Fifty-four years ago this week, on Aug. 28, 1963, hundreds of thousands of people gathered for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The event marked a turning point…
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Fifty-four years ago this week, on Aug. 28, 1963, hundreds of thousands of people gathered for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The event marked a turning point in our society in recognizing the need for civil rights and equality for African Americans. But it’s painfully clear we have yet to achieve the dream set forth that day by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Our nation remains divided along racial and class lines. The events in Charlottesville highlighted the terror that white supremacists still inflict upon people of color, religious minorities and the LGBTQ community.
But white supremacy goes well beyond the venomous hate spewed by neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and other white nationalists. It permeates our economic systems, workplaces and institutions.
President Trump’s much-awaited speech about his plans for tax reform has fired up the debate about who really wins when taxes are slashed.
The president has previously proposed cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent — a move budget experts project would cost the country $2.4 trillion over a decade. The reduction, he has argued, would encourage companies to stay and grow and hire in the United States.
“We need a competitive tax code that creates more jobs and higher wages for Americans,” Trump said Wednesday in Missouri. “It’s time to give American workers the pay raise that they’ve been looking for for many, many years.”
To hear President Donald Trump tell it, the United States’ tax burden is a major impediment to economic growth. In a speech in Springfield, Missouri, on Wednesday, Trump framed his plan to dramatically lower corporate and individual tax rates as a coup for ordinary Americans, whose pay has stagnated in the past four decades.
In fact, the evidence suggests that Trump’s tax cuts would line corporate CEOs’ pockets, while depleting the Treasury and doing little, if anything, to boost working class Americans’ bottom line.
“Trump’s plan would double down on the anti-populist features of the current system,” said Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the progressive Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
Here are some ideas Trump could get behind if he is really interested in championing working people.
A month later, in December 2015, Trump advocated for the use of war crimes to defeat ISIS, saying that the U.S. would have to “take out their families” and that he’d “knock the hell out of” ISIS: “You have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. . . . When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families,” Trump said, as he complained about the “politically correct war” the U.S. is fighting in the battle against ISIS.
Judging by Trump’s comments, it seems as though by “politically correct” he was referring to the United States making efforts to protect civilians.
Once a customer has barked their order into the microphone at the Popeyes drive-thru on Prospect Avenue, Kansas City, the clock starts. Staff have a company-mandated 180 seconds to take the order, cook the order, bag the order and deliver it to the drive-thru window.
The restaurant is on “short shift” at the moment, which means it has about half the usual staff, so Fran Marion often has to do all those jobs herself. On the day we met, she estimates she processed 187 orders – roughly one every two minutes. Those orders grossed about $950 for the company. Marion went home with $76.
Despite working six days a week, Marion, 37, a single mother of two, can’t make ends meet on the $9.50 an hour she gets at Popeyes (no apostrophe – founder Al Copeland joked he was too poor to afford one). A fast food worker for 22 years, Marion has almost always had a second job. Until recently, she had been working 9am-4pm at Popeyes, without a break, then crossing town to a janitorial job at Bartle Hall, the convention center, where she would work from 5pm to 1.30am for $11 an hour. She didn’t take breaks there either, although they were allowed.
Over the decades, the concept of “nation-building” has been in and out of favor with successive American administrations. President Donald Trump says he wants no part of it in Afghanistan.
But past presidents have found that when it comes to foreign interventions, it’s very difficult to achieve and sustain military gains in the absence of a stable, functioning government and the institutions that go along with it. That’s one of the main arguments in favor of nation-building — or state-building, as some, including President George W.’s Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice chose to call it.
Here’s a look at where broad assistance has worked and where it hasn’t, and some of the lessons about why.
Education and wealth have a direct correlation. It’s not by coincidence that most rich people are well-educated or that most people living in poverty are deficient in formal education. According to recent Bureau of Labor Statistics, a professional with a master’s degree, on average, earns double the income of a laborer with a high school diploma. The same professional is also unemployed at half the rate.
Due to this relationship, education is often referred to as “the great equalizer,” the proverbial key to unlocking the coveted American dream. It’s the impetus for the proliferation of mass student loan debt throughout the United States. Yet for Black Americans the return on investment is unpromising.
As Donald Trump increases the pressure on the throat of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement with Iran, more than the nuclear agreement is at risk of being lost. Trita Parsi, an Iran expert who was consulted by the Obama administration during the negotiations, has identified two other potential offspring of the agreement: it could soften the enmity between America and Iran and open the possibility of important cooperation, and the successful diplomacy between the bitterest of enemies could serve as a blueprint for the U.S. in future conflicts with seemingly ossified enemies. Both of these opportunities are also in danger of being lost.
There is a jagged contradiction in Trump’s foreign policy with Israel and Iran. He has been quite clear that he regards Israel as an unconditional ally and Iran as an unredeemable enemy. And yet, his policy does not always reflect his promise.
When the white supremacists chanted “blood and soil” in honor of a Confederate general in Charlottesville this weekend, they were invoking me and people like me. On my father’s side, I’m descended from plantation families that enslaved Africans and African Americans in Mississippi and South Carolina. My second great-grandfather, Samuel Mitchell McAlister Jr., was a slaveholding Confederate private in the Mississippi State Cavalry.
White supremacists have called, so I must respond. As a descendant of slaveholders and Confederate soldiers, I want to tell the truth about the evil that my ancestors and the Confederacy perpetrated, the repercussions their crimes have today, and how I and other white people still benefit from discrimination against people of color.
Like clockwork, as his administration’s approval slipped to all-time lows, President Donald J. Trump managed to rattle his saber and utter bellicose nuclear threats toward the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), manufacturing a foreign crisis to attract political support and to draw attention away from his recent legislative failures.
“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” Mr. Trump unloaded in a statement to reporters in the White House. “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. (North Korean President Kim Jong Un) has been very threatening, beyond a normal statement. And as I said, they will be met with fire, fury and, frankly, power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.”
North Korea responded hours later, threatening to strike the U.S. territory of Guam in the western Pacific. Guam is home to 163,000 U.S. citizens as well as several major U.S. military bases. A statement issued by the North Korea state media said of Mr. Trump: “Sound dialogue is not possible with such a guy bereft of reason and only absolute force can work [on] him.”
Tensions began to tighten when the U.N. Security Council imposed a new round of sanctions against North Korea over its test launches of two intercontinental ballistic missiles in July. The sanctions ban North Korean exports of coal, iron, lead and seafood, which would slash up to one-third of North Korea’s export revenue.
Finally, Mr. Trump tweeted that U.S. military was “locked and loaded.”\
