$42-Hr. Minimum wage. French revolt continues. ACA Preventative Care & Internet archive overturned
Both the ACA preventative care & Internet Archive have nixed by courts. If the same Wall Street fairness applied to all, the minimum wage would be $42/hr. The French revolution spreads.
New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted the former Thug-In-Chief, Donald Trump. Most rags will be saturated with all of that coverage. I will not. While Trump may be consequential when we are looking for small thinking comic or macabre relief, it does nothing for the condition Trump, Neoliberals, and the Republican Party have left America in as the middle class and poor continue to struggle more and more.
So today we cover four subjects covering our wages, our healthcare, our education, and the necessary activism of the masses. So let’s get busy.
$42-Hr. Minimum wage.
I was watching the hearing where the CEO of Starbucks got upset because a Senator called him a billionaire. He took her tone as an insult and snapped back. He claimed he earned that money. The truth is, our economic system is predicated on the ability of those with capital to get a substantial piece of all the labor and intellect we all generate.
We cannot allow the billionaire or super-millionaire class to create a narrative that we sit back and believe. We do it at our detriment. Worse, it makes us complicit in our own demise. A recent article brought out a reality that should wake us up.
The federal minimum wage in the United States would be more than $42 an hour today if it rose at the same rate as the average Wall Street bonus over the past four decades, according to an analysis released Thursday by the Institute for Policy Studies.
Citing newly released data from the New York State Comptroller, IPS noted that the average Wall Street bonus has increased by 1,165% since 1985, not adjusted for inflation.
Last year, the average cash bonus paid to Wall Street employees was $176,700—75% higher than in 2008 but slightly lower than the 2021 level of $240,400.
The federal minimum wage, meanwhile, has been completely stagnant since 2009, when it was bumped up to $7.25 from $5.15. While many states and localities have approved substantial pay increases in recent years, 20 states have kept their hourly wage floors at the federal minimum.
Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Project at IPS and the author of the new analysis, wrote Thursday that "average weekly earnings for all U.S. private sector workers increased by only 54.4%" between 2008 and 2022—a significantly slower pace than inequality-fueling Wall Street bonuses.
"The total bonus pool for 190,800 New York City-based Wall Street employees in 2022 was $33.7 billion—enough to pay for 771,520 jobs that pay $15 per hour with benefits for a year," Anderson observed. "Wall Street bonuses come on top of base salaries, which averaged $516,560 for New York securities industry employees in 2021."
These are people that produce no product or service of substantive value. They do not innovate to move society forward. We must learn to respect ourselves, and our fellow workers who are the ones that make society prosper as a large percentage of the rich parasitically leach on us all.
French revolt continues.
I was ecstatic when the French masses stood up to their Neoliberal President Emmanuel Macron when he increased the retirement age by two years. This is something Republicans are whispering about in the United States as well. Interestingly, as they are contemplating raising the retirement age, the life expectancy in the United States is falling. That scenario dictates that we lower, not raise the retirement age. Let’s be clear, Social Security is financially unstable for political reasons.
Many politicians had hoped that this new French revolt would have subsided by now. Instead it has seeped into unexpected corners. As the New York Times article states, “Even Bordeaux, known for its surrounding vineyards and conservative politics, has become a flashpoint. The City Hall’s charred doors attest to that.” The article continues:
The ancient wooden doors are adorned with an ornate metal knocker and a small grilled window, for guards to peek through. Once an imposing part of the elegant facade of Bordeaux’s City Hall, they look more like towering pieces of charcoal since being set on fire last week, after a protest against the French government’s retirement law.
“It makes me angry. This is our heritage,” said Catherine Debève, a retired accountant standing among the crowd drawn by outrage and curiosity to the stone plaza in the city’s center to examine the damage. “The government has to withdraw its law. Anger is growing.”
Traditionally, Bordeaux, in the southwest of France, is known for its surrounding vineyards, conservative politics and colonial wealth. It is a measure of the anger sparked by the government’s decision to force through a law raising the retirement age to 64, from 62, that Bordeaux, too, has become a violent flashpoint of the rancor.
University students have occupied their buildings, putting an end to classes. A record number of protesters have charged through the stony streets declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco. Protests have ended in fires and clouds of tear gas, with a handful of agitators later setting fire to the antique doors leading into the City Hall’s broad courtyard.
