months ago in Superstorm Sandy are still homeless. Insurance is stingy & slow to pay, and banks are holding on to part of what insurance pays.
The reader, no doubt, can add more to the list.
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Today, Daily Kos was promoting a petition to raise the minimum wage. It noted that in 1968 the federal minimum wage [measured in 2012 dollars] was over $10 / hour. Yet the 2013 minimum wage is only $7.25.
Even Adam Smith - the economist anti-worker conservatives treat as a hero - said the following, "Servants, labourers and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconvenience to the whole. No society can surely be fourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged." - Wealth of Nations, I .viii.36