Economy

Illinois Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky added her ignorant voice to the cacophony of economic confusion Thursday on the low-rated MSNBC show hosted by Chris Hayes. If a Republican congressperson made a statement as breathtakingly ignorant as the one you're about to see, it would get wider media play. Schakowsky's "brilliant" suggestion almost certainly won't. Why has nobody thought…

It must be nice to blithely talk about how you would spend somebody else's money without thinking through the consequences. Kendall Fells, the organizing director of Fast Food Forward in New York, told Yahoo Finance's Bernice Napatch at its Daily Ticker site that "McDonald’s made $5.5 billion in profits and there’s plenty of money to pay the workers who work there and new hires without firing…

The four panelists of MSNBC’s The Cycle each weighed in on yesterday's nationwide fast food workers’ strike on Thursday’s show. All four of them voiced their support for the strikers, including the supposedly conservative member of the panel, Abby Huntsman. Huntsman claimed the strike was “bigger than the minimum wage. This is about making enough to live.” She groused that the average…

Vickie Thomas and the news department at Detroit TV station WWJ really ought to be ashamed of themselves. The open question is whether they even know enough to be ashamed. In reporting on a Motor City McDonald's store which was forced to close — whether it was for a few hours or all day and night isn't disclosed — Thomas quoted a "protester" claiming that "McDonald’s made like $500 billion…

MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski vehemently criticized Miley Cyrus’s lewd display during Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” at the MTV Video Music Awards, but Brzezinski herself has blurred the lines between morning show anchor and social activist. On today’s Morning Joe, broadcast from a Ford assembly line near Detroit, the co-host openly declared her support for the nationwide fast food workers’ strike…

When conservatives rally or march over an issue, such as the yearly March for Life, they don't get much attention. Yet, ABC offered two reports on Thursday promoting a liberal-backed strike on fast food restaurants. Good Morning America's Rebecca Jarvis went so far as to link the protest to Wednesday's 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's rally. Jarvis touted, "They're hoping that scenes…

At Slate, Mark Lynas tells the story of activist-orchestrated media deception — although one sometimes wonders whether the press even minds being deceived in these instances, and in certain cases whether some journalists are in on the scam. The deception involves activists who are against any form of biotechnology advances laying waste to a field of genetically modified "golden rice" in the…

There are two key words missing from the report Bloomberg's Kasia Klimasinska & Shobhana Chandra published Tuesday morning — a writeup that is so incredibly sunny and over-the-top that is probably would have embarrassed the Old Soviet Union's Pravda in its heyday. One is "income." The reason is obvious. Real median household income is still way below where it was when the recession ended…

Hoping to breath some new life and some fresh drama into the minimum wage issue, Time magazine foresees the handful of fast-food strikes going "viral" tomorrow. "Fast Food Strikes Go Viral: Workers Expected to Protest Low Wages in 35 Cities Thursday" blares the headline to Victor Luckerson's 10-paragraph August 27 post at the magazine's website. Here's how Luckerson opened his piece:

In the world of Jesse Jackson and the people over whom he has undue influence, if you oppose President Obama's agenda in any way, on any issue, you're a racist. No debate, no allowance for principled objection, discussion over. Apparently now, in Jackson's view, if you in any way oppose the frightening and financially reckless expansion of government we've seen during the past five years or the…

As has been demonstrated many times, including in its recent cover-up and weaselly non-correction of his "Gulf ports" gaffe, the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, continues to do its level best to keep President Obama's misstatements and misleading statements from wider public visibility. Two such instances occurred in one speech on Friday in Binghamton, New York, where Obama…

Anyone remember all the huffing and puffing from the establishment press about how third-quarter economic growth was going to be great — so please stop worrying about how weak the past three quarters (annualized rates of 0.1%, 1.1%, and 1.7%, respectively) have been? Oops. On Friday, the Census Bureau reported that new-home sales dropped over 20% in July to an annual rate of 394,000 from June…

When you think of California, a few things spring to mind. One is the state's love affair with the automobile. Another is, of course, how in the past 25 years the state the state has abandoned the center-right politics that gave it governors like Ronald Regan and George Deukmejian for hard-left, tax-and-spend politics. So it should come as no surprise that the penchant for the latter is…

A chart accompanying a writeup by Robert Pear at the New York Times on how Americans' real incomes have fallen and barely begun to recover is interesting in its selection of comparison points. Pear himself tried to pretend that what President Obama wants to do to try to make college more affordable is somehow relevant to reigniting economic growth. Really.