Six on History: "Our" Economy - NY Times, Slate, AFT, The NIB, Business Insider, Democracy At Work
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"Over the past year, as Covid has decimated the social and economic fabric of the United States, one company has been recording staggering profits and market growth, along with a hiring spree of over a thousand workers a day: Amazon. If you are reading this review, you have definitely encountered an Amazon product in some form — whether a blue-and-white bubble-lined envelope sitting outside your door or a delivery from Whole Foods. Even if you’ve decided to boycott Amazon purchases, just by going on The Times’s website you will have used an Amazon product — The New York Times, along with sites like Netflix, Zoom and Twitter, is hosted on Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division behind Amazon’s smiling consumer face.
And chances are high that whatever the product inside the bubble envelope, the Whole Foods bag or the web page you loaded, the product brought you some temporary fulfillment.
In Alec MacGillis’s urgent book, “Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America,” true fulfillment is elusive in Amazon’s America. Through interviews, careful investigative reporting and vignettes from across the country, MacGillis deftly unravels the strong grip Amazon has on the United States, from the ground level — in the inhumane working conditions of the warehouse, in rural towns upended by deindustrialization and subject to the glint of Amazon’s economic promise — to the gilded halls of Washington, D.C., where Amazon’s lobbyists flock."
"Here’s a question that you might think would have an easy-to-Google answer: How much money does the federal government collect in student loan payments each year?
I found myself wondering this several months ago. At the time, Joe Biden had just won the presidency, but it wasn’t clear whether Democrats would take the Senate. And so lawmakers and activists had begun batting around the idea of mass loan forgiveness as a big, legacy-defining gesture that the administration could potentially pursue without Congress.
But how much money would borrowers as a whole actually save each year thanks to a jubilee? Nobody seemed to know.
The question had implications not just for borrowers’ pocketbooks, but for the economy at large. In response to the coronavirus crisis, the federal government has paused payments on the student loans in its portfolio (people can choose to keep paying them but not many are). When payments finally resume, it will act like a new tax on households, putting a slight damper on consumer demand."
"March 31 is César Chávez Day and April 10 is Dolores Huerta Day. Use these K-12 lesson plans and resources to celebrate the life and legacy of these civil rights and labor activists.
Topics span their co-founding of the United Farm Workers union, their use of nonviolent protests to fight for the rights of laborers and includes other change-makers like Lucas Benitez and Librada Paz. You’ll also find related lessons on social justice, on Martin Luther King, Jr., and Hispanic heritage month celebrations."
