CEPR's Dean Baker is appearing in this week's episode of Moyers & Company, talking about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), referred to by some as “NAFTA on steroids.”

Along with Yves Smith, who runs the excellent Naked Capitalism blog, Dean and Bill Moyers discuss the secret negotiations that have plenty of seats at the table for corporations (but not the public), as well as the potentially dangerous effects that the TPP could have on the rest of us.

The following labor market policy research reports were recently released:

The deployment of a new military police force, an initiative first proposed by National Party candidate, and president of the National Congress Juan Orlando Hernández, has emerged as an important contextual issue in U.S. media and analysis of Honduras’ fast-approaching presidential elections. Catherine Cheney, for example, wrote recently for World Politics Review:

Last week, in the midst of a political campaign that has focused heavily on public security, authorities in Honduras deployed 1,000 military police as part of an effort to address drug violence and organized crime in this Central American country, home to the highest homicide rate in the world.

The new police force is a demonstration of a central Hernández political campaign position in response to one of the biggest issues in the elections: soaring crime rates, and Honduras’ now infamous status as the “murder capital of the world.” As Henry Tricks wrote for The Economist:

…Mr Hernández has made security the central issue, even though polls show that the economy is just as much of a concern for most citizens. In relentless publicity slots, he accuses [LIBRE presidential candidate Xiomara] Castro of wanting to demilitarise the fight against crime (she denies this, saying she wants to use the military to secure the borders against drug traffickers). In contrast, he has put his weight behind the creation of a 5,000-strong military-police force, 1,000 of which have been deployed on city streets during the campaign.

Cheney cites experts who see the militarized police force as both poorly-trained and having a misplaced focus:

[Mark Ungar, a Latin America expert and professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center] said militarizing the police is harmful to both security and human rights, and diverts attention from reforming the police. “They’re not trained for security. They don’t know how to do criminal investigation or community policing. They’re trained to shoot,” Ungar said of the military police.

As the nation debates the low wages of fast-food workers, the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center has released a report entitled Fast Food, Poverty Wages, which reveals the cost of public benefits programs for fast-food employees. The paper discusses how the low wages, low work hours, and limited employer-provided benefits leave over half of fast-food workers with little choice but to rely on government assistance programs to get by.

Mark WeisbrotThe Guardian (UK), 29 de octubre, 2013En Inglés

Changing the basis of the COLA to the chained CPI would cut an already modest cost-of-living-adjustment.

The Social Security Administration has announced the Social Security cost-of-living-adjustment (COLA) will be 1.5 percent in 2014. Beneficiaries will begin seeing the increase in their checks in January.

It is worth noting that this COLA based on the consumer price index for wage and clerical workers (CPI-W) is likely to be lower than the rate of inflation shown by the BLS experimental elderly index (CPI-E), which is designed to reflect the purchasing patterns of the elderly. The biggest differences between the two indices are the weights assigned to health care and housing, with both components accounting for a much larger share of the CPI-E than the CPI-W.

Mark WeisbrotThe Guardian Unlimited, October 29, 2013En español