Today's Stories

March 6-8 , 2009

Chris Floyd
Tangled Up in Karl

Uri Avnery
Remember Ophira?

David Ker Thomson
Against Work

March 5 , 2009

James G. Abourezk
This Time It's Mrs. Clinton's Turn

Kathleen and Bill Christison
U.S. Military Aid to Israel

Robert Weissman
Wall Street's Best Investment: Paying for Public Policy

Patrick Cockburn
My Day at the Terror "Charity"

William Blum
Being Serious About Torture...Or Not

Robert Fantina
From Iraq to Afghanistan: Augmentation All Over Again

Saul Landau
The Unseen Crisis

Benjamin Dangl
Striking a Blow Against the Beer Cartel: a Grassroots Victory in Utah

Christopher Brauchli
The New Leaders of the GOP

Website of the Day
The Angola 3: 36 Years of Solitude

March 4, 2009

Marjorie Cohn
Blueprints for a Police State

Mike Whitney
Blowing Up the Economy: How Securitization Lit the Fuse

Ron Jacobs
The Banality of Occupation: the Rand Papers

Ashley Smith
War by Another Name

Joanne Mariner
Obama's War on Terror

Dan Bacher
The California Water Wars: Why It's Not a Conflict Between Fish and People

Mark Engler
Will the Winds of Change Reach El Salvador?

Franklin Lamb
"What's Hezbollah Done for Us Lately?"

Cal Winslow
Slugging It Out in California

David Mandelzys
Apartheid Week

Website of the Day
Guantánamo: the Definitive Prisoner List

March 3, 2009

Conn Hallinan
Ethnic Cleansing and Israel

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
The Long, Dark Night of Pakistan

Brian M. Downing
The Changing Game in Afghanistan

Robert Larson
External Damnation: Companies are Designed for Destruction

Daniel P. Wirt, MD
Single-Payer Health Reform

Russell Mokhiber
Burn Your Health Insurance Bill!

William Loren Katz
Obama, One Ape and Two Newspapers

Kathy Sanborn
The Lazy Man's Guide to the Economic Crisis

Pauline Imbach
A New Start for the World Social Forum?

Christopher Ketcham
The Best Journalism You'll Write is Priceless

Website of the Day
The Surveillance Self-Defense Project

March 2, 2009

Andrea Peacock
A Poisoned Town's Shot at Justice

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's Budget

Peter Lee
Pakistan Lurches Toward the Abyss

John Blair
Locking Down Big Coal

Peter Morici
Treasury's Flawed Plan for Citigroup

Uri Avnery
10 Ways to Kill Fatah

Michael Donnelly
Resistance to the War on the Wild

Fred Gardner
The Judge Who Ruled Marijuana is Medicine

Sonia Nettnin
Middle East Medical Mission Heroes

Andrew Lehman
A New Deal for the Web

Website of the Day
Pentagon Papers II?

Feb. 27 - March 1, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Is Nancy Pelosi Really Against War Crimes?

Harry Browne
Where the Cheats Have No Shame

Anthony DiMaggio
From Bush to Obama: Seven Years of Wartime Propaganda

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Dennis Ross and Iran: the Fox and the Chicken Coop

Mischa Gaus
The Banks' War on Workers

Felice Pace
The Economy and the Big Picture

Mike Whitney
Is Free Market Capitalism Possible Without Accountability?

Lee Sustar
Blaming the Autoworkers

Peter Lee
The Other Side of the Coin in Afghanistan

Nicole Colson
Ruining Young Lives for Profit

Roger Burbach
Et Tu, Daniel? The Betrayal of the Sandinista Revolution

Rannie Amiri
King Abdullah Has No Robes

Missy Beattie
Owning Disaster

Dave Lindorff
America's Stupid Health Care Debate

Robert David Steele Vivas
Intelligence for the President--and Everyone Else

John Ross
Teotihuacan Gets Mickey-Moused

Ralph Nader
Civic Heroism Awards

Yves Engler
Haiti's Harsh Realities

Alan Farago
The Story of Leonard Abess, Banker

Zulfikar Majid
Understanding Kashmir

David Yearsley
Don't Stay Up Too Late, Johan!

Charles R. Larson
Sleeping with Dogs

Kim Nicolini
Spitting at Dark Times: Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky"

Lorenzo Wolff
So You Wanna Be a Garage Rock Star

Poets' Basement
Puthoff, Payne, Gaffney and Gray

Website of the Weekend
Sleep Now in the Fire

February 26, 2009

Dave Lindorff
Obama's Address to Congress

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Military Mephistopheles

Patrick Cockburn
Did the US Learn Anything in Iraq?

