Kathleen Geier

The International Labor Organization (ILO) recently released its Global Wage Report 2012/13. Econ blogger Timothy Taylor, the “Conversable Economist,” (H/T Economist’s View) points to one of the report’s most disturbing findings, the fact that labor’s share of the GDP is declining significantly in nearly all countries throughout the world. Here’s an excerpt from the report: […]

Sunday’s Washington Post features an article that will break your heart. Written by Eli Saslow, it’s a brilliant piece of journalism titled “After Newtown shooting, mourning parents enter into the lonely quiet.” The article focuses on one family, Mark and Jackie Barden, whose 7-year old son, Daniel, was murdered in the Newtown massacre. Part of […]

The divine Cole Porter was born on this day in Peru, Indiana in 1891. Porter was among the greatest American popular songwriters of the pre-rock era. Though he wrote both words and music, he was most formally inventive with lyrics, to which he brought insouciant wit, high ironic sophistication, and healthy dose of good old […]

On Thursday of this week, the Washington Post’s Jena McGregor noted something very strange: Nancy Brinker is still the CEO of the Susan Koman Foundation. Not only that, she’s helped herself to a 64 percent pay raise. You all remember Nancy Brinker, don’t you? She’s the right-wing operative who trashed the once-golden brand of the […]

So, today, Cory Booker made it official; he announced he’s running for the U.S. senate, to fill the New Jersey seat left vacant by the recent death of senate veteran Frank Lautenberg. As you may have guessed, if you know me and my writing, I’m not a big Cory Booker fan. It’s not so much […]

This week, ThinkProgress’s excellent Bryce Covert wrote about a new report by the National Women’s Law Project about the relationship between the minimum wage and the gender pay gap. As the NWLP demonstrates, raising the minimum wage would help close the gender pay gap, because women are disproportionately concentrated in low-wage sectors such as food […]

Remember all those fearless predictions by the usual grinning idiots on the right about how the sequester was going to work miracles for the economy? Well guess what? That never happened. I know, I know. I’m still reeling from the shock. The sequester took effect on March 1, so we now have three months’ worth […]

Korean pop is the music world’s latest sensation. If I ran the zoo, “Bad Girls,” the latest single and video by Lee Hyori (roughly, the K-pop equivalent of Beyonce), would be a “Gangnan Style”-type worldwide break-out hit. It’s brilliant filmmaking and pop feminism at its most buoyant.

“If austerity were tested like a medication in a clinical trial, it would have been stopped long ago, given its deadly side effects.” — academics David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, from their New York Times op-ed In the past week, the academics David Stuckley (an Oxford sociologist) and Sanjay Basu (a Stanford epidemiologist) have published […]

The legacy of the late internet activist Aaron Swartz lives on. Just this past week, Aaron received the ultimate pop culture tribute: he was the answer to a question on Jeopardy. The topic was “Tech Drop-Outs.” Here’s the clue, which was worth $2,000: This Stanford dropout & RSS pioneer died in 2013 while fighting government […]