New research by the Economic Policy Institute connects the murder of George Floyd to a much older history of extrajudicial murder by the country’s “law enforcement” agents and other white enforcers of the color line:
Salon
June 22, 2020
“All in all, today’s UI [unemployment insurance] data highlight the deep recession we are now in,” Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a Thursday morning blog post.
Newsweek
June 22, 2020
While some companies are rehiring as states loosen restrictions and the number of initial claims dropped slightly, the 1.5 million people who applied for benefits was still historic. “It’s still more than twice the worst week of the Great Recession,” Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, told the New York Times.
Route Fifty
June 22, 2020
Approximately 28 percent to 47 percent of private-sector workers were subject to non compete agreements in 2017, according to the Economic Policy Institute. This just goes to show just how common non compete agreements really are.
Ladders
June 22, 2020
In their memo on the ad, the GOP campaign also sent articles that stated that the U.S.-Korea trade deal from 2012, supported by the chamber, led to a more than doubling of the U.S. goods trade deficit, according to Reuters, and “more than 95,000 lost U.S. jobs,” according to an analysis from the union-backed Economic Policy Institute in 2016. (The White House said in 2018 that the goods trade deficit grew by 75 percent under the 2012 agreement.) The biggest source of the trade deficit was related to car sales, according to Vox in 2018.
Politifact
June 22, 2020
The additional $600 a week in federal unemployment benefits, included in the CARES Act, is set to end July 31. That means the unemployed will have to rely solely on state weekly benefits averaging $370, according to Goldman Sachs estimates.
“A huge share of jobless people will be forced to exist on much less than what they had before,” says Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
USA Today
June 22, 2020
More specific proactive actions can add to this, varying by business sector. Richard Rothstein, a distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, offers an example. Rothstein is the author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, which documents, among other injustices, the ways housing policies and business practices exploited and undermined Black access to housing and property, for generations. In short, the de facto segregation of cities was “created jointly,” he says, by government agencies, banks, and insurance and real-estate firms.
Medium
June 22, 2020
People of color make up a disproportionate number of essential workers. According to the Economic Policy Institute, there are 55.2 million essential workers in the US. Half of those in food and agriculture, and 53% in industrial, commercial, residential facilities and services, are people of color.
Business Insider
June 22, 2020
But, it is expensive to be here. Prohibitively. The Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think-tank, estimates that a two-parent, two-children household needs an average combined income of more than $8,500 a month to live in Napa Valley.
Al Jazeera
June 22, 2020
Richard Rothstein, a distinguished fellow of the Economic Policy Institute, writes frequently on achievement gaps. He asserts that the COVID-19 pandemic will exacerbate existing achievement gaps between middle and low-income children. The gaps that already exist will widen – again, black and brown children – will figure prominently in these statistics.
Fort Worth Business Press
June 22, 2020