Author Archives: RowenaBernardin

This CEO Just Raised His Company’s Minimum Salary to $70,000 a Year

by RowenaBernardin Posted on April 14, 2015

Mother Jones

Inspired by research suggesting that the emotional well-being of many of his employees could be improved by a raise, the owner of a Seattle credit card payment processing company has just announced that he will boost their minimum salary to $70,000.

The New York Times reports Gravity Payments founder Dan Price will slash his own $1 million salary to $70,000 and use a majority of the company’s forecasted $2.2 million profits this year to help pay for the bold move. Many of the workers affected by the raise include sales and customer service representatives.

Of the company’s 120 employees, 30 will see their salaries almost double.

“The market rate for me as a CEO compared to a regular person is ridiculous, it’s absurd,” Price told the Times. “As much as I’m a capitalist, there is nothing in the market that is making me do it.”

In the rest of the country, the wage gap between top executives and well, everyone else, is staggering: In 2014, Wall Street bonuses alone amounted to nearly double the combined income of all Americans working full-time minimum-wage jobs.

Publicity stunt or not, Price’s plan is a unique story about one CEO’s effort to directly address income inequality and create liveable wages for his workers. If successful, we can only hope this turns into a Times trend piece.

Source – 

This CEO Just Raised His Company’s Minimum Salary to $70,000 a Year

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This CEO Just Raised His Company’s Minimum Salary to $70,000 a Year

October Jobs Report: Economy Improving Despite GOP

by RowenaBernardin Posted on November 8, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The economy added 204,000 jobs in October, according to jobs numbers released Friday by the Labor Department, despite the two-week government shutdown that put thousands temporarily out of work, and which economists predicted would dampen last month’s numbers. The jobs gain is about twice as many as expected. Employment numbers for August and September were also revised upwards by a total of 60,000 jobs, signaling the economy is strengthening, despite Republican efforts to tank it through budget cuts, shutdowns and default scares.

Even though jobs were added, the unemployment rate increased a tenth of a percentage point to 7.3 percent. This is because of the way job growth is tallied. As Catherine Rampell explained at the New York Times last month:

The jobs report is based on two different surveys—one of households, and one of employers—and it turns out that furloughed federal government workers will be treated as unemployed in the first survey but employed in the second. In other words, the temporary layoff of federal workers will probably increase the unemployment rate, but not (at least directly) depress the payroll job growth numbers.

Continue Reading »

Continued here – 

October Jobs Report: Economy Improving Despite GOP

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on October Jobs Report: Economy Improving Despite GOP

How Fracking Can Harm Your Family

by RowenaBernardin Posted on November 3, 2013

Read article here: 

How Fracking Can Harm Your Family

Posted in alo, FF, GE, ONA, Oster, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on How Fracking Can Harm Your Family

Sorry, Democrats, the Sequester Is Here to Stay

by RowenaBernardin Posted on October 17, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

As several people have pointed out to me, my headline this morning (“The Republican Defeat in the Budget Deal Was Complete and Total”) is satisfying but not entirely true. After all, Republicans did get a continuing resolution that funds the government at sequester levels. Democrats agreed to that long ago.

But I’ve never really thought of that as a Republican victory, because I never really thought there was any chance at all of rolling back the sequester. Here’s why:

Everyone agreed to it in 2011. Everyone wanted lower spending. Remember, the sequester was a temporary substitute for a Grand Bargain that would have cut spending even more, and it became permanent only when the infamous supercommittee failed. But the supercommittee also would have cut spending even more. The sequester wasn’t a compromise, it was the smallest, most Democrat-friendly level of spending reduction that was on the table in 2011.
Status quo bias is important. In this case, it works in favor of keeping the sequester in place.
Upcoming negotiations over the sequester aren’t an example of hostage taking. They’re just ordinary budget negotiations. If, in the end, it turns out there’s nothing that conservatives want badly enough, then Democrats simply don’t have the leverage to get higher spending levels. And it looks very much as if that’s the case.
The original sequester cuts were dumb, across-the-board reductions. But that was only for last year. Appropriations can all be freshly negotiated this year, which makes the pain of the sequester smaller.
I’m not at all convinced that President Obama even wants to do away with the sequester. He says he does, of course, and his budget proposal includes higher levels of spending. But his actions over the past three years speak louder than words. His pivot to the deficit in 2010 seemed quite genuine, and his active push for a grand bargain in 2011 confirmed that he takes the deficit fairly seriously. It’s true that the sequester is a lousy way of addressing the deficit, but I suspect that Obama thinks it’s better than nothing. If he could negotiate some kind of swap between short-term discretionary cuts and long-term entitlement cuts, he’d do it, but if he can’t he’s not going to invest a lot of energy in fighting the weather.

