Joe Kenehan Center

Bush's New Year Resolutions

Don’t miss Ruy Teixeira’s withering analysis of the empty promise of an “Ownership Society,” which is the right’s new term for their ongoing attempt to dismantle the American Dream for working people. (It’s also shaping up to be the domestic theme for Bush’s campaign in the soon to be New Year.)

Schwarzenegger Goes After Working California

Schwarzenegger has launched a move to defund California's innovative university labor studies programs.

David Bacon has the details in this Nation article.

Bacon also provides an interesting outline of the evolution of labor studies programs.

During a long, sleepy period when labor studies programs aimed to help codify a social compact between working people and corporations they drifted into looking for ways to smooth over conflicts between workers and employers--regardless of whether those conflicts were justified. More recently, some of them have moved to providing useable research and know-how to citizens who work for a living and want to improve their lives.

(The same way the much larger and better funded empire of college business programs work with private businesses to expand their markets and profits.)

Outraged? The United Students Against Sweatshops makes it easy to talk to California legislators about Governor Terminator’s plan.

The Bush Tax Cut In Action

From today's Washington Post story on better holiday sales in high-end retailing but relatively flat activity everywhere else:

The results make sense because spending among upper-end consumers who frequent luxury chains has been picking up since mid-year, said economist Michael Niemira, of the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi. But spending among middle- and lower-end customers, who are more likely to frequent discount chains such as Wal-Mart, has been less robust.