A Western country with this type of unrest would normally be all over TV. Except for short snippets here and there, it has been missing. The contagion fear is evident. The leaders of our flawed and corrosive economic system fear that people will wake up and demand what is theirs.
ACA Preventative Care
The Affordable Care Act, though it did not go near far enough, saved millions of lives. One would think that Republicans and Neoliberals, the Party that claims to believe in the sanctity of life and a sect who believes their economic modal has some form of humaneness respectively, would be happy that ultimately something good came out of a neoliberal law. NO. They are not happy. They continue to take it to court and they continue to try killing the law one piece at a time. And they won an important victory that will kill millions of Americans.
A U.S. District judge in Texas has overturned the ACA Preventative Care Provision in the law. Common Dreams reported the following,
A ruling handed down by a U.S. district judge on Thursday will threaten a range of lifesaving preventative healthcare services for more than 150 million people, legal experts and advocates said, as the decision challenged the legality of a federal task force that enforces coverage for the services.
Judge Reed O'Connor, a Bush appointee who sits on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, ruled that insurance companies do not have to comply with preventative care recommendations made by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), which was established by a key provision in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare.
O'Connor ruled that the appointments of members of the task force violate the Appointments Clause in the U.S. Constitution and said that violation "invalidates its power to enforce anything against anyone nationwide," according toSlate journalist Mark Joseph Stern.
The USPSTF has issued recommendations for a wide range of preventative care services, including screenings for breast cancer, colorectal cancer, cervical cancer, and diabetes; interventions and tests for pregnant patients; anxiety screenings for children and adolescents; and pediatric vision tests.
Under the ACA, insurance companies are required to cover those services, but following O'Connor's ruling coverage will no longer be mandated.
The decision is "nothing short of catastrophic to the U.S. healthcare system," said Stern.
The party that believes in the sanctity of life is comfortable with the sanctity of death if there is a cost associated with life,
Internet Archive
Our economic system believes every aspect of our society must be monetized by the few. Again, it is parasitic in nature for the wealthy. As the country’s IQ falls because of our lack of investment in an educational system commensurate with a forward moving country, the corporatocracy is busy attempting to make sure they can make a few pennies on every word you read. A chilling ruling against digital books by a U.S. District Judge has the Internet Archive vowing to appeal the decision.
Internet Archive vowed to appeal after a U.S. district court judge on Friday sided with four major publishers who sued the nonprofit for copyright infringement. Common Dreams reported the following.
Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, Internet Archives operated a controlled digital lending system, allowing users to digitally check out scanned copies of purchased or donated books on a one-to-one basis. As the public health crises forced school and library closures, the nonprofit launched the National Emergency Library, making 1.4 million digital books available without waitlists.
Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House sued Internet Archive over its lending policies in June 2020. Judge John G. Koeltl of the Southern District of New York on Friday found in Hachette v. Internet Archive that the nonprofit "creates derivative e-books that, when lent to the public, compete with those authorized by the publishers."
Internet Archive "argues that its digital lending makes it easier for patrons who live far from physical libraries to access books and that it supports research, scholarship, and cultural participation by making books widely accessible on the Internet," the judge wrote. "But these alleged benefits cannot outweigh the market harm to the publishers."
In a statement responding to the ruling, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle pledged to keep fighting against the publishers.
Monetizing every aspect of society as the titans of finance continue to do will stunt civilization. Unfortunately the damage is realized most after these parasites are dead.
These subjects are the topics of discussion today on Politics Done Right on KPFT 90.1 FM Houston today at Noon Central Time (1 PM Eastern/10 AM Pacific/11 AM Mountain). You can listen to it on air at 90.1 FM in the Houston metropolitan area or at politicsdoneright.tv.
Register: Ask Egberto Anything
Ask Egberto Anything: Meet with Egberto and other paid subscribers via Zoom at 11 AM Central on the first Saturday of every month. You can tell me anything, ask me anything, or give me suggestions for articles you want me to research. We can even discuss a topic you command for which you like us to interview you on our radio/video show Politics Done Right.
If you have thoughts or ideas on this issue/post, please click the “Leave a comment” button below and offer your opinion or information. Only subscribers can comment, so there won’t be any trolls or spammers.
Please consider getting one or more of our books. Everyone who has read them and sent me feedback has been very positive, often telling me they have provided them with a new perspective that even helped with their relationships with those who differ from them politically and ideologically.