Mike Whitney
The Geithner Put

Eamonn McCann
"Make Bono Pay Tax"

Tim Wise
Eric Holder and the Whitewashing of Racism

Tom Barry
Napolitano's Hard Line

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Excellent Atomic Omission

Adam Turl
The Enemies of Unions and the Lies They Tell

David Macaray
When People are Fired Illegally

James McEnteer
Rush to the Rescue: Limbaugh's Secret Plan to Save the Economy

Website of the Day
The Carbon Casino

February 25, 2009

Chris Sands
Afghanistan: Chaos Central

M. Shahid Alam
Israel in 1948: Poised for Expansion

Chris Floyd
Obama's Non-Withdrawal Withdrawal Plan

Dave Lindorff
Wall Street and Bernanke: the Blind Leading the Blind

Norman Solomon
The Slow Pullout Method

Rachel Godfrey Wood
Neoliberals Do The Amazon

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Teacher and Student: the New Class Struggle

Ron Jacobs
It Ain't Over Till It's Over

Nadia Hijab
The First Waltz

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Website of the Day
Hitchens Gets Stomped by Syrian Nerd

February 24, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
How the Economy was Lost

Uri Avnery
Coalition Theory

Peter Morici
Is Nationalization Inevitable?

Jonathan Cook
Arab Parties Face Most Hostile Knesset in History

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
The Man Who Shouldn't be King (of Afghanistan)

Andy Worthington
Who is Binyam Mohamed?

Brian Horejsi
Crisis Creates Hope for Reality

Julia Stein
I was a Writer for the Government

Norm Kent
How Judges Disgrace the Bench

Rachel Smolker /
Brian Tokar
Biofuels, Promise or Threat?

Dennis Loo
The Water Line: Doing What Must be Done

James McEnteer
The Oscar for Denial

Website of the Day
How to Destroy a Fox News Anchor

February 23, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Language of Looting

Mike Roselle
On Cherry Pond: Going Up Against Big Coal in W. Virginia

Patrick Cockburn
The New War in Iraq

Franklin Spinney
Obama Steps on the Pentagon Escalator

Einar Már Guðmundsson
A War Cry From the North

Ralph Nader
How Credit Unions Survived the Crash

Jordan Flaherty
A New Orleans Intifada?

Helen Redmond
Ted's Table: Kennedy and the Corporate Lobbyists Craft a Health Plan

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Harvey Wasserman
Jet Crashes and Nuclear Reactors: Feds Ignore a Serious Risk

Terry Lodge
The Intelligence is Wrong

Website of the Day
BadCreditReport.Com

February 20 / 22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Lawyer's Tale

Michael Neumann /
Osha Neumann
Remove Our Grandmother's Name from the Wall at Yad Vashem

Ismael Hossein-zadeh
Herbert Hoover Copycats

Paul Craig Roberts
Bill of Rights Under Fire

Linn Washington Jr.
The NY Post's Chimpanzee Cartoon

Saul Landau
On the Road Again

Marjorie Cohn
War Criminals Must be Prosecuted (And Their Lawyers Too)

Binoy Kampmark
Cricket and Cartels: the Fall of Sir Allen Stanford

Dave Lindorff
Using the Recession to Hammer Workers

David Yearsley
Edward Said's Greatest Musical Writings

David Macaray
A Closer Look at the Employee Free Choice Act

James McEnteer
Last Mambo in Minnehaha

Rick Salutin
A Canadian Looks at Obama

Wayne Clark
South Carolina Nears the Abyss

Richard Rhames
Got Farms?

Stephen Martin
Silver Mist Descending

Mitu Sengupta
Slumdog Millionaire's Dehumanizing View of India's Poor

Charles R. Larson
Slumdog Reality?

Richard Morse
Carnival Ramble in Haiti

Lorenzo Wolff
Desperation in an Unavoidable Groove

Poets' Basement
Three Poems of Tu Fu (Trans. K. Rexroth)

Website of the Weekend
Ron Paul: What If the People Wake Up?

February 19, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Cleanser: Lobbyists Whistle Up Cordesman to "Prove" Israel Waged a Clean War in Gaza

Harry Browne
How Ireland Went Bust

Robert Bryce
Why the Promise of Biofuels is a Lie

Brian M. Downing
The Winding Road: From Western Europe to Kyrgyzstan

Fred Gardner
The DEA Chief's $123,000 Flight

Andy Worthington
Obama's Uighur Problem

Wajahat Ali
Aftermath of a Beheading

Laura Carlsen
A New Attitude at the White House Toward Bolivia and Venezuela?

Deb Reich
Gaza: Choose Life!

Christopher Ketcham
Crisis? What Crisis?

