The 1 Percent President
This week at the World Economic
Forum’s annual Davos conference, President
Trump declared
that “the American dream is back bigger, better, and stronger than
ever before.” In an op-ed for The Guardian,
Roosevelt Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz issues an urgent fact-check.
“Even judging by GDP, the Trump
economy falls short. Last quarter’s growth was only 2.1%, far less
than the 4%, 5% or even 6% Trump promised, and even less than the 2.4%
average of Obama’s second term. That is a remarkably poor performance
considering the stimulus provided by the $1tn deficit and ultra-low
interest rates,” Stiglitz writes. “So, Trump deserves failing grades
not only on essential tasks such as upholding democracy and preserving
our planet. He should not get a pass on the economy, either.”
Read
more and
watch
Stiglitz discuss inequality and the climate
crisis with
Bloomberg’s Tom Keene.
The Strands of New
Progressivism
On NPR’s Left, Right & Center, Roosevelt President & CEO Felicia Wong
talks impeachment, the USMCA, and the four strands of
new
progressivism in a post-neoliberal world: new structuralists, public providers,
economic transformers, and economic democratists. “There are lots of
subtleties amongst these; a lot of the people who are in these various
strands have plenty of debates with each other,” Wong said. “But
overall, the reason we call this post-neoliberal is it’s basically
taking the idea of power away from solely corporations and putting it
back in the hands of people—and also putting it back in the hands of
other institutions, including labor institutions.”
Listen
here.
Rewriting the Rules of
Labor
A
new report from Clean Slate for Worker Power proposes a bold redesign of American labor
law, incorporating the ideas of over 70 thinkers—including Roosevelt
Fellow Brishen Rogers. “Across our entire history, access to economic
and political power has been unforgivably shaped by racial and gender
discrimination, as well as by discrimination based on immigration
status, by sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination, and
by ableism. And, truth be told, the American labor movement has itself
often failed to insist upon a genuinely inclusive and equitable
America,” write the report’s authors, Sharon Block and Benjamin Sachs.
“What we need, then, is a new labor law that is capable of empowering
all workers to demand a truly equitable American democracy and a
genuinely equitable American economy.” Read
more from Block and Sachs in
Newsweek.
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On the trail: “All of
these [presidential] candidates have aggressive and meaningful labor
policy proposals,” Roosevelt Vice President for Advocacy and Policy
Steph Sterling tells the Los Angeles Times.
“I think they recognize the need to rebalance power in our economy and
the critical roles that unions play in making that a reality.”
Read
on.
The Hidden Rules of
Race
What the Racial Wealth Gap
Means
On an MLK Day episode of NPR’s
Mountain
Money, Roosevelt Fellow
Darrick Hamilton explains the historic
causes and implications of the US racial wealth
gap. “We often
think about wealth as an outcome, but the real value of wealth is what
it can do for you: the agency it provides to make decisions in your
life,” said Hamilton. Coming soon, a new Roosevelt working paper from
Lenore Palladino will explore the effects of shareholder
primacy on the
racial wealth gap, and a report from Insight Center for Community
Economic Development President Anne Price will reexamine the racial
wealth gap framework.
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