Washington Post

Having banged its head against a wall for years with nothing to show for it but a headache, the American labor movement is devising a plan to bypass the wall altogether. During its quadrennial convention here this week, the AFL-CIO has acknowledged that the laws protecting employees who seek to join a union have been rendered so ineffectual that labor must come up with new ways to advance workers’ interests.

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By seeking congressional approval for military action against the Syrian government, President Obama has accomplished something that the nation hasn’t seen in some time: He’s compelled Republicans to divert their attention from their concocted crises to an issue of actual substance.

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Of all the commemorations of the March on Washington, the one that will best capture its spirit isn’t really a commemoration at all. Thursday, one day after the 50th anniversary of the great march, fast-food and retail workers in as many as 35 cities will stage a one-day strike demanding higher wages.

Sadly, the connection between the epochal demonstration of 1963 and a fast-food strike in 2013 couldn’t be more direct.

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This Wal-Mart low-prices, low-wages thing isn’t working out so well — even for Wal-Mart.

The company released its quarterly numbers last week, and they weren’t pretty. Same-store sales declined by 0.3 percent, and the company lowered its earnings-per-share forecast. Bad news wasn’t limited to Wal-Mart. At the low end of the retail consumer market, Kohl’s reported similarly bad news; Macy’s, a little higher up the food chain, lowered its earnings forecast as well.

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Like Walt Whitman, Jim Messina contradicts himself and contains multitudes. How else to explain why Messina — the campaign manager of President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and the chairman of his ongoing grass-roots lobbying operation — has taken a new gig as a consultant to the reelection campaign of David Cameron, Britain’s Tory prime minister?

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Now, mind you: I’m not taking full credit for the decision of the Graham family to sell The Post to Jeff Bezos. I’m not convinced that the musings of this avowedly social democratic op-ed columnist are in all instances decisive in The Post boardroom. But that said …

My column last week concerned a new study by three economists (two at NYU’s Stern School of Business and one at the Harvard Business School) which showed that privately-owned companies invest 6.8 percent of their assets into expansion, modernization and diversification, while publicly traded companies invest just 3.7 percent. Indeed, they noted, when privately owned companies went public without raising more capital, their investment levels dropped substantially.

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