A woman named Dawn Hughey had worked at a Dollar General store for just four months when she was named "manager" of a store in the Detroit suburbs in 2009. Having recently moved home after a stint in California, Hughey had hoped the new honorific title (and its accompanying annual salary) would help her start a new life in Michigan. But like other managers in America's booming dollar store industry, Hughey quickly came to realize she was a manager in name only.
Those 50 and older, who were laid off over the past 5 years, have had an especially difficult time being rehired. Many have already drained their savings and now rely on government services. Some have taken their own lives.
Many of us are aware of the TIME magazine investigation about hospitals charging us $12 for those little paper pill cups. Those little cups add up to millions of dollars a year; but those little red and blue pills that Big Pharma pushes on us add up to billions. And many times the taxpayers are illegally billed for those little cups and pills. But because of budget cuts, the Inspector General may no longer investigate these abuses and fraud.
The GOP has a new jobs bill. House Republican Representatives Ted Poe of Texas and Raul Labrador of Idaho have proposed nearly twice as many annual visas for low-skilled guest workers than the Senate bill had included in its version of an immigration bill. The House will propose nearly 400,000 new H-2B visas for temporary foreign guest workers in non-agricultural work (for unskilled and semi-skilled labor.)
It seems that fast-food wages can't pay the rent these days, so this week fast-food workers took to the streets in protest. Then panic ensued, and Fox News immediately launched a counter-offensive by putting on a high-priced restaurant lobbyist to argue that America's most titanic and profitable corporations, as well as the largest job creators, can't afford to pay their employees a living wage. If this is true, then capitalism, as we once knew it, has come to a shuttering halt.
The House Agriculture Committee's farm bill would have denied food stamp benefits to as many as 5.1 million Americans, or more than 10 percent of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program's enrollment, according to a new analysis by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
The year 1979 may very well have been the year when the middle-class in America had first began it's long decent into oblivion. According to a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report, manufacturing in the U.S. peaked in 1979 when we had over 19.6 million manufacturing jobs in a labor force of 104.6 million. In 1979 manufacturing was 21.6% of all jobs. Now manufacturing is only 9.9% of jobs in America.
In a speech last Wednesday President Obama said, "Over the past 40 months, our businesses have created 7.2 million new jobs. This year, we are off to our strongest private-sector job growth since 1999."
But is that really true? And one also has to wonder...just what kind of jobs have those businesses been creating over the past 40 months? It's not always about the quantity, but the quality as well.
Consider the irony of companies like Walmart that economically forces their employees to apply for food stamps, and then profits from their food stamp dollars. That's not more public welfare, that's more corporate welfare. But now those profits are at risk, because the GOP's current version of a farm bill includes ZERO for food stamps --- meaning, 1 in 6 Americans could also go hungry.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics --- the mainstream media and most bloggers refuse to (or are unable to) to get the numbers correct on Social Security disability. It's no wonder they are all saying different things, and why many of us (including myself) were so confused about the accuracy of SSDI statistics. There also appears to be a lot of ideological spin in everyone's reporting --- so I'd like to help clarify a few things.
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