Two Strikes
Across the nation,
workers
are making their voices heard 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,
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.
 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 so that we’re not relying
on some business leaders to put in place better practices while letting the bad actors
continue to act as they do today.” Listen
here.
2020 Plans for
Power
Outsized
corporate power and untapped public power 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 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 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 includes a
21st
Century Homestead Act, 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.
 How to Fix Our
Politics
“The solution?
Deploy
tax policy to curb concentrations of wealth and
power that are crippling our economy and
democracy,” writes Roosevelt
President & CEO Felicia Wong in POLITICO Magazine’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, 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.”
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