Plutocracy

Sordid Advantage: America can’t avert Climate Hellhole because Manchin, Sinema are Corporate Hired Mercenaries

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – American journalists like to personalize stories and create horse races empty of real content. That is why most Americans don’t know what is in the Democratic Build Back Better Bill backed by President Joe Biden– the substance has not been reported on. That bill was originally budgeted at $350 billion […]

Antisemitism

Bogus charges of Antisemitism and the Case of Rashida Tlaib

David Rubenstein

By David Rubenstein | – ( Southside Pride) – You have to wonder how many people actually listened to the allegedly antisemitic comments made by Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib in a speech to a Socialist convention earlier this year. Not many, you can be sure of that. For days those comments were a lead news […]

Banking

Make them Pay Up: Pandora Leaks show that the Super-Rich rob Public of $200 bn a year in lost Tax Revenues

John Feffer

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The rich have always flaunted their wealth. It was rarely good enough to enjoy financial success, you had to be conspicuous about it. They build enormous homes for everyone to gawk at. They throw lavish parties. They commission paintings, statues, biographies. They endow institutions so that their names […]

Inequality

Could Lebanon, Looted and mismanaged by its Plutocrats, become a Failed State?

The Conversation

By Tony Walker | – In the midst of a pandemic that has wrenched the world off its axis, Lebanon’s precipitous decline has not received the attention it deserves given the country’s strategic importance. Bordering Syria to its north and east, and Israel to its south, Lebanon occupies a critical space in the Eastern Mediterranean. […]

Democratic Party

Arguing with Sen. Joe Manchin

John Buell

As I write this piece the so called moderate Democrats are locked in combat with the party’s progressives, but what issues besides numbers to be appropriated receive scant attention. Since Senator Manchin plays so pivotal a role in this conflict it is imperative that progressives understand from where he is coming and formulate careful responses. […]

Campaign Finance

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema angers Progressives, draws support of 40% of Republicans

Cronkite News Arizona PBS

By Diannie Chavez and Brenda Rivas | – ( Cronkite News ) – WASHINGTON – Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s refusal to back the Biden administration’s $3.5 trillion social and clean-energy spending package has made her a target for Democrats – and possibly “the most powerful person in Washington right now,” one analyst said. It’s not […]

Natural Gas

How Sen. Joe Manchin’s support for natural gas could derail Biden’s US climate plan

The Conversation

By Michael Oppenheimer | – ( The Conversation) – President Joe Biden has a goal for all U.S. electricity to come from zero-carbon sources by 2035. To get there, he’s counting on Congress to approve an ambitious package of incentives and penalties designed to encourage utilities to clean up their power sources. That plan, part […]

Inequality

If even the Democratic Party can’t raise Taxes on the Super-Rich, is the US even a Democracy Any More?

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – The struggle over efforts to revise and reform the tax code offers left and labor activists as well as the “democratic wing” of the Democratic Party an opportunity to test its strength and to clear up some widely circulated but misleading facts about the distribution of wealth […]

Arms Sales

The Profits of War: How Corporate America Cashed in on the Post-9/11 Pentagon Spending Surge

William D. Hartung

( Tomdispatch.com) – The costs and consequences of America’s twenty-first-century wars have by now been well-documented — a staggering $8 trillion in expenditures and more than 380,000 civilian deaths, as calculated by Brown University’s Costs of War project. The question of who has benefited most from such an orgy of military spending has, unfortunately, received […]