Plutocracy

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 […]

Epidemics

Public Citizen: It Turns out Pfizer-BioNTech Vaccine depends Heavily on Publicly-Financed Research

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – Public Citizen recently uncovered “an agreement that the European Commission reached with Pfizer and BioNTech last November to purchase 100 million doses of the companies’ mRNA vaccine, which was developed with the support of https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-09/pfizer-vaccine-s-funding-came-from-berlin-not-washington”> government funding and U.S. taxpayer-financed technology. In the 104-page contract, Public Citizen […]

Inequality

Tax the ‘Trillion-Dollar Seven’

OtherWords

By Bob Lord | – ( Otherwords.org ) – Democrats want to spend $3.5 trillion on jobs and infrastructure. A third of that could be covered by just seven billionaires. By Bob Lord | September 1, 2021 The collective wealth of the seven wealthiest Americans has now reached nearly $1 trillion. And these seven pay […]

Featured

On Labor Day, Poverty for Workers has fallen from 12.8% to 8.5%

Juan Cole

Revised. Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – This Labor Day, American workers finally have something have to celebrate, by virtue of having voted for a Democratic president and Congress. The pandemic-driven labor shortage has raised wages. Direct payments from the government, including an expanded child tax credit and expanded unemployment benefits added $3,200 to the income […]

Climate Crisis

How Can US Corporations address the Climate Emergency if their Stock Buy-backs even Interfere with their Ordinary Business?

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – The international panel of climate science experts presents the challenge in the starkest terms. A panel of leading scientists convened by the United Nations issued a comprehensive report Monday that contains a stark warning for humanity: The climate crisis is here, some of its most destructive consequences […]

Debt

Debt and Disillusionment: Neoliberalism’s Unfair burden on this Generation of College Students

Rebecca Gordon

( Tomdispatch.com ) – For the last decade and a half, I’ve been teaching ethics to undergraduates. Now — admittedly, a little late to the party — I’ve started seriously questioning my own ethics. I’ve begun to wonder just what it means to be a participant, however minor, in the pyramid scheme that higher education […]