Today’s comic by Matt Bors is Should the Rebels renew Darth Vader's spy powers?
• Betty White is 96 today.
• Appeals court: Woman can sue over ad that used her photo in HIV awareness campaign:
A Brooklyn woman’s lawsuit against the state for using her photo in an ad promoting the rights of HIV-positive people can proceed — because society has yet to fully accept people who have the virus, an appeals court ruled Tuesday.
Avril Nolan — who does not have HIV — sued the state’s Division of Human Rights in 2013 for $1.5 million, alleging it had improperly used her photo obtained through Getty Images in an advertisement.
“I am positive, I have rights,” the ad read, alongside a picture of Nolan. It ran in three newspapers and on three websites.
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MIDDAY TWEET
• Ford finally steps up on electric vehicles: A promo video has announced that in 2020, Ford will introduce an all-electric SUV, good for 300 miles of driving between charges, called the Mach 1.
“It’s the beginning of a whole new world for our customers, and electrifying the best of Ford,” Jim Farley, who heads up the carmaker’s global markets effort, said on stage at the North American International Auto Show. The Detroit car caucus, the biggest of its kind in the country, is the place where the big US automakers like to trumpet their big plans and ambitions.
Sure, that’s vague. Less vague: Ford’s announcement that it will pump $11 billion into electric vehicles in the next five years, with 24 hybrid and 16 fully electric vehicles to debut by 2022. The company said a year ago it would spend $4.5 billion on EVs by 2020; now it’s nearly doubling that commitment.
When it comes to electrifying announcements, Ford is playing catchup. In October, GM announced it would roll out 20 fully electric models by 2023, and eventually ditch fossil fuels altogether. Volvo will debut five battery electrics between 2019 and 2021, and stop designing cars without batteries next year.
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• Skills shortage in U.S. labor market? More like an employer shortage:
Much has been written about America’s alleged skills shortage. Articles in which executives moan about their inability to find qualified workers for job openings are business press perennials, typically focusing on “middle skill” industries like manufacturing and construction that don’t require a bachelor’s degree. In the years immediately following the Great Recession, there seemed to be an entire cottage industry devoted to blaming America’s stubbornly high unemployment rate on the notion that workers just lacked the specific talents employers needed, rather than, say, the hangover from a housing bust and financial crisis that had crippled the economy.
One of the reasons these stories never really added up was that, outside of a select few industries, American wages were relatively flat. If good workers were really in short supply, you’d expect pay to rise quickly as companies tried to outbid each other for talent. Instead, employers spent years carping about a lack of good job applicants while letting pay stagnate.
• If Trump regime’s tip stealing rule is finalized, women would lose billions:
The Department of Labor (DOL) has proposed a rule that would make it legal for employers to pocket their workers’ tips, as long as they pay those workers the minimum wage. We estimate that if the rule is finalized, every year workers will lose $5.8 billion in tips, as tips are shifted from workers to employers. Of the $5.8 billion, nearly 80 percent—$4.6 billion—would be taken from female tipped workers.
• California bullet train’s costs soar by a third:
The cost of the first phase of California’s high-speed rail project through the state’s Central Valley has soared by 35 percent to $10.6 billion, officials disclosed Tuesday.
The California High Speed Rail Authority disclosed the $2.8 billion spike during its regular Tuesday meeting, citing unanticipated costs relating to right-of-way purchases, utility relocations, general increases in railway costs and lawsuits.
• 50 years after the Poor People’s Campaign, the economy for black Americans still stinks:
At $14.92 per hour, the median black worker currently earns just 75 percent of the $19.79 that their white counterpart earns. On the income front, the median black household is bringing down just 61 percent of the total median white household, about $39,500 versus $65,000 annually. That’s slightly improved from the gap in 1967, when the median black household earned just 55 percent of white household income. But in absolute terms, the racial income gap has grown by more than $5,000 since the year King called for “a radical redistribution of economic and political power.”
Moreover, the wealth gap between black and white families is more like a yawning chasm. The most widely cited data on this comes from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, which shows that the median white family is worth 10 times more than the median black one, ($171,000 and $17,600, respectively). On the surface, that’s actually an improvement since 1963, the year King led the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when the median white family was worth 19 timesthe median nonwhite one.
Yet under a less generous model employed by the Institute for Policy Studies (but perhaps more accurate since it excludes the falling value of the family car), the median white family ($151,800) is worth
over 35 times the median black one ($4,300). More damningly, a recent
report from the institute finds that 30 percent of black households have “zero or negative wealth,” with median black household wealth on a collision course to hit $0 by 2053.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin is on hand for the spin cycle on Trump’s physical. Joan McCarter was here for shutdown talk. Plus CHIP, DACA & Net Neutrality! And Trump-Russia! And Fire and Fury! And patiently waiting through another 5 lost minutes on Trump’s height.
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