Making America Great -- Wages Growing -- Fastest Rate In More Than A Decade -- December 28, 2019

From Axios, original story here.

Wages for nonsupervisory employees — who make up 82% of the workforce — are rising at the fastest rate in more than a decade. 

The big picture: Workers at the bottom of the pay scale have been feeling positive effects on their wages at the end of 2019 — especially when compared to those at the top.

Pay rates the bottom 25% of wage earners rose 4.5% in November from a year earlier, while wages for the top 25% of earners rose only 2.9%, per data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

The bank also found that the rate of pay rises for low-skilled workers matched those for high-skilled workers last month for the first time since 2010.

Ah, yes, since 2010 -- the "lost decade."

Flashback: Hillary promised to put folks out of work; not raise wages.

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The History Page

I have just re-read the first four chapters of The Battle For New York, Barnet Schecter, c. 2002. I completed my first reading of the entire book some time ago. I will put Schecter down for awhile now that I've got the setting sorted out (again), as well as the geography -- land and water -- of the New York area. My notes on that book are here.

I don't recall ever having read a biography of George Washington, but the biography of Washington in Schecter's book is incredibly fascinating.

Then, of all things, while reading The Anarchy, the story of the East India Company, by William Dalrymple, c. 2019, this from page 57:

That opportunity [to "take" India"] manifested itself even as the Carnatic Wars (a series of "wars" waged between French and British trading companies in India during the 1750s] were grinding to an inconclusive end in the mid-1750s.

For it was not just in India that Anglo-French rivalry was smouldering, ready to reignite  at the slightest spark. Instead the trail of gunpowder which ignited the next round of Anglo-French conflict began far away from India, on the frozen borderlands of America and New France -- what we today call Canada --a between the great lakes and the headwaters of the Ohio River.

On 21 June 1752, a party of French Indians led by the French adventurer Charles Langlade, who had a Huron wife and was also influential among the Seneca, Iroquois,  and Micmac, led a war party of 240 warriors down Lake Huron, across lake Erie and into the newly settled farmlands of British Ohio. Tomahawks at the ready, they fell on the British settlement of Pickawillany, achieving complete surprise. Only twenty British settlers managed to muster at the stockade. Of those, one was later scalped and another ceremonially boiled and the most delicious parts of his body eaten.

The violent raid spread a sense of instability and even terror among British traders and settlers as far as New York and Virginia. Within months, regular French troops, supported by indigenous guides, auxiliaries and large numbers of of Indian warriors were rumoured to be moving in large numbers into the headwaters of the Ohio Valley, and on 1 November the Governor of Virginia sent a  21-year-old militia volunteer north to investigate. His name was George Washington. So began the first act in what Americans still call the French and Indian Wars, and which is known in the rest of the world as the Seven Years (sic) War.

This time it would be total war, and properly global, fought on multiple continents and in ruthless advancement of worldwide British and French imperial interests. It would carry European arms and warfare from the Ohio to the Philippines, from Cuba to the coast of Nigeria, and from the Heights of Abraham outside Quebec to the marshy flatlands and mango groves of Plassey.

But the part of the globe it would transform most lastingly was India.

Wow, talk about serendipity. I put the first book down having come to a great spot to do so, and then to pick up a completely unrelated book and it seems to begin exactly where the first left off.

Wow, advice to the granddaughters: never quit reading. LOL.