Greece can be seen as a case study of what not to do during troubled economic times: A safety net destroyed, public unions decimated and massive corporate tax breaks that did nothing to help their economy, leading only to skyrocketing unemployment. Now, Wisconsin sadly serves as a parallel study.
Corporations aren't people. If that were so, Yahoo!'s recent acquisition of Tumblr would be a violation of the Constitution, which states that people are human beings with inherent rights, not commodities to be bought and sold.
More and more people are understanding that the government and the economy do not work for them, that we have to build a mass popular resistance that not only challenges what we oppose, but also builds an alternative economy and new systems of governance. But is it too late?
At this point everyone who follows economic policy debates knows about the famous Reinhart-Rogoff spreadsheet error uncovered by a University of Massachusetts graduate student. When the error is corrected, there is nothing resembling the growth falloff cliff associated with a 90 percent debt-to-GDP ratio that had been the main takeaway from the initial paper.
Over the weekend, a national conversation about our nation’s decaying infrastructure finally became audible in the wake of a bridge collapse in Washington state. At the heart of the matter is America’s need to increase infrastructure spending by any means available: congressional loans; an infrastructure bank; and/or incentivizing private-public investments, to name a few.
Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and David Vitter (R-LA) have introduced legislation that would lay the groundwork for breaking up the biggest banks — a cause Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has been fighting for since she took office.
Some of the world's wealthiest corporations—utilizing secretive tax havens backed by powerful governments—are siphoning billions of dollars of potential revenue from the very same poor countries that foreign investment is so often said to be helping.
In the furious fallout from the revelation that the IRS flagged applications from conservative nonprofits for extra review because of their political activity, some points about the big picture -- and big donors -- have fallen through the cracks.
While the man who coined the "Two Americas" term left politics in disgrace, that message has never been more important or apparent than in the debate over raising the minimum wage. After adjusting for inflation, minimum wage workers earn 25-percent less than they did 45 years ago—despite upper-echelon employers raking in a bigger slice of the pie than ever before.
Big Tobacco not only created the Tea Party, it has promoted it over decades, pumped millions into marketing it, and pulled it out of its magic hat every time it needed to produce an overnight, spontaneous “grassroots” movement.
