The Angry Bear

Via PR Watch for the Center for Media and Democracy points to the impact of tax cuts for nine companies: The Center for Media and Democracy just concluded an analysis of nine companies that are major players in ALEC, showing that even with the tax cut, those corporations have laid off or will lay off employees. Comcast, for example, said it will save $128 million from the tax cut, and announced 500 layoffs. Caterpillar reported that it will pay 9 percent...

Real wages and unemployment update: April 2018 Now that we have the inflation numbers for April, let’s update the wage situation for ordinary Americans. Real wages YoY are only up +0.2%: More significantly, they are still down -0.3% from their most recent high 9 months ago: They are also only up +0.2% for the entire last 2 years and 2 months. Increased consumption by ordinary Americans isn’t up because they are making more in real...

Two real economic consequences of the Trump presidency Next week we will be 1/3 of the way through Trump’s Presidential term. Last year I used to point out that it was really still Obama’s economy, as the GOP had failed to pass, nor Trump commence, any economic policy of consequence. That is no longer the case. In late December the GOP Congress passed and Trump signed their huge giveaway for the wealthy. Yesterday, Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear...

February of this year and Mick Mulvaney already started to dismantle the CFPB by stripping the agency’s fair-lending office of enforcement powers reducing oversight and penalties for firms that discriminate against borrowers. Enforcement of fair-lending laws is governed by the 2010 financial reform law. Taking away the agency’s enforcement powers creates a vacuum making it unclear as to what happens now. Senator Elizabeth Warren sees Mulvaney’s actions...

Economics: The View from 35,000 Feet Air travel offers an opportunity to catch up on one’s reading.  In my case, this means Marion Fourcade’s “Economics: A View from Below”, which had been sitting in my pile for at least two long weeks.  For those wondering about her title, she has been toying for several years with the actual/mock inferiority felt by other disciplines, such as her own sociology, in the face of the pretensions, authority and worldly...

Blowing Up The Iran Nuclear Deal This is probably Donald Trump’s biggest mistakes, his refusal to certify Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran and his fullout abrogation of it by announcing the reimposition of full economic sanctions against Iran, although we had not fully undone those sanctions anyway.  An immediate victim in the US of this action will be Boeing workers who were to benefit from a $3 billion contract Boeing had with...

In the Public Interest has published a new report (pdf) on the impact of charter schools and public school funding in CA: In a first-of-its-kind analysis, this report reveals that neighborhood public school students in three California school districts are bearing the cost of the unchecked expansion of privately managed charter schools. In 2016-17, charter schools cost the Oakland Unified School District $57.3 million, the San Diego Unified School...

Passivity is a key term in Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle: 12. The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears. The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance. 13. The basically tautological...

Charles Gaba: Why Risk Pools are Bad [embedded content]Charles Gaba at ACA Signups.net has an excellent explanation on how Risk Pools work and how they harm those amongst us who depend upon a community rating system to balance out cost. Michigan Medicaid Wavier Strikes at the Poor The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported on how Michigan’s Medicaid Proposal would lead to “Large Coverage Losses” harming Low Income Workers. The coverage reduction...