January
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1 min read
Four Point Eight Trillion and a Thank You Card
Read more . . . →The 2017 Trump tax cuts were supposed to create jobs. That was the pitch. Cut the corporate rate and companies will invest, hire, build. Nine years later the receipts are in: $4.8 trillion in stock buybacks. Workers got a newsletter about “company values.” Shareholders got a second yacht. S&P 500 companies hit a record $1 trillion in buybacks last year alone, nearly double what they spent when Trump took office. Schumer, Wyden, and Warren are trying to raise the buyback tax from 1% to 4%, and it’s rotting in committee like every other bill that inconveniences a CEO. The proposed...
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1 min read
Half Your Paycheck and a Picket Line
Read more . . . →Tomorrow Spain shuts down. Every sector, every city. The first joint general strike in 14 years, and the demand is the most basic thing in the world: people who work full time should be able to afford a roof. Spaniards now spend half their gross salary on rent. In Barcelona it’s 76%. An 87-year-old woman named Maricarmen got evicted, sparked the biggest housing protests in a generation, and then died. The government looked at all of that and called a snap election instead of capping rents or building anything. Which is the perfect summary of every housing crisis everywhere: workers...
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1 min read
Sixty-Eight Billion and a Three Percent Raise
Read more . . . →Harvard sits on $68 billion. Sixty-eight. Their investments made 27% last year. And they’re in a standoff with 4,000 grad students over a 3% raise. These are the people who actually teach the classes and grade the papers. They want protections for noncitizen workers and an independent process for harassment complaints. Harvard’s counter-offer: no, and by the way, we don’t think your strike is legal. Eighty-eight percent of the union voted to walk out Monday. The endowment report dropped October 15 showing an $11 billion gain in a single year. The strike deadline is October 27. Harvard spent the days...
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1 min read
Two Hundred Workers and a Voting Booth
Read more . . . →A clock factory in Michigan closed this month. Nearly two hundred people lost their jobs. One of them told the AP he’s been a Republican his entire adult life and he’s voting straight Democrat in November. Not a polling shift. A guy who got fired because his president started a trade war, walking into a booth with nothing left to lose. Trump promised tariffs would bring manufacturing back. Instead, they closed a plant that was already here. The parts that factory needed got more expensive overnight, the math stopped working, and management shut it down. Two hundred families in Michigan...
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1 min read
Nine Million Paychecks
Read more . . . →The Education Department is about to garnish the wages of five million Americans who defaulted on their student loans. Another four million are close behind. Up to fifteen percent of every paycheck, plus your tax refund, plus your Social Security if you’re old enough to collect it. The same administration that handed billionaires the biggest tax cut in a generation is reaching directly into the bank accounts of people whose crime was going to college. This is debt collection, not governance. The pause they announced in January lasted about as long as a campaign promise. Now the machinery is back:...
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1 min read
Eighty Hours or Your Health Insurance
Read more . . . →As of October 1, if you’re on Medicaid in over forty states, you have to document eighty hours of work every month or you lose your health insurance. Most people on Medicaid already work. Congress just wanted the paperwork. The forms aren’t for verification. They’re there because enough people will miss one and lose coverage that the budget projection looks better. Five to ten million people are projected to lose their insurance over this. Half the adults at risk already deal with poor physical or mental health but don’t qualify for disability exemptions. Bad knees, depression nobody diagnosed, a condition...
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1 min read
Down Thirty Percent and Winning
Read more . . . →Port Milwaukee’s steel volumes are down thirty percent this year. Duluth-Superior, the biggest tonnage mover on the Great Lakes, dropped twenty-five percent. Canadian-flagged vessels calling on American ports fell thirty-seven percent. This is what a trade war looks like when it stops being a press conference and starts being a paycheck. Trump slapped fifty percent tariffs on Canadian goods in August. Canada hit back with twenty billion in retaliatory tariffs on steel, agricultural equipment, and paper. The president called it winning. The dock workers watching ships not arrive probably have a different word for it. The Great Lakes shipping corridor...
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1 min read
Amazon Built a Suggestion Box and Then Deleted the Suggestions
Read more . . . →Amazon warehouse workers in Rock Tavern, New York walked off the job this week after months of reporting unsafe conditions to a company that responded by deleting their complaints. Literally deleting them. Amazon has an internal feedback system called “Voice of the Associate,” and when workers used it to flag dangerous conveyor belt speeds and falling packages, management scrubbed the posts. The injury rate at that facility hit 6.3 per 100 workers, with 97 percent of those injuries severe enough to require missed days or restricted duty. Amazon’s response to that number was not to slow the belts. It was...
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The Fork Led to a Ditch
Read more . . . →DOGE paid 144,000 federal workers $6.7 billion to sit at home and do nothing. That was the efficiency plan. A 435 percent spike in paid administrative leave. Six times the salary cost of the year before. The program was called “Fork in the Road,” and it was sold as a way to trim the fat. The GAO just showed everyone what it actually trimmed: seven billion dollars from the treasury, for the privilege of having fewer people do the work. Then the agencies started rehiring. Over 20,000 new hires by June, same kinds of roles they’d just paid people to...
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Your Groceries Have Surge Pricing Now
Read more . . . →Walmart is putting digital price tags on every shelf in every store by the end of this year. They say it’s about efficiency — updating a price used to take two days with paper tags, now it takes minutes. What they’re not telling you is that the same technology lets them change the price of milk at 5pm when every tired parent in the zip code walks through the door. The grocery workers’ union has a name for it: surveillance pricing. Uber for your cereal aisle. The tags can respond to foot traffic, time of day, weather, local demand. The...
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