Economy

By Jessica Schieder | (Otherwords.org) | – – This year-end tax package is a grab bag of gifts for corporations and a lump of coal for working families. Given the commitment House Republicans profess to balancing the federal budget, you’d think tax breaks for profitable businesses would be a low priority. But this holiday season, […]

Featured

Is Corporate Media a danger to Society? Coverage of Trump v. Sanders

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – ABC World News has given one minute to Bernie Sanders this year (actually, it is just 20 seconds). It has given 81 minutes to Donald Trump. Bernie is taking on corporations, and it is the corporations that are reporting on him, or rather blacking him out. […]

Inequality

Deepening Inequality Driving US Middle Class into Oblivion

contributors

By Deirdre Fulton, staff writer | (Commondreams.org) | – – “The hollowing of the middle has proceeded steadily for four decades, and it may have reached a tipping point,” Pew Research Center says A closer look at the shift out of the middle reveals that “a deeper polarization is underway in the American economy,” says […]

Plutocracy

Peak Inequality? 400 US Billionaires are wealthier than 190 Million fellow Americans

contributors

By Chuck Collins & Josh Hoxie, | (Institute for Policy Studies) | – – This report exposes the extreme wealth concentrated within the fortunes of the 400 wealthiest Americans and compares this wealth to the much more meager assets of several different segments of American society. The report proposes several solutions to close the growing […]

Banking

After 2008 Wall Street Crash, did US White Working Class Drink itself to Death?

contributors

Barbara Ehrenreich | ( Tomdispatch.com) | – – The white working class, which usually inspires liberal concern only for its paradoxical, Republican-leaning voting habits, has recently become newsworthy for something else: according to economist Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the winner of the latest Nobel Prize in economics, its members in the 45- to 54-year-old age group […]

Employment

The GOP Race as America’s Hunger Games

contributors

Nomi Prins | (Tomdispatch.com) | – – Fact: too many Republican candidates are clogging the political scene. Perhaps what’s needed is an American Hunger Games to cut the field to size. Each candidate could enter the wilderness with one weapon and one undocumented worker and see who wins. Unlike in the fictional Hunger Games for […]

Economy

Turkey reels as Putin imposes Stiff Economic Sanctions

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The Russian sanctions announced by President Vladimir Putin on Saturday could have a severe impact on the Turkish economy. It is not clear whether President Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu did not expect this severe a reaction to the shoot-down of a Russian fighter […]

Featured

‘Very Soon’ US forces will Arrive in Syria; Russia bombs near Turkey

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Turkey’s government is very unhappy today about developments in Syria. President Obama’s special envoy, Brett McGurk, said Sunday that the some 50 men from special operations forces will arrive in Syria in the very near future. But Turkey has been upset that the US troops will […]

Acidification of Oceans

Climate Change to throw 100 mn. People into Poverty

contributors

By Thalif Deen | (Inter Press Service) | – – UNITED NATIONS (IPS) – The UN’s heavily-hyped Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were approved by more than 160 world leaders at a summit meeting in September, are an integral part of the world body’s post-2015 development agenda, including the eradication of hunger and poverty by […]