Newly released emails reaffirm that then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton worked to help Honduras’ 2009 military coup succeed. Lee Fang writes for The Intercept:

The Hillary Clinton emails released last week include some telling exchanges about the June 2009 military coup that toppled democratically elected Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, a leftist who was seen as a threat by the Honduran establishment and U.S. business interests.

One of the most damning new emails, cited by Fang, is penned by veteran diplomat Thomas Shannon, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the time (and now Counselor of the Department). Shannon’s email makes clear something also detailed in the scores of State Department cables made available by WikiLeaks that we examined and analyzed for the forthcoming book, “The WikiLeaks Files”: Although the U.S. State Department claims to be a neutral observer of elections around the world, the U.S. government invariably has candidates and parties that it wants to win, often – if not routinely – channeling support to these candidates and parties, whether the support be political, material or otherwise.

Here’s then State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack in 2006, just prior to Nicaragua’s presidential elections, in a cable we cite in the book:

We do not … we are not trying to shade opinion or to try to take a position. This is a democratic election. If you look around the globe, we do not take positions. We do not try to influence these elections.

Here’s then Assistant Secretary Shannon in an email [PDF] to Clinton just after the results of Honduras’ November 2009 election were announced:

The turnout (probably a record) and the clear rejection of the Liberal Party shows our approach was the right one, and puts Brazil and others who would not recognize the election in an impossible position. As we think about what to say, I would strongly recommend that we not be shy. We should congratulate the Honduran people, we should connect today's vote to the deep democratic vocation of the Honduran people, and we should call on the community of democratic nations (and especially those of the Americas) to recognize, respect, and respond to this accomplishment of the Honduran people.

Finally, this Administration, which worked so hard to manage and resolve this crisis, should be the one who defines the results and perceptions of today's vote, and not our critics on the Hill (who had no clear pathway to elections) or our adversaries in the region (who never wanted this day to happen).

The Federal Reserve Board will submit its semiannual report to the House and Senate next week. The report, and testimony from Chair Janet Yellen, will no doubt discuss whether to raise the federal funds interest rate, the interest rate that banks use when

Dean Baker
Al Jazeera America, July 7, 2015

Mark WeisbrotÚltimas Noticias, 5 de julio, 2015

Steve Rose has a new piece on wage growth being published by the Urban Institute which was previewed in a blog post in the Wall Street Journal. It shows a considerably better picture than most of us are used to seeing. Whereas my friends at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) show the real median wage for men has fallen by 7.4 percent between 1979 and 2011, Rose finds that real annual compensation for men has risen by 13.4 percent. EPI’s data show that the median hourly wage for women has risen by 24.2 percent. Rose finds a gain of 73.0 percent.

There are three issues that explain the differences. The main difference for women is the increase in average annual hours worked. Women are far more likely to be full-time full year workers in 2013 than they were in 1979. This is largely due to a breakdown of the barriers that excluded women from most types of better paying jobs and social norms that tended to confine women to working in the home. While the increased opportunities for women is clearly a positive development, we would expect pay to rise accordingly. People expect to be paid more for working forty hours a week than for working 30 hours a week. Therefore if we find that people having higher earnings because they are working more hours rather than getting higher hourly pay, it doesn’t really change the wage stagnation story.

The second issue is that Rose is looking at total compensation rather than just hourly pay. This includes payments that employers make for Social Security taxes, health care insurance and defined contribution pensions. This matters more for the 1980s, when there were substantial increases in Social Security and Medicare taxes than in the last two decades.

Looking at compensation in principle is reasonable if we want to know what workers are paid for their work, but it does raise some issues. The most important is that Rose’s measure only counts payments to defined contribution pensions, not payments to defined benefit pensions. This means that a switch from defined benefit pensions to defined contribution pensions would show up as an increase in compensation in Rose’s measure, even if no more money is being paid by the employer. This switch only explains a small part of the difference in wage growth, but it is certainly peculiar.[1]

Dean Baker
Truthout, July 6, 2015

Dean Baker
Truthout, July 6, 2015

Mark WeisbrotThe Huffington Post, July 2, 2015

President Obama’s critics have consistently used the talking point that he is “only creating government jobs.” They argue that the private sector has been significantly hampered by his presidency and that most of the job growth under his administration has been in the public sector. The most famous iteration of this argument came in a 2012 roundtable debate on ABC News when Senator Rand Paul and economist Paul Krugman engaged in a heated debate on the sources of job growth under Obama.

Deborah JamesThe Huffington Post , July 2, 2015

The satirical publication The Onion recently featured an older piece of theirs, “180 Trillion Leisure Hours Lost To Work Last Year.” The joke is that the 180 trillion leisure hours are supposed to represent every hour that Americans work. But there’s a mo

Eileen AppelbaumThe Hill, July 2, 2015