Great Unemployment Rate, Lousy Jobs

Hey brother, can you spare a dime? President Trump has fallen far short of his goal of creating good American jobs, according to research from the Brookings Institution, which found that 44 percent of US workers earn a median annual wage of $18K.

It's a common misconception that low-wage gigs go to high school kids slinging burgers at McDonald's or walking area pooches for some cash. Brookings torpedos that notion, finding 53M Americans in the prime working years of 25 to 54 struggling with a median hourly wage of $10.22 per-hour. The average price of a Big Mac meal with soda/fries is $5.69.

Though the mainstream media portrays the economy as humming along at a nice clip, Brookings notes many Americans earn wages low enough to leave them and their families extremely vulnerable.

And it's an endless cycle of want. Women, people of color and those with low levels of education are most likely to stay in low-wage jobs, wrote Brookings researchers Martha Ross and Nicole Bateman.

They argue that though the private sector is good at spewing out low-paying jobs, there just aren't enough of the good ones to go around.

"We need additional funds, a commitment to change the status quo, political will to reallocate funding toward evidence-based programs, and greater employer involvement," wrote Ross and Bateman.

Good luck with that.

The Trump administration entered office with a promise to back a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure program that would have resulted in those "good jobs." Millions of Americans are still waiting.

It's getting hot in here. Companies have been put on notice to improve their climate warming disclosures. The $28B TCI hedge fund sent letters to ten of its holdings to warn them it will vote against their directors, if they don't publish their carbon dioxide emissions.

The Financial Times reported that Charter Communications, Moody's and Airbus are on TCI's hit list.

Once an afterthought for investors, fund managers now put a priority on emissions disclosure as they focus on climate-risk.

"Investing in a company that doesn't disclose its pollution is like investing in a company that doesn't disclose its balance sheet," Christopher Hohn, TCI founder, told the FT.

Hohn's campaign is welcome news for financial and sustainability/environmental PR pros.

The Partnership for America's Health Care Future neither denies nor confirms that it is behind the effort to ghost write opinion columns for state lawmakers to warn against the "dangers" posed by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren's "Medicare-for-all" program.

The Washington Post reported that the healthcare industry has mobilized against both the "single-payer" and "public option" because they would redirect "trillions in spending with insurers, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies."

Medicare for All Now, a group that backs single payer, received a trove of emails from healthcare lobbyists to state lawmakers "trying to bend public opinion away" from Sanders/Warren's plan. It handed the emails to the Post.

Wendell Potter, former VP-corporate communications at healthcare insurer CIGNA and now industry critic, told the paper secret emails "blow open what I saw first hand and revealed as a health insurance whistleblower. These companies and their lobbyists will stoop to whatever it takes, no matter how grotesque, to deny people the lifesaving coverage they need."

In the event of a Sanders or Warren presidential victory, the battle for "Medicare for All" will make the old Harry and Louise 1993-1994 $20M ad push from the Health Insurance Assn. of America to kill Hillary Clinton's healthcare reform effort look downright amateurish.

Potter was on the other side when Harry and Louise hit the tube and was the talk of healthcare PR.