According to "Underwriting Bad Jobs: How Our Tax Dollars are Funding Low-Wage Work and Fueling Inequality," taxpayers subsidize nearly 2 million low-wage jobs through federal contracts, Medicare and Medicaid spending, Small Business Administration loans, federal infrastructure funds, and other areas of government spending.

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The Senate is scheduled to vote Monday on a bill that would empower states to collect sales taxes for purchases made over the Internet. The measure is expected to pass because it has already survived three procedural votes. But it faces opposition in the House, where some Republicans regard it as a tax increase. A broad coalition of retailers is lobbying in favor of it.

Under current law, states can only require retailers to collect sales taxes if the store has a physical presence in the state.

That means big retailers with stores all over the country like Walmart, Best Buy and Target collect sales taxes when they sell goods over the Internet. But online retailers like eBay and Amazon don't have to collect sales taxes, except in states where they have offices or distribution centers.

As a result, many online sales are tax-free, giving Internet retailers an advantage over brick-and-mortar stores.

The bill would empower states to require businesses to collect taxes for products they sell on the Internet, in catalogs and through radio and TV ads. Under the legislation, the sales taxes would be sent to the states where a shopper lives.

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Major clothing retailers like Wal-Mart, Joe Fresh, JCPenney and the Children's Place were each found to have subcontracted manufacturing to the crumbling factory in Savar, where workers were making an average of $38 a month and coerced to report to work even after the walls of the building were literally falling apart. In November, fire ravaged another garment factory near the capital city of Dhaka, leaving 112 dead. Again, pieces of clothing from Sears, the Walt Disney Co. and other major retailers were found among the scorched remains.

In the aftermath of such tragic, and preventable, losses of life, many consumers are left asking themselves what role they can play in discouraging disasters like this from happening again. And, fortunately, there are answers. The collective power of workers is a real thing, and the collective power of consumers is, too.

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“At the end of the day,” Macy’s employee Krystal Maxie-Collins told Salon, “it feels like I’ve done all of this to help everyone else, to help the store, help the managers, help the customers, but it doesn’t feel like anyone is looking out for me.” Maxie-Collins, a mother of four who works part-time for the state minimum wage of $8.25 plus a commission, said she had initially been hesitant about the strike because of the risk of retaliation. But “what we are fighting for, the reason for doing it, kind of overrode the fear of doing it.” “Usually the things that are worth it,” she added, “you have to sacrifice for.”

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In an article today, Publishers Weekly tried to reverse engineer a book's sales on Amazon by tracking its position on the bestseller list. The conclusion, which is couched in plenty of caveats, is that reaching the top of the Amazon list only requires about 300 sales through the site per day. It's not a result that will cheer the always beleaguered publishing industry.

Here's how the experiment worked:

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At this point, the Clintons are the shining example of how this quiet but nonetheless powerful corruption system works. As USA Today this week noted, Bill Clinton has become one of the wealthiest presidents in American history, thanks to the fact that since leaving office, he "has earned more than $125 million before taxes, with the vast majority of that coming from speaking fees."

That term "speaking fees" is a sanitized phrase that evokes images of earnest college lectures and graduation orations. But for the most part, the term really refers to a corporate payoff, either for a job well done in office, or for a former politician to add his name to the corporate brand.

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Yet that continues to be the direction we’re heading in.

A newly-released analysis by the Economic Policy Institute shows that the super-rich have done well in the economic recovery while almost everyone else has done badly. The top 1 percent of earners’ real wages grew 8.2 percent from 2009 to 2011, yet the real annual wages of Americans in the bottom 90 percent have continued to decline in the recovery, eroding by 1.2 percent between 2009 and 2011.

In other words, we’re back to the widening inequality we had before the debt bubble burst in 2008 and the economy crashed.

But the President is exactly right. Not even the very wealthy can continue to succeed without a broader-based prosperity. That’s because 70 percent of economic activity in America is consumer spending. If the bottom 90 percent of Americans are becoming poorer, they’re less able to spend. Without their spending, the economy can’t get out of first gear.

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“We” must make these sacrifices, it will be said, in order to deal with our mushrooming budget deficit and cumulative debt.

But most of the people who are making this argument are very wealthy or are sponsored by the very wealthy: Wall Street moguls like Pete Peterson and his “Fix the Debt” brigade, the Business Roundtable, well-appointed think tanks and policy centers along the Potomac, members of the Simpson-Bowles commission.These regressive sentiments are packaged in a mythology that Americans have been living beyond our means: We’ve been unwilling to pay for what we want government to do for us, and we are now reaching the day of reckoning. The truth is most Americans have not been living beyond their means. The problem is their means haven’t been keeping up with the growth of the economy — which is why most of us need better education, infrastructure, and healthcare, and stronger safety nets. The real median wage is only slightly higher now than it was 30 years ago, even though the economy is twice as large. The only people whose means have soared are at the very top, because they’ve received almost all the gains from growth. Over the last three decades, the top 1 percent’s share of the nation’s income has doubled; the top one-tenth of 1 percent’s share, tripled. The richest one-tenth of 1 percent is now earning as much as the bottom 120 million Americans put together. Wealth has become even more concentrated than income (income is a stream of money, wealth is the pool into which it flows). The richest 1 percent now own more than 35 percent of all of the nation’s household wealth, and 38 percent of the nation’s financial assets – including stocks and pension funds.Think about this: The richest 400 Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together. The six Wal-Mart heirs have more wealth than the bottom 33 million American families combined.

