— Suburban Guerrilla đź’™ (@SusieMadrak) April 30, 2024
Category: #OccupyWallStreet
Happy time
BREAKING: 4 million workers will now take home more money when they work more than 40 hours a week under a new Labor Dept. rule released today. The changes would make it so salaried workers earning less than about $59k annually would automatically be due overtime pay.
— Rebecca Rainey (@RebeccaARainey) April 23, 2024
A dangerous woman
Jon Stewart reveals that Apple wouldn't let him interview FTC Chair Lina Khan.
"They literally said, please don't talk to her." pic.twitter.com/YFOlCKOnsn
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) April 2, 2024
Ha, ha
An auditor has raised doubts about the ability of former President Trump's publicly traded company to stay in business, according to a new regulatory filing. https://t.co/xYM0S5I0xY
— NBC Politics (@NBCPolitics) April 1, 2024
Don’t worry, once those foreign autocrats start laundering cash through the company, it will rise from the dead, like Lazarus!
You get what you pay for
NY billionaires move to Florida to get lower taxes and don’t really care what it means for everyone else:
Unacceptable! It doesn’t have to be this way! #TakeBackFL https://t.co/MJATBaih1s
— Nikki Fried (@NikkiFried) March 28, 2024
Second chances
President Biden came into office promising to expand the social safety net as no president has since Lyndon B. Johnson.
But even though Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress until last year, he couldn’t fulfill his most ambitious goals. https://t.co/6HCybYA4Mi
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 20, 2024
What happens when you take things away?
The more I think about this, the more I think it’s true:
It’s a riddle that economists have struggled to decipher. The U.S. economy seems robust on paper, yet Americans are dissatisfied with it. But hardly anyone seems to have paid much attention to the whirlwind experience we just lived through: We built a real social safety net in the United States and then abruptly ripped it apart.
Take unemployment insurance. The CARES Act, passed in March 2020, included the largest increase in benefits and eligibility in American history. It offered people “a sense of relief,” said Francisco DĂez, senior policy strategist for economic justice with the Center for Popular Democracy, which organized unemployed people in the pandemic. “A feeling like they could breathe and figure out what they could do.”
LaShondra White was one of them. When she was furloughed from her job at a Kohl’s department store in Detroit in March 2020, she started receiving more than $600 a week. It was “my chance to get out of this situation,” she told me last year, a situation in which her pay was “horrible.” She had always wanted to own her own business, so with the extra money she fixed her credit score, rented out a commercial space and opened an eyelash studio. Her studio is still open and largely booked.
In 2019, unemployment insurance kept 500,000 people out of poverty; in 2020, that figure was 5.5 million. Yes, the program was riddled with problems, particularly technological ones, that made it difficult for many people to get enrolled quickly. But once they were covered, “They saw something close to the actual level of benefits that they deserve,” Mr. DĂez said.
It was short-lived. By July 2020, the extra $600 in benefits had lapsed, and it wasn’t until December 2020 that Congress approved $300 payments with new restrictions. By May, some states started opting out, leaving their residents with the paltry benefits they would have gotten prepandemic.
Fantastic
story on this here:https://t.co/FuI4g85QZk
— David Dayen (@ddayen) March 12, 2024
Go Katie
Two of the largest credit card issuers—@CapitalOne and @Discover—are trying to merge, which would mean higher fees and fewer choices for consumers.
Big banks don’t need to get any bigger. I’m working to block this deal. https://t.co/LvIvYkklgk
— Rep. Katie Porter (@RepKatiePorter) February 26, 2024
And then there’s this
America’s Richest Ask the Courts To Make Unions Illegal https://t.co/LJ4SchkZRL
— Suburban Guerrilla đź’™ (@SusieMadrak) February 25, 2024