Politicians tell us that they want to serve their fellow humans. To whom?

The minimum wage will increase in eight states and several localities across the country. In these states, the minimum wage is indexed to inflation, a campaign priority of Barack Obama back in 2008 that never got past the formative stage. This can actually have a pretty decent impact, if a small one in macroeconomic terms, and a significant increase in the minimum wage would be even better.

When Ohioans soundly turned back an assault on worker’s rights, defeating Issue 2 and SB 5 with 61% of the vote, they did it with a broad coalition that points to a total reversal of the voting bloc that brought Governor John Kasich to power in 2010. It could have long-lasting implications for 2012 and beyond.

I’m not ashamed of my hometown: you grow up working class, and you understand working, and class, and if you can keep your eyes open, that’s a gift.

It’s practically a rite of passage for a labor leader to stress their independence from the Democratic Party. In the end, the alarm bells almost always go off, and labor runs back into the waiting arms of the Democrats. Not to mention that labor is intimately intertwined with the Democratic Party. They have seats on the DNC, fercryinoutloud. So will this time be any different?

There are differences between the proposed Wisconsin and Indiana measures: the Indiana ones are actually quite a bit worse. Governor Mitch Daniels de-certified the state’s public employee unions on his first day in office back in 2007. It got little response at the time. This new bill would essentially make Indiana into an anti-union “right to work” state. It would prohibit employers from requiring an employee to join a union or to collect union dues to work at their establishment. It would also give private-sector union members the right to drop out of their unions and stop paying dues. Basically it would turn the work environment in Indiana like much of the deep South.

Wisconsin is kind of a launching pad for conservatives who want to break public employee unions. Other efforts are happening in concert. Tennessee just passed a bill out of a Senate committee stripping collective bargaining for teachers. If you weren’t aware that the tea party push to elect Republicans was more about union-busting than liberty or freedom, you weren’t paying attention.

At a time when we should be reining in the capitalism that failed so badly, we are instead capitulating to it, using the event of the failure of our corporate masters to give them even more. How is that even happening? And to what degree does the blogosphere deserve some of the blame?

According to revised statistics, the US economy grew at a faster rate than first expected, up to 2.5%. Earlier growth in Q3 2010 was estimated at 2%. But there’s a problem here: despite record unemployment, and no hope for reductions clearly in sight, corporations have experienced all-time record profits, the highest since the Commerce Department started tracking the figure 60 years ago. They’ve learned to produce as many or more goods without workers.

In a state with 14% unemployment, foreclosures everywhere, Reid put together a coalition that was unusually potent and a model for Democratic victory.