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Showing posts with the label Latin America

Puerto Rico is Our Greece

We, here in the U.S., have our very own Greece. There is the destruction of the city of Detroit, which has been raped and pillaged by hedge fund vultures who are major donors to both political parties, which means the politicians then pass laws to protect hedge funders’ money, that is usually invested in bonds. On a bigger scale there is Puerto Rico, which has labored under colonial rule since Christopher Columbus landed on its shores in 1493 and claimed it for Spain. After the Spanish American War in 1898 the U.S. acquired Puerto Rico in the treaty of Paris and ruled it as a territory since. Puerto Ricans are considered natural born citizens, but like all stepchildren they must abide by U.S. laws without a voting member in Congress. For decades the island was a jewel of the Caribbean with the highest per capita income in Latin America, but in 1996 when a Republican Congress and the Clinton administration agreed to a 10-year phase out of section 936, a tax exemption for U.S. manufa...

Coming Together One Country At A Time

In California there is hope for the $15 an hour minimum wage because we are seeing two unions fight for this new amount for minimum wage. One is the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and it wants $15 by 2020. The other union is United Health Care Workers West wants to raise the wage by $1 an hour every year until it hits $15 an hour by 2021 and the SEIU’s state council is prepared to spend $20 million to $30 million on the campaign. This all sound good and productive, but why would these unions invest so much money to start such a low amount for the minimum wage? This slow walking of the minimum wage will do nothing more than bump workers off the assistance programs that allows them to work and eat or seek medical care without going broke? The Teamsters have a word for unions that cater to corporations’ interest and it is “business unionist.” The minimum wage has not kept up with inflation, had it kept up minimum wage would be about $24 an hour, so these low increases will...