Website of the Day
Taking Back NYU

February 18, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
President of Special Interests

Mike Whitney
Trouble at Treasury

M. Shahid Alam
Afghan Pitfalls

Patrick Cockburn
A Real Surge at Last

Conn Hallinan
Death's Laboratory

Dave Lindorff
Whatever Happened to Antitrust?

Rannie Amiri
The Perils of Blogging in Egypt

Gareth Porter
Pushing Back Against Petraeus on Pullout Risks

Eric Hobsbawm
Remembering V. G. Kiernan

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Predicament

Martha Rosenberg
It's the Cymbalta Stupid

Website of the Day
Red Gold

February 17, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Oligarchs' Escape Plan

Mike Whitney
The Global Ditch

Ralph Nader
The One-Dimensional Congress

Joanne Mariner
Benchmarking Obama: How to Evaluate the New Administration's Counter-Terrorism Policies

John Ross
Commodifying the Revolution: Zapatista Villages Become Hot
Tourist Destinations

Belén Fernández
The Venezuelan Referendum From the Back of a Pickup Truck

Mats Svensson
Who is a Terrorist?

David Macaray
Why America Needs Labor Unions

Gregory Vickrey
$400 in Change

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
Another Hamastan?

Michael Dickinson
Unrest in Istanbul

Website of the Day
Take a Stand for Open Access

February 16, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Reconstruction: the Greatest Fraud in US History?

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
The Truth About Colombia's New Emperor

Paul Craig Roberts
Who Remembers Guns and Butter?

Uri Avnery
Livni's Bitter Options

P. Sainath
The Meltdown: Whose Crisis Is It?

Dedrick Muhammad / Michael Brown
White Recession, Black Depression

Carla Blank
A New New Deal for the Arts

Patrick Irelan
Venezuela Ends Term Limits

Dan Bacher
Is Delta Pumping Driving Salmon and Orca Decline?

Fidel Castro
Chavez's Clarion Call

Harvey Wasserman
Hail to the Spleef: Did George Washington Smoke Pot?

Website of the Day
Mining Black Mesa

February 13 - 15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
On the Rocks

Joshua Frank
The Myth of Clean Coal

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Coming Out Party

George Ciccariello-Maher
Venezuela's Term Limits: More Hypocrisy From the NYT

Nikolas Kozloff
Venezuela Beyond the Referendum

Brian M. Downing
Pakistan on the Brink

Paul Craig Roberts
Deficit Nonchalance

Christopher Ketcham
Israel's Ball Boys

Ron Jacobs
At a Campus Sit-In Against Israeli Occupation

Dave Lindorff
Why Can Judd Gregg See What Obama Can't?

Alan Maass
Lincoln at 200

Chuck Spinney
Grassley Sounds Off on Obama's Man at the Pentagon

Phil Gasper
Mr. Darwin's Reluctant Revolution

Stephen Lendman
A Short History of Business Handouts

Charles Thomson
Tate Cruises: Caveat Emptor on the High Seas

Kathy Sanborn
The Suicide Rush

Saul Landau
Bowled Over

Len Wengraf
The Nightmare in Somalia

Harvey Wasserman
Striking a Blow Against Nuclear Power

David Macaray
An Easy Call for Obama on Joining a Union

Tom Stephens
Four Freedoms, Four Changes

Seth Sandronsky
Lincoln and the Collective Mind

David Yearsley
On the Road Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Freaking Out With Danny Barnes

Kim Nicolini
The Body of the Worker: What "The Wrestler" Says About the State of America

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Buknatski and French

Website of the Weekend
The Iranian Revoution and the US Dual Containment Policy: a Presentation

Weekend Edition
March 6-8 , 2009

Higher Pay Equals Higher Productivity

The Minimum Wage Revisited

By DAVID MACARAY

In 1938, the first federal minimum wage was established.  It was set at 25-cents per hour.  Not surprisingly, business groups and industrialists protested strenuously not only at having to pay so exorbitant a rate, but at the federal government’s naked attempt (as they saw it) to “Stalinize” the American economy.

The next year, 1939, the minimum was raised to 30-cents.  By March of 1956, it had crept up to a landmark $1.00 per hour; in May of 1974, it reached $2.00; and by the time Ronald Reagan took office, in 1981, it had risen to $3.35.  Notably, it was under President Reagan that the ratio between the minimum wage and the average worker’s wage began to grow.

Today, although the federal minimum is $6.55, the gap between the minimum wage and the wage of the average worker continues to widen.  In 1968, the minimum wage represented 53-percent of the average worker’s hourly wage; by 2006 it had dropped to 31-percent—this despite the fact that the average worker’s wage, in real dollars, had, itself, declined significantly.

On July 24, 2009, the federal minimum will be raised by seventy cents, to $7.25 per hour.  Let’s do the math.  Under the new rate, if you work eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, never take vacation or miss even one day due to illness or family emergency, you will earn $15, 080. 

