Part-Time Is The New Full-Time

The Article: 97 percent of new US jobs are part-time by Shannon Jones in the Worldwide Socialist Website.

The Text: Behind the job figures of recent months lies an underlying reality of continued hardship for millions of unemployed and partially employed workers in the United States.

US employers added 162,000 nonfarm jobs in July according to the government’s Establishment Data Survey, an anemic number considerably below predictions. However, a closer look reveals another serious problem.

“Over the last six months, of the net job creation, 97 percent of that is part-time work,” said Keith Hall, a senior researcher at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center quoted by McClatchy Washington Bureau. Hall was head of the US Bureau of Labor (BLS) Statistics from 2008 to 2012.
Citing the BLS Household Survey, Hall said that over the past six months 963,000 more people reported that they were employed while 936,000 of them reported they were in part-time jobs. Hall continued, “That is a really high number for a six-month period. I am not sure that has ever happened over six months before.”

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A 13 Year Old On Being Stopped And Frisked

Thirteen year old “menace to society” Kasiem Walters experienced the now unconstitutional “stop and frisk” policy for the first time while on his way to school. At an already vulnerable and difficult age, the last thing any 13 year old needs is to be demonized and treated not as human but as a criminal. Unfortunately for Walters and many others just like him, this is not an uncommon occurrence. Surely after years and years of race-based aggravation, minorities affected by this policy won’t come to resent and resist police authority and finally become the criminals they’re already believed to be. Oh, wait. That is what tends to happen.

The Most Honest Explanation Of The GOP’s War On Women You’ll See

Never one to shy from controversy, cartoonist Garry Trudeau took the GOP to task in 2012 when they began releasing their Kraken-esque pieces of legislation that would require women seeking abortions to endure a series of painful, invasive and sovereignty-violating procedures before undergoing the operation–which is still, to the chagrin of most social conservatives, authorized under Roe v. Wade. So contentious were Trudeau’s sketches that quite a few papers opted out of publishing many of the cartoons you see below. In Trudeau’s eyes, however, to not cover them would be akin to “comedy malpractice”. A year later, things haven’t gotten any better and Trudeau’s work unfortunately remains as relevant as ever.

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8 Ways Privatization Has Failed America

The Article: 8 Ways Privatization Has Failed America by Paul Buchheit in The Contributor.

The Text: Some of America’s leading news analysts are beginning to recognize the fallacy of the “free market.” Said Ted Koppel, “We are privatizing ourselves into one disaster after another.” Fareed Zakaria admitted, “I am a big fan of the free market…But precisely because it is so powerful, in places where it doesn’t work well, it can cause huge distortions.” They’re right. A little analysis reveals that privatization doesn’t seem to work in any of the areas vital to the American public.

Health Care

Our private health care system is by far the most expensive system in the developed world. Forty-two percent of sick Americans skipped doctor’s visits and/or medication purchases in 2011 because of excessive costs. The price of common surgeries is anywhere from three to ten times higher in the U.S. than in Great Britain, Canada, France, or Germany. Some of the documented tales: a $15,000 charge for lab tests for which a Medicare patient would have paid a few hundred dollars; an $8,000 special stress test for which Medicare would have paid $554; and a $60,000 gall bladder operation, which was covered for $2,000 under a private policy.

As the examples begin to make clear, Medicare is more cost-effective. According to the Council for Affordable Health Insurance, Medicare administrative costs are about one-third that of private health insurance. More importantly, our ageing population has been staying healthy. While as a nation we have a shorter life expectancy than almost all other developed countries, Americans covered by Medicare INCREASED their life expectancy by 3.5 years from the 1960s to the turn of the century.

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One Of MLK’s Best–And Least Known–Speeches

As many fought for equal rights, Martin Luther King Jr. understood that for true equality to be achieved, the promotion and protection of labor was key. Speaking about the importance of dignified life to a group of striking sanitation workers a week before he was shot, MLK’s words are just as relevant today as they were several decades ago.