It’s possible that there’s some kind of minor deal to be made before the CR extension runs out in January. But for the moment, I think the sequester is locked into place. Republicans have never been serious about “entitlement reform,” and even if they were, there’s no way that anything significant could be negotiated within a few weeks. Without that, there’s just no bargain to be had except, possibly, at the margins. Unfortunately for Democrats, the sequester is settled law just as much as Obamacare is. And we all know the lesson Republicans learned from fighting Obamacare, don’t we?

UPDATE: I’m getting some feedback that suggests the Obama White House, in fact, really, really hates the sequester because it hammers discretionary spending so badly. So I might have gone too far in my fifth bullet above. However, I still think the sequester is here to stay, and I doubt that Obama is going to try to fight too hard against it.

Originally from: 

Sorry, Democrats, the Sequester Is Here to Stay

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Sorry, Democrats, the Sequester Is Here to Stay

Andrew Cuomo’s Much-Touted Corruption Watchdog Is Beginning to Look Like a Joke

by RowenaBernardin Posted on October 8, 2013

Mother Jones

In June, an anti-corruption bill that included the holy grail of money-in-politics reforms—public financing of elections—died in the New York State Senate. Progressives and election reformers had pinned their hopes on passing a public financing system modeled after New York City’s, a system that helped Bill de Blasio clinch the Democratic mayoral primary. But they weren’t left empty-handed when the bill died: In its place, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) created the Commission to Investigate Public Corruption to get at the root of Albany’s corruption woes and to study the funding of state elections.

Now, it looks like Cuomo’s commission is not all it’s cracked up to be. And the Cuomo administration is partly to blame.

State lawmakers are refusing to turn over the information about their outside income that the corruption commission requested, the New York Times reports. Cuomo’s staff, meanwhile, “has leaned on the commission to limit the scope of its investigations,” according to the Times.

Here’s more from the Times:

The turmoil over the commission began in late August, when it asked members of both houses of the Legislature to release information about their outside income above $20,000. Several weeks later, lawyers for the Legislature refused, saying, “These demands substantially exceed what New York law authorizes.”

The commission’s relationship with the governor’s office has also been freighted. It issued a flurry of subpoenas at the start, but then was slowed by Mr. Cuomo’s office in several instances, according to people familiar with the situation who insisted on anonymity because they feared retribution by the governor.

In one such instance, when the commission began to investigate how a handful of high-end residential developers in New York City won tax breaks from Albany, its staff drafted, and its three co-chairmen approved, a subpoena of the Real Estate Board of New York. But Mr. Cuomo’s office persuaded the commission not to subpoena the board, whose leaders have given generously to Mr. Cuomo’s campaign, and which supported a business coalition, the Committee to Save New York, that ran extensive television advertising promoting his legislative agenda.

A Cuomo spokeswoman told the Times that “ultimately all investigatory decisions are up to the unanimous decision of the co-chairs.” Still, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said he’s worried about “interference and micromanagement” at the commission, and good-government groups are increasingly disillusioned over the commission’s trajectory. “New Yorkers are losing patience with the continuing culture of corruption in Albany and the continued indictment of their representatives,” reads a letter from Common Cause New York to Cuomo. “The commission was established to help restore their faith in government, not confirm their cynicism that the system will never change.”

Continue reading:  

Andrew Cuomo’s Much-Touted Corruption Watchdog Is Beginning to Look Like a Joke

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Andrew Cuomo’s Much-Touted Corruption Watchdog Is Beginning to Look Like a Joke