By Jon Marcus/The Hechinger Report

This article was originally published by The Hechinger Report in March 2016.
MELBOURNE, Australia – He admits it: José Lopez always dreamed of going to America and using his training in information technology to make his fortune.
But even if he hadn’t been put off by the rhetoric from across the border about building walls and banning people based on their religion, there were 52 times more applicants for visas to emigrate to the United States from his native Mexico in 2015 than were made available under a complex quota system. And even if a technology company agreed to sponsor him, that route, too, was closed off when the number of workers who applied for those kinds of visas in the first week was three times the annual cap.
Which is why Lopez has come to find himself in a classroom in Melbourne boning up on his English and preparing for a new life in Australia, a country that invites skilled, well-educated immigrants like him with comparatively open arms.

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Posted on February 7, 2017

By Tom Polansek and Mark Weinraub/Reuters

CHICAGO – U.S. food producers and shippers are trying to speed up exports to Mexico and line up alternative markets as concerns rise that this lucrative business could be at risk if clashes over trade and immigration between the Trump administration and Mexico City escalate.
Diplomatic relations have soured fast this month, as the new U.S. administration floated a 20 percent tax on Mexican imports and a meeting between the presidents of the two countries was canceled. U.S. President Donald Trump has also pledged to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement trade deal with Mexico and Canada.
Mexico is one of the top three markets for U.S. farm production.

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Posted on February 6, 2017

By Patrick Stokes/The Conversation

Hey, remember 2016? When all those beloved celebrities kept dying and we couldn’t wait for the year to be over? We’re now less than a month into 2017 and two weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency, and the Internet finds itself seriously conflicted over whether it’s ok to punch Nazis.
Nostalgic yet?

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Posted on February 3, 2017

By The Roderick And Solange MacArthur Justice Center

A federal class action lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Illinois’ parole revocation process has been resolved with a guarantee that attorneys will be provided to eligible parolees and an agreement the state will take additional steps to bring fairness to the process of determining whether a parolee must return to prison due to a parole violation.
U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve approved the settlement agreement reached with the Illinois Department of Corrections and the Illinois Prisoner Review Board. Plaintiffs were represented by the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center and the Uptown People’s Law Center.
“The terms of the settlement, if implemented correctly, will guarantee that many parolees throughout the Illinois will receive state-funded attorneys to represent them throughout the revocation process,” said Alexa Van Brunt, an attorney with the MacArthur Justice Center and Clinical Assistant Professor of Law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.

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Posted on January 25, 2017

By Leonard Steinhorn/BillMoyers.com

When Donald J. Trump assumes the presidency and lays out his agenda for our country, he will likely proclaim himself, as he did in the campaign, the voice of “the forgotten Americans.”
To Trump, these “forgotten Americans” are the white working-class Rust Belt voters who catapulted him to the presidency, people who see themselves as an aggrieved silent majority whose diminished social and economic status never gains the attention of a coastal elite preoccupied with political correctness and minority rights.
But the truth is this: These white working-class voters have never been forgotten, while those who truly are forgotten still don’t have a voice.
If Trump really wants to speak for forgotten Americans, he would travel to the Mississippi Delta and the rural Black Belt of the American South, where conditions are so wretched and dire that even a struggling Rust Belt factory town might seem like a bountiful paradise of opportunity and wealth.

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Posted on January 21, 2017

By Joshua Jansa/The Conversation

In late November, President-elect Donald Trump announced that he had reached a deal with Carrier to keep about 800 manufacturing jobs in Indiana from moving to Mexico. After the announcement, we learned that the Indiana Economic Development Corporation would give $7 million in tax credits and grants to Carrier’s parent company in exchange for keeping the jobs in the state.
Trump proudly praised the agreement as a “great deal for workers” and said that it was part of a larger approach to keep jobs at home, saying that “This is the way it’s going to be.”
Having the chief executive of the United States negotiate individualized deals with corporations is certainly a new approach to economic policy nationally, though it is not without precedent. In fact, state governments have been negotiating targeted incentives with corporations for decades.
My research focuses on why states use incentives to attract and retain investment from corporations and whether they are effective. My work, as well as that of many others, shows that these deals do not create the jobs and economic growth they are purported to.

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Posted on January 19, 2017

By Alwyn Scott/Reuters

SEATTLE – A dispute over $8.7 billion in Washington state tax breaks is heating up after Chicago-based Boeing joined a new lobbying group set up to preserve the industry incentives, the biggest in U.S. history.
The group opposes efforts to make the aerospace tax breaks, passed in 2013, dependent on Boeing maintaining minimum employment levels in the state.
Such “claw-back” bills had failed the past two years, but union leaders and a lawmaker said in interviews on Tuesday they planned to try again in the legislative session that started this week.

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Posted on January 18, 2017

By Nika Knight/Common Dreams

The private jets of the world’s wealthiest men and women are swarming the Swiss Alps for the annual World Economic Forum, which began Monday in Davos, Switzerland, in the midst of an ongoing global inequality crisis.
And that crisis is accelerating, according to a new Oxfam report: today, only eight men own the same amount of wealth as the 3.6 billion people who comprise the poorest half of humanity.
Those eight men are Bill Gates, Amancio Ortega, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim Helu, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and Michael Bloomberg.

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Posted on January 17, 2017

By Les Leopold/Common Dreams

History warns us to be very, very careful when using the phrase “white working class.” The reason has nothing to do with political correctness. Rather, it concerns the changing historical definitions of who is “white.”
For example, Eduardo Porter (like so many others) recently used this construction in the New York Times to ask , “Did the white working class vote its economic interests?” He claims that current data shows white people losing out to blacks and Hispanics in getting their fair share of the new jobs created since 2007:

Despite accounting for less than 15 percent of the labor force, Hispanics got more than half of the net additional jobs. Blacks and Asians also gained millions more jobs than they lost. But whites, who account for 78 percent of the labor force, lost more than 700,000 net jobs over the nine years.

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Posted on January 16, 2017

By Reade Levinson/Reuters

In late 2013, a San Antonio police officer stood accused of handcuffing a woman in the rear of his police car and then raping her. The same officer had remained on the force despite prior sexual misconduct complaints and other brushes with the law.
So early in 2014, backed by the city council, City Manager Sheryl Sculley proposed reforms to the police union contract in the Texas city. She wanted to eliminate a clause that erased prior misconduct complaints from cops’ records, increase citizen participation in the complaint process, and end officers’ ability to forfeit vacation time rather than serve suspensions.
The San Antonio Police Officers Association’s response: It targeted Sculley with a $1 million advertising campaign, according to estimates by the manager’s office. The union ran full-page newspaper ads and placed billboards downtown claiming crime rates rose because she refused to fill open police positions. Police backers broadcast ads highlighting Sculley’s six-figure salary and created a Facebook page, Remove City Manager Sheryl Sculley.

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Posted on January 14, 2017