Time to put the spotlight on corporate taxes

A battle is slowly brewing in Washington DC over whether to raise corporate taxes to help finance new infrastructure investments.  While higher corporate taxes cannot generate all the funds needed, the coming debate over whether to raise them gives us an opportunity to challenge the still strong popular identification of corporate profitability with the health of the economy and, by extension, worker wellbeing.

Black Lives Matter protests are saving lives

The research is pretty clear that oppressive economic and social conditions are bad for one’s mental and physical health.   And there is also research showing that protesting is good for one’s mental and physical health.  As Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a psychiatrist at Yale University explains:  

Can protesting and other forms of activism help people break out of those negative thought cycles? Yes, because protesting alone is therapeutic. It is acting on hope and it is also, in the case of oppression, therapeutic.

Now we have a study that finds that protesting actually saves lives.  More specifically, that Black Lives Matter Protests reduce police killings.  As Travis Campbell, the author of the study, concludes, “census places with Black Lives Matter protests experience a 15 percent to 20 percent decrease in police homicides over [the period 2014-2019], around 300 fewer deaths. The gap in lethal use-of-force between places with and without protests widens over these subsequent years and is most prominent when protests are large or frequent.”