Doug Henwood edits Left Business Observer and is the host of Behind the News. His latest book is My Turn.
The average corporate tax rate in the 1950s was 50 percent. Today, it’s below 20 percent. Yet the US business class is still whining about the modest tax increase on corporations in the Inflation Reduction Act.
If it seems like nothing works anymore in the US, you’re not imagining things. Record-low public investment and declining private investment have given us a failing, decrepit infrastructure.
President Biden signed the bipartisan CHIPS Act earlier this week. It’s a massive giveaway to the semiconductor industry, which has spent the last decade padding the pockets of CEOs and stockholders with billions upon billions of dollars in stock buybacks.
According to Gallup polls, the number of Americans who self-identify as below middle-class, including those who identify as working-class, is on the rise — a rise especially pronounced among those age 18–34.
Talk of the “Great Resignation“ is everywhere. But a close look at the numbers reveals something interesting: more workers are quitting their jobs in Trump-voting states with low unionization rates than in states with high unionization rates that rejected Trump.
Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine is a horrific, unconscionable act. NATO’s expansionist policy made such an invasion more likely. Both of these things are true.
Unions raise wages and benefits and increase job security. So, the fact that unionization rates are still in decline, despite some recent bright spots in worker militancy, is very bad news.
Everyone is desperate for signs of life in the American working class, so the breathless talk of a “Striketober” a few months back made sense. But new Bureau of Labor Statistics data throws cold water on that idea: there was no strike upsurge.
Things may not be trending in the right direction for workers in the United States.
COVID-19 sparked the worst job losses since the Great Depression. The most recent numbers make clear that while American workers are still suffering immensely, they’re also feeling emboldened to reject bad jobs.
Ten years ago, I was ready to throw in the towel on this whole politics business, writes Doug Henwood — things were too bleak. Then Occupy Wall Street kicked off. Now, thank God, we’re living in the world Occupy created.
People are right to be disgusted by giant corporations. But the liberal “antitrust” response too often valorizes small-scale competition instead of solidarity and worker organization.
Labor strategist Jane McAlevey offers her take on why Amazon workers were defeated in their recent Bessemer, Alabama union drive.
For more than three centuries, something has been going horribly wrong at the top of our society, and we’re all suffering for it.
Whatever the size and shape of Joe Biden’s proposed infrastructure bill, you can be sure to hear corporate weeping and gnashing of teeth about how they can’t afford a tax hike. The truth: they’ve got the money — they just don’t want to share.
Strikes are the labor movement’s muscle, and when unions don’t strike, that muscle atrophies. Unfortunately, the latest data shows just how atrophied that muscle is. Simply put, workers aren’t striking.
The online pranksters behind the great GameStop bubble of 2021 are probably going to lose a lot of money. But they’ve done the world a service by reminding us of the utter uselessness of the stock market, an institution that serves no purpose besides making a small number of undeserving people rich.
US-style industrial farming has ravaged two of the world’s most fertile regions, California’s Central Valley and the Midwest’s corn belt. But we can build an agriculture system that delivers food in a sustainable way — and empowers farmworkers, too.
With an incarceration rate exceeding 700 people for every 100,000, Americans have built a prison monstrosity that has few parallels in history — destroying untold millions of lives and families in just a few decades. We need to study the economic origins of this mass incarceration system in order to dismantle it.
The latest economic numbers are dismal: GDP is projected to be down 33 percent from the first to second quarter of 2020. Even if we see some recovery soon, the long-term damage — people unemployed, businesses shuttered, confidence hammered — will be massive and lingering.