Eating Healthy When You’re Poor: You Can’t

I’ve spent a good deal of time talking about the stereotype of the “fat poor”. You know the right-wing slur: if we’re so broke, how come so many of us are overweight? It’s just another way of claiming that being poor is our own damn fault and has NOTHING to do with, like, an income [...]

Foreclosure filings up 70 percent in 2006

We knew this was coming, didn’t we?
Petitions to foreclose on Massachusetts homeowners rose nearly 70 percent in 2006, and the number of distressed properties that went to auction increased 46 percent, a report said today.

Wal-Mart (ahem) Expands? (Updated)

If this isn’t the be-all, end-all, last-word killer argument for finally dumping deregulation, I don’t know what is: Wal-Mart wants to become *cough* a bank.
The federal agency that insures bank deposits is expected to decide this week whether Wal-Mart Stores can move ahead with its plan to open a bank.
Wal-Mart critics want the Federal Deposit [...]

Feature Launch: TrenchNews

With the passing of Jordan Barab’s Confined Space and Nathan Newman’s Labor Blog, it falls to the rest of us to try to pick up pieces of his work and keep it going. The most natural piece for me to concentrate on is covering organized labor. In my surfing, I almost always come across way [...]

Bush’s “Health Care Reform” 2: Selling the Scam

In the previous post, I said Bush’s pro-corporate proposal to address the health care problem through tax policy was liable to turn out to be the only initiative in the SOTU that he actually cared about and might try to implement. So far, I seem to be batting a thousand. He hasn’t mentioned the ethanol/alternative [...]

Bush’s “Health Care Reform” Aims to Kill Employer Coverage

As I’ve said elsewhere, the only initiative Bush put forward in his lame SOTU that he might actually be serious about is the health care “reform” in which he wants to address a social problem through tax-policy-tweaking. I wrote:
But the truly insidious element is in the unspoken subtext: what this proposal basically does is offer [...]

Confined Space Closes Down

I suppose it’s to be expected that from time to time real life has to take precedence over blogging. It happened to me, it’s happening to Kevin Hayden, and now Jordan Barab is giving up Confined Space to take a job with the House Committee on Education and Labor. I’m glad that if we have [...]

Republicans Filibuster Minimum Wage Bill

I must be getting naive in my old age. I actually thought the minimum wage bill had so much momentum that the Republicans wouldn’t be able to stop it. I was wrong. Shameless Pub Senators, corporate puppets all, are staging a filibuster against the bill. The Democrats tried to end the “debate” but lost the [...]

Labor and Business Join for Immigration Reform

There is almost no coverage of unions or labor issues in the nation’s mainstream press. As Studs Terkel pointed out 15 or 20 years ago – and before that, for all I know – every newspaper has a Business Section, along with a Lifestyle Section (now that’s critical news), an Entertainment Section, an Automotive Section. [...]

Developing White-Collar Unions, Pt 1

Writing in The Democratic Strategist, ex-labor organizer and current union PR consultant Jim Grossfeld summarizes the results of a survey he and his partners conducted into modern attitudes about unions at the request of the Center for American Progress. The results aren’t so much surprising as they are cohesive. It’s not that, as David Kusnet [...]