Despite Bush administration claims that the economy made strong gains this past year, real median household income did not grow and for full-time, year-round individual workers, real income actually declined more than 1%.

Over the last five years, there has been a new concentration of wealth in the hands of the few in the US. Meanwhile, middle and lower-income families have seen their already precarious financial solvency eroded by rising debt and stagnant wages.

Like the dinosaur, "the US economy is mind-bogglingly enormous, two and a half times as big as the next largest economy in the world and almost as large as that of the six other members of the Group of Seven combined.

Five dollars and fifteen cents, the federal minimum wage (FMW), doesn’t buy much these days. With $5.15 you can almost buy two gallons of gas, almost go to the movies, or almost buy two burgers and a soda – at McDonald’s.

A Republican bill that hid a huge, wolfish tax break for the wealthy inside the sheep’s clothing of an increase in the minimum wage crashed and burned in the Senate on Aug. 3.

With the fifth anniversary of the end of the last recession now approaching, both employment and wages should be fully restored to their pre-recession levels and growing in real terms. Instead, both are still below their 2000-2001 peaks, with no sign of any improvement before the business cycle turns down again.

If anyone ever doubted that the Republican Party is the party of the rich, working tirelessly to make themselves richer off the labor of American workers, those doubts were erased as Republicans moved into action in the final days of the Congressional debate over the federal minimum wage.

"In the United States, it is possible to work full-time, full-year and still live in poverty," states the soon-to-be-released book The State of Working America, 2006/2007, the indispensable annual publication of the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

Thus the real question is: why should the danger of higher interest rates in the US weaken sentiments in equity markets worldwide, resulting in the generalised downturn in global markets?

U.S. employers have quietly been raking in extraordinarily high profits for the past two years while holding wages down and shifting more benefit costs onto workers. Real wages will decline further as economic growth slows in the United States and worldwide over the next year.

Michigan voters can’t trust Dick DeVos. He says one thing – about jobs, Michigan schools, and ethics – but his record says another.

Homeless advocates are planning a fabulous redesign of the Peachtree and Pine Homeless Shelter into a major community hub, where the homeless will eventually run a coffee shop, restaurant, market, art studio, and rooftop garden, to enhance downtown culture and provide themselves a way out of poverty.

A half century ago, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black reminded us in Griffin v. Illinois (1956) that there “can be no equal justice where the\ kind of trial a man gets depends on the amount of money he has.”

For quite some time now, the post-war welfare state has been on the retreat in France as in many other nations in Europe, giving way to neo-liberal politics and economics. However, this is for the first time that a massive student movement erupted against the neo-liberal reforms.

As Bush continues to troll for votes to shore up Republicans in the November elections, the immigration debate moves further away from any informed discussion of why workers uproot themselves and make treacherous journeys to other countries, only to take miserable jobs with employers who exploit them in every imaginable way.

The new spike in oil and gasoline prices is the last nail in the coffin for workers who hoped to see any real improvement in wages this year.

They use their own secret language to communicate with one another, a language that says one thing on the surface but has a hidden subtext that, if recognized, allows the reader to translate "Capitalese" (the secret dialect of the capitalists) into more meaningful ordinary English.

I, like millions of other former and ongoing Verizon customers, watched my phone bills rise sharply for local calls while a deregulated Verizon got into Internet, cell phones, TV, etc., making us pay for both their investments in the new technologies and their discounts to new customers for relatively expensive services.

President Bush’s 2007 budget that was released last month includes significant cuts in housing assistance. The new budget for the Housing Choice Voucher Program underfunds 70 percent of the state and municipal housing agencies that oversee the program.

General Motors, with a $90.9 billion pension fund – the largest among U.S. companies – announced on March 7 that it will freeze pension benefits for nonunion workers.