Business

• To avoid giving them healthcare coverage under Obamacare
• Taco Bell saw a banner year in 2012, with its parent corporation enjoying a 73 percent jump in profits in the beginning of the year and an additional 23 percent increase later in the year.
• Papa John’s Obamacare idiocy
• 9 Greedy CEOs Trying to Shred the Safety Net While Pigging Out on Corporate Welfare

Scott Keyes, Think Progress

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Tuesday, 8 January, 2013 | A Taco Bell in Guthrie, Oklahoma is cutting all its restaurant workers’ hours to part-time in order to skirt federal law requiring them to provide health insurance for employees.

Nearly 20 employees work for this particular Taco Bell franchise. They were informed just before Christmas that everyone’s hours would be cut to 28 hours or less per week because the owners disliked the Obamacare requirement that large companies had to help provide health coverage for workers.

Full story...

Related:

Papa John’s Obamacare idiocy, Prachi Gupta, Salon

CEO John Schnatter insists that the Affordable Care Act necessitates price increases. Experts disagree.

9 Greedy CEOs Trying to Shred the Safety Net While Pigging Out on Corporate Welfare, Lynn Stuart Parramore, AlterNet

• Financiers, polluters and other biz honchos team up to strangle the economy.
• Secrets and Lies of the Wall Street Bailout
• 6 Reasons Joseph Stiglitz and Other Top Economists Think Means-Testing Medicare & Social Security Is a Destructive Idea

• Here's an extended excerpt from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers' (CIW) website in which they explain their reasons for putting this remarkable video together.
• 1960: Harvest of Shame
• MLK's Badass Speech that Everyone Forgot About

Katrina vanden Heuvel, Nation

This article is made possible with the generous contributions of all reader supported Evergreene Digest readers like you. Thank you!

December 6, 2012 | The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the remarkable farmworker organization in Florida that I have written about many times over the years as they continue to win victory after victory in their Campaign for Fair Food, has done it again.

This time they have put together a must-see video that is mandatory watching.

Full story...

Related:

1960: Harvest of Shame, Edward R. Murrow, CBS News

Watch the entire original broadcast of one of the most celebrated documenaries of all time, which exposed the plight of America's farm workers.

MLK's Badass Speech that Everyone Forgot About, Rollie Williams, Upworthy

Freedom and self-respect are never given, but must be unapologetically taken.

• Goldman Sachs is sitting pretty after Congress cut a deal larded with corporate tax breaks worth billions.
• The “fiscal cliff” fraud
• Let’s Call Their Bluff on the Hyped-Up Fiscal Cliff!

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Bill Moyers & Company / Salon

Goldman Sachs chairman and chief executive officer Lloyd Blankfein. (Credit: AP/Susan Walsh)

January 11, 2013 | In economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s book “End This Depression Now!,” there’s a chapter titled “The Second Gilded Age” in which he describes the extraordinary rise in wealth and power of the very rich during this era of unregulated greed. Since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, the top 1 percent of Americans have seen their incomes increase by 275 percent. After accounting for inflation, the typical hourly wage for a worker has increased just $1.23.

Big Money, as Krugman writes in his book, buys Big Influence. And that’s why the financiers of Wall Street never truly experience regime change — their cash brings both political parties to heel. So it is that the policies that got us where we are today — in this big ditch of chronic financial depression — have done little for most, but have been very good to a few at the top.

Full story...

Related:

The “fiscal cliff” fraud, Andre Damon, World Socialist Web Site

The working class must insist that all people have the right to the necessities of life: a secure and decent-paying job, economic security, food, housing, education and medical care. The realization of these rights, however, is not compatible with the continued rule of the corporate and financial elite.

Let’s Call Their Bluff on the Hyped-Up Fiscal Cliff! Ellen Brown, Web of Debt

• Congress is said to be held hostage to conservative demands. The real hostages are the debt slaves of our financial system.
• The “fiscal cliff” fraud
• Where Did the Debt Come From?

• The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come.
• 9 Greedy CEOs Trying to Shred the Safety Net While Pigging Out on Corporate Welfare
• Frank Rich | America's Real Fiscal Crisis
• Krugman | Fiscal Cliff Deal Is Bad Omen

Matt Taibbi, Common Dreams

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(Illustration by Victor Juhasz)

It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you'd think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we've been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?

Wrong.

Full story...

Related:

9 Greedy CEOs Trying to Shred the Safety Net While Pigging Out on Corporate Welfare, Lynn Stuart Parramore, AlterNet 

• Financiers, polluters and other biz honchos team up to strangle the economy.
• Secrets and Lies of the Wall Street Bailout
• 6 Reasons Joseph Stiglitz and Other Top Economists Think Means-Testing Medicare & Social Security Is a Destructive Idea

Frank Rich | America's Real Fiscal Crisis, Frank Rich, New York (NY) Magazine 

• For all the Beltway hysteria about the fiscal cliff, the forgotten Americans in the debate are American workers. 
• Frank Rich on the National Circus
• Robert Reich | Jobs Deficit Still More Important Than Budget Deficit

Krugman | Fiscal Cliff Deal Is Bad Omen, Paul Krugman, New York (NY) Times

• If Obama stands his ground in this confrontation, this deal won’t look bad in retrospect. If he doesn’t, yesterday will be seen as the day he began throwing away his presidency and the hopes of everyone who supported him.
• Perspective On The Deal
• Austerity Is So Wrong