Snaking its way through the Pennsylvania legislature is a bill that will block local governments from requiring companies to provide sick leave, even if unpaid, that is more than required by state or federal regulations.
The familiar anti-immigrant rhetoric and subsequent political games that have unfolded in the aftermath of the announced Administrative Relief on Immigration are quite expected, as the U.S. has a very long history of super-exploitation of immigrant labor coupled with denial of immigrants’ human rights.
Before I’d even moved to Olympia, a friend told me that there was quite a ‘high end’ nursery in Olympia called Bark and Garden. He felt that, considering the size of the operation and the expense of the products offered, that they might be a great place to work.
I did stop by and seek to make out an application, but the sales clerk simply said, ‘Leave off a resume, and if Kern, “the owner”, thinks you qualify, you will get a call.”
John W. Whitehead is a constitutional attorney. As head of the Rutherford Institute he is actively involved in defending our civil liberties. Being actively involved in legal cases, he experiences first hand the transformation of law from a shield of the American people into a weapon in the hands of the government.
For those of us who came of age sometime in the late 80s to early 90s the date October 21, 2015 has special significance in terms of both nostalgia and excitement. For those who don’t grasp the reference immediately this is the day that Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) and Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) travel to in the film Back to the Future 2. The purpose of the trip was to prevent Marty’s future son (also played by Fox) from taking part in an armed robbery that sends the McFly family on a downward spiral (Doc Brown having already taken the trip to the future and witnessed all this).
“I’m getting hot,” croaked the frog as he floated in a pot of water from which steam was beginning to rise.
“Me too,” croaked the other frog as she paddled listlessly. “This water used to be warm. Now it’s too hot.”
“Oh well…nothing we can do about it. Maybe it’ll get better.”
“Let’s enjoy what we can,” she croaked. “We’ll listen to the music and watch the pictures on the ceiling that keep changing. They’re pretty.”
“OK…I’m feeling dreamy.”
As the water simmered, the frogs slipped into a stupor; they were unconscious as they began to boil.
Henry Ford was a smart fellow. As a matter of fact, he was much smarter than the current ruling junta of the much-envied and much-maligned 1%, because they still haven’t yet figured out what Henry realized in the early Twenties. In addition to inventing the assembly line, he shrewdly calculated the ratio of the worker-wage-purchaser cycle, such that he determined precisely the minimum hourly wage he could pay his workers, vis-a-vis the maximum price tag he could put on his Model T, in order for his workers to be able to buy their own product, i.e. his cars.
One. Seven Nobel Laureates in Economics endorse the higher minimum wage to $10.10 by 2016, saying it does not lead to lower fewer jobs.
We are incessantly confiscating ourselves into a world of unavoidable, sun-blaring big data. Our landscape, the environment, even outer space — all are inspirations of our very sci-fi existence; here clouds echo first of data centers proliferating far beyond the real clouds’ pouring; here our world wishes to lose touch with indolence, that moving forward and disrupting any inconsistency, is the key. After all, the ultimate fight remains against death; it’s a fight for remembrance through perennial interruption — against an otherwise ephemeral legacy.
Self-made billionaire (meaning he didn’t inherit it), Nick Hanauer is not one to mince words, especially when they are backed by facts and principles of fairness. The Seattle entrepreneur, author and venture capitalist (he was the first non-family investor in Amazon), is known for vocally championing Seattle’s staggered increase of its minimum wage to $15 an hour as good for workers and the economy. Any contrary corporatist to debate him on this subject would lose big.
