The movement for structural change takes to the streets.View this in your browser and share with your friends. <[link removed]>




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Two Strikes

Across the nation, workers are making their voices heard <[link removed]> this week. Nearly 50,000 General Motors workers have been on strike since Monday, fighting to increase pay and job security and end benefit discrepancies between permanent and temporary employees. As Laura C. Bucci notes for the Washington Post <[link removed]>, both public- and private-sector strikes are on the rise in the US, and 62 percent of the public now supports unions—up 14 percentage points since 2008.

- Another angle: Theyouth-led Global Climate Strike <[link removed]> begins today, with millions of students and employees planning thousands of walkouts across 150 countries. Among the strikers: workers at Google, Microsoft, and Amazon <[link removed]>, whose Seattle headquarters <[link removed]> will see its first-ever walkout.




Shareholder Primacy


“You can’t have a successful corporation without employees working there. You can’t have a successful corporation without customers, without the public providing roads [and] infrastructure,” Roosevelt Senior Economist and Fellow Lenore Palladino explains on BBC’s Business Daily podcast. “We do need new laws or policies <[link removed]> so that we’re not relying on some business leaders <[link removed]> to put in place better practices while letting the bad actors continue to act as they do today.” Listen here. <[link removed]>




2020 Plans for Power

Outsized corporate power and untapped public power <[link removed]> lie at the heart of our current inequality. Three new plans from 2020 candidates seek to remedy this long-standing power imbalance.
- Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s anti-corruption plan <[link removed]> seeks “to take power away from the wealthy and the well-connected in Washington and put it back where it belongs—in the hands of the people.” 
- Sen. Cory Booker’s labor proposal <[link removed]> hopes to “transform our economy by empowering workers to take collective action, restructuring our laws to make our workplaces fairer and more inclusive, and rebalancing our tax system so that everyone pays—and receives—a fair share.”
- Sen. Bernie Sanders’s housing-for-all plan <[link removed]> includes a 21st Century Homestead Act <[link removed]>, which would “promote integration and end local segregation that excludes low-income and minority tenants and homeowners.”




The Racial Wealth Gap


Roosevelt Fellow William “Sandy” Darity “has enlisted a dozen Black academics and activists, the self-titled ‘Planning Committee for Reparations,’ to craft a report that will lay out not only a rationale for why descendants of slaves should be paid reparations but also suggestions for how to implement such a program.” Read more from the Washington Post <[link removed]>.




How to Fix Our Politics


“The solution? Deploy tax policy to curb concentrations of wealth and power <[link removed]> that are crippling our economy and democracy,” writes Roosevelt President & CEO Felicia Wong in POLITICOMagazine’s “How to Fix Politics” issue. “To get there, rather than focusing on the argument that tax policy raises revenue (which is important, and which progressives have said for decades), refocus the argument on how vital taxation is to the functioning of our democracy.” As Roosevelt Fellow Todd Tucker explains in the same issue <[link removed]>, giving nonstates—like Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and Washington, DC—full congressional representation “would empower millions of disempowered citizens, more faithfully represent the modern electorate and perhaps even help shake Congress out of its current state of gridlock.”


What We’re Reading
The GM Strike Isn't Just About Higher Wages. It's Also a Protest Against the Gig Economy <[link removed]>-Time

The Environmental Movement Needs to Reckon with Its Racist History <[link removed]>-Vice

Can Public Ownership of Utilities Be Part of the Climate Solution? <[link removed]>-Forbes

The Case for a Public Option for the Drug Industry <[link removed]>-New Republic

New Mexico’s Free-College Plan Could Be a Game-Changer for Student Debt in America <[link removed]>-MarketWatch

A Generation of Economists Helped Get Us into This Mess. A New Generation Can Get Us Out. <[link removed]>-Vox





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