Categories

Raising and Indexing the Federal Minimum Wage

New Orleans   There was a picture in the New York Times claiming to be Dan Cantor (sure didn’t look like him?) of the New York State Working Families Party who was advocating an increase in the state minimum wage.  Jen Kern, a career minimum wage expert as former coordinator of ACORN’s Minimum Wage Resource Center [...]

No End to Recession without a Solution to Housing Crisis

Mortgage & Housing Crisis

New Orleans    I’m going to keep this short and sweet, and the message will be clear.  The economy in the USA is showing some signs of improvement.  More jobs are coming into the statistics.  The President is getting a bounce in his step.  This is all good news.

Obama will have trouble [...]

Domestic Workers Pushback as Citizen Wealth Advances

Tegucigalpa What are the odds that as we talk about achieving living wages and income security as a central theme of Citizen Wealth that in successive days there are surprising stories of domestic workers winning or holding on to higher wages in both Brazil and Saudi Arabia?

Collective Bargaining Under Attack

New Orleans It’s hard hearing and reading the reports about the attack on unions in Wisconsin.  After a life of avoiding the mass emails of any listserv, I ended up on one arbitrarily when I joined a group, so I’ve been inundated with hyperbolic messages that find the pushback in Wisconsin by labor heroic [...]

No One Regulating Remittances

 Toronto            Preparing to meet with the ACORN International “intern army,” as I call them, at George Brown College today, I couldn’t help but laugh while using the Starbucks internet (thanks, fellas!) when I read that Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase was over at Davos complaining about “banker bashing” and France’s President Sarkozy was forced [...]

Santa Barbara Finally Pulls Up Short

Quepos            It was an extra present under the palm tree to read in the pre-dawn that Santa Barbara Bank & Trust was being pulled out of the business of factoring RALs, predatory refund anticipation loan for Jackson & Hewitt and other companies in the viciously competitive tax services market for lower  income and working families.  [...]