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Reportedly poor, unsafe working conditions in the retail giant's U.S. warehouses led last year to repeated strikes and threats of legal action by subcontracted workers. According to Eidelson, however, labor groups are unimpressed by Wal-Mart's response -- namely that Wal-Mart would employ the system it uses to monitor international distribution warehouses to monitor U.S. ones. The move seems particularly striking in the wake of a deadly fire in one of Wal-Mart's Bangladeshi distribution centers in which 112 workers died. Via the Nation:

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The fish recall is for "Cold smoked salmon in 12-ounce twin packs – which are vacuum-sealed with a cardboard sleeve – and 1.25-pound bundles under the brand 'Paramount Reserve.'” So far no illnesses have been reported according to Wal-Mart. The recall is an escalation of an earlier recall.

A Miami subsidiary of Multiexport Foods Inc. produced the fish in conjunction with Tampa Bay Fisheries.

According to the paper, "The listeria monocytogenes bacteria – which can cause fatal infections in the elderly, the young and those with weak immune systems and lead to fever, nausea and diarrhea in other victims – was discovered during a standard lab test on a shipment of the salmon that hadn’t been distributed to stores, according to Wal-Mart."

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I spent some time at one of these megastores last week, and what I really noticed were the kids. The best way to understand Christmas in modern America is to watch how children react to the intense marketing directed their way. Kids are the purest representation of our values, because they haven't yet learned to disguise their desires and feelings. They don't yet know they are being marketed to, they want what they want, and they are going to bug their parents to get it. In fact, piggybacking on innocence is a standard tactic in children's marketing, known as accentuating "the nag factor." But they also want to be adults, to help, to be taken seriously.

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The increasing importance of internet retail appears to be coming at the expense of traditional brick and mortar stores which saw Black Friday sales drop slightly, to $11.2 billion.

The online shopping surge arrived even before tomorrow’s “cyber Monday” event when consumers can supposedly access numerous online bargains. However, the decision by online retail behemoth Amazon to offer comparable bargains throughout last week may cut into cyber Monday grosses and relevance.

In recent years, Black Friday sales have created near riots and even fatalities as shoppers crushed into big box stores. This year the frenzy was relatively subdued though there was a hectic scene outside a Victoria’s Secret in Kansas City, Mo.

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The release noted that "the same number of associates missed their scheduled shift as last year," but hundreds of protests in 46 states beginning Thursday evening have drawn attention to the retailer's poor labor practices while according to The Nation, workers struck at stores in Dallas, Kenosha, Wis., San Leandro, Calif., and Clovis, N.M. At least one worker went out on strike at stores in Ocean City, Md., Orlando and Baton Rouge. Rep.-elect Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) joined a Walmart worker as she walked off her job in St. Cloud.

Walmart stores rang up almost 10 million transactions from the time doors opened for Black Friday shoppers at 8 p.m. Thursday until midnight. Meanwhile the following strikes and protest actions have been reported:

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Consider the example of the Kelley family in Fort Myers, Fla., so determined to sacrifice nothing of their quality of life while in quest for the perfect deal that they showed up in front of the local Best Buy's doors on Monday, equipped with a dinner table.

This is what we call not messing around:

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"Black Friday," wrote Eidelson, "workers have pledged -- barring concessions from the company -- will bring their biggest disruptions yet." Walmart employees across the country have a host of grievances including unsafe and unsanitary working conditions, sexual harassment, excessive hours, forced labor and low pay. Ned Resnikoff at MSNBC flagged a leaked internal document (first obtained by HuffPo) that revealed that base pay  at Walmart's Sam's Place stores can be as low as $8 an hour (or $16,000 per year), with wage increases in increments as low as 20 or 40 cents per hour. To put this in context, Gawker recently highlighted a Demos study that says that raising the salary of all full-time workers at large retailers to $25,000 per year would lift more than 700,000 people out of poverty, at a cost of only a 1 percent price increase for customers.

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The Rediscovering Government Initiative has been dedicated to restoring faith in government through publicizing the best scholarship, clarifying the nation’s true history and countering the prevailing and widely prevalent myths about government. So it is encouraging to see the growing chorus, even if there is a Johnny-come-lately feel to some of it.

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If Walmart doesn’t address OUR Walmart’s demands, said striking worker Colby Harris, from Dallas, “We will make sure that Black Friday is memorable for them.” He said that would includes strikes, leafleting to customers, and “flash mobs.” Harris was joined on a press call announcing the deadline by leaders of the National Consumers League, the National Organization of Women, and the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, three of the national organizations that have pledged support for the workers’ efforts. Absent a resolution, said NOW President Terri O’Neill, NOW members will join Walmart workers outside stores on Black Friday to ask customers “whether they really want to spend their dollars on a company that treats workers this way.”

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“A lot of associates, we have to use somewhat of a buddy system,” Dallas worker Colby Harris said last night. “We loan each other money during non-paycheck weeks just to make it through to the next week when we get paid. Because we don’t have enough money after paying bills to even eat lunch.” Harris, who’s now on strike, said that after three years at Walmart, he makes $8.90 an hour in the produce department, and workers at his store have faced “constant retaliation” for speaking up.

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Last June, nearly 100 Wal-Mart employees announced the formation of a new membership organization called OUR Walmart, which demanded improvements on the job. Though backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers union, it hasn’t sought union recognition (UFCW also backed a previous non-union organization of Wal-Mart workers in 2005). OUR Walmart currently claims thousands of Wal-Mart workers in hundreds of stores as dues-paying members. As its efforts have escalated, OUR Walmart leaders say Wal-Mart has targeted them for punishment.

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