After state and federal taxes, social security, FDIC, et al, have been deducted, it’s hard to say how much actual cash you would take home, but, obviously, since what you started with was so little, what you’re left with won’t be much.  Moreover, that $15,000 pre-deduction figure could be more wishful thinking than economic reality, as many of those full-time, 40-hour a week jobs have dried up.  Thirty-hour a week jobs are becoming more common.

Some people—libertarians, hope-to-die conservatives, free market fundamentalists—believe we shouldn’t have anything remotely resembling a federal minimum wage, that the supply-and-demand dynamics of the marketplace should be the sole arbiter. 

On the other side, you have progressives saying that, if you’re going to institute such a thing as a minimum wage, the least you can do is make it realistic:  Make it the minimum income on which an average person can actually live. 

Arguably, a minimum wage that doesn’t supply the necessary minimum—doesn’t allow one to make the barest living—is more a mathematical construct, a “gimmick,” than a living wage.  As the Unitarian Church aptly summarized it, “the current federal minimum [wage] is a poverty wage, not an anti-poverty wage.”  

But if we’re talking about a living wage, what would that minimum be?  By definition, wouldn’t it have to be the amount required for a single person to live independently at what is, more or less, a bare subsistence level:  a tiny apartment, transportation to and from work, utilities, food, toiletries and clothing?

While one might be able to pay for “luxuries” such as DVD rentals, cable TV, the Internet or telephone, it’s unlikely a minimum wage earner could afford a car, car insurance or car maintenance.  Needless to say, health insurance is out of the question.  And, if you start adding dependents to the equation—if you’re a family with kids, or a single mom requiring child-care—you can forget about it.

Some would argue that the aforementioned scenario is too bleak and despairing.  They would argue that, to be able to purchase material goods, people don’t necessarily have to be able to afford those goods.  They don’t need a commensurate income.  All they require is credit.  Unfortunately, there’s a rebuttal to the argument that free and easy credit has no downside, and it can be expressed in two words:  Brutal Recession.  

Which brings us to organized labor.  People need to be reminded that America’s most prosperous period, the post-war 1950s (and into the ‘60s), happened to be the same period when the greatest number of America’s workers—approximately 35-percent—belonged to labor unions.  Was that a coincidence?

When we say “most prosperous,” we’re not speaking of the wealthiest Americans (the top 2-3-percent), those who are doing far better today than at any time in the country’s post-war history.  Rather, we’re talking about the middle-class, the vast segment of the population that was thriving in the 1950s—who could not only buy material goods, but could actually afford them.  Unfortunately, that same middle-class began shrinking under the Reagan administration and, alas, has continued to shrink.

A proposal:  Instead of relying on an artificial device called the Federal Minimum Wage (intended to insure that low-wage workers “maintain contact” with the economy), why not keep the Feds out of it entirely?  Why not look to labor and management to reach an equilibrium? 

Instead of mandating government minimums which don’t—and never will—provide an actual living wage, we should allow what conservatives themselves call the “inherent wisdom” of the marketplace to prevail.  Allow management and labor to sit down at the table and trust the “wisdom” of the collective bargaining process to lead them to the Promised Land, to a wage/benefit package suitable to both.

It goes without saying that for this arrangement to be effective we’ll need more labor union members, because what used to be a robust 35-percent now stands at a puny 12.4-percent.  The benefits of union membership should be readily apparent.  All one has to do is look around and survey the condition of our  “union deficient” landscape. 

There’s always been this nagging belief out there that labor unions are somehow bad for the economy.  That’s  a myth.  It’s corporate-sponsored propaganda.  Unions might be a threat to management autocracy, and harmful to management greed, but they’re certainly not harmful to commerce.  Indeed, commerce loves them. 

Economists and progressive business groups (yes, business groups) have acknowledged that higher wages help the economy by increasing the purchasing power of the consumers.  After all, who’s going to buy the stuff available, if the number of flush consumers keeps diminishing?  As George Meany famously said, “The greatest anti-poverty program ever invented was the labor union.” 

It’s also been demonstrated that higher wages (union wages) result in greater productivity and lower employee turnover.  It’s an undeniable fact:  good pay and good benefits attract a higher caliber of worker than lousy wages and lousy benefits.  

So, besides supplying businesses with more qualified, more stable employees, labor unions create more personal wealth across-the-board.  Those bumper-stickers you still occasionally see aren’t lying:  “Live Better.  Work Union.”  It’s true.

David Macaray, a Los Angeles playwright (“Borneo Bob,” “Larva Boy”) and writer, was a former labor rep.  He can be reached at dmacaray@earthlink.net

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