Neoliberalism

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – Digging our way back out of the pandemic recession will not be easy, but we have the advantage of knowing what worked and did not work in the 2008 crisis. Any policy choice today does not operate on a blank slate. No one knows this more than […]

Employment

Dear National Public Radio: The Stock Market is not the Economy– Tell us about Hunger and the Real Unemployment Rate

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – I have a pet peeve with NPR. Why do so many of its top- of- the- hour five minute newscasts begin and end with short stock market updates? Is there no more important factoid its news editors could be passing along to us? NPR likes to portray […]

Epidemics

Lest we Forget: Trump’s and Billionaires’ Covid Profiteering, Debasing Science and Death on the scale of the Civil War

Tomdispatch

By Nina Burleigh | – ( Tomdispatch.com) – Now that we’re all unmasking and the economy seems set to roar into the 2020s, what will we remember about how disastrously, how malignantly, the Trump administration behaved as the pandemic took hold? And will anyone be held to account for it? The instinct to forget pandemics, […]

Banking

Let Lebanon be Lebanon: Paris should Stop Threatening Beirut with EU Sanctions

John Hickman

John Hickman “Governing Lebanon is surely more daunting than governing France.”[1] That pearl of wisdom in an essay defending consociational democracy by University of Pennsylvania political scientist Brendan O’Leary has never been more accurate. A delicate balance of domestic interests with institutional vetoes at the best of times, Lebanese politics has been stalemated for months […]

Epidemics

Pfizer and Big Pharma need to waive Patents on Covid-19 Vaccine to Save the World

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – It is a familiar story. A Pharma giant sells life- saving vaccine , which costs no more than 7 dollars a dose, to most nations at almost 20 dollars per shot. Knowing that unseemly profits in the midst of a global pandemic may elicit outrage and perhaps […]

Inequality

How the Pandemic spelled the end of Trickle-Down Economics: We need Wealth to Percolate up

Jim Hightower

( Otherwords.org) – The past year proves that a lot of conventional economic wisdom is neither true nor wise. For example: 1) “We don’t have the money.” The power elites tell us it would be nice to do the big-ticket reforms America needs, but the money just isn’t there. Then a pandemic slammed into America, […]

Employment

The Decades-Long Struggle Over Big Corporations and Poverty Wages

Inequality.org

By Phil Mattera | – ( Inequality.org ) – The Senate Parliamentarian dealt a strong blow to the Fight for $15 movement by ruling that a federal minimum wage increase could be included in the stimulus bill. Senator Bernie Sanders is pushing back with an amendment to take tax deductions away from large, profitable corporations […]

Epidemics

Rich Nations are Getting Vaccines, Poor Countries Not: Which is a Big Danger to Rich Countries

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – Our commercial media have followed the ups and downs of the vaccine roll out in the United States even as much less attention is devoted to the experience of poor nations. Pundits and TV anchors periodically acknowledge that lethal viruses don’t respect borders but seldom discuss the […]

Employment

Essential Workers deserve $15/ hr. – Remember when we Fêted them for Serving us in Pandemic?

OtherWords

By Eshawney Gaston | – ( Otherwords.org) – I’m one of America’s millions of essential workers. We’re working in your children’s schools, at your grocery stores, and at drive-through windows. We’re cleaning your homes. And we’re struggling so hard to make ends meet. Congress is debating whether to raise the minimum wage to $15 an […]