Plutocracy

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

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 […]

Authoritarianism

1/6 Committee: Can a Pinochet-Style Chilean Dictatorship be Forestalled in the United States?

Jill Richardson

( Otherwords.org) – If you believe violence instead of voting is justified, I implore you to at least consider the alternative viewpoint. By Jill Richardson | July 28, 2021 As the congressional investigation into the January 6 insurrection gets underway, we’re learning disturbing new details about Trump supporters’ violent attempt to overturn the 2020 election. […]

Children

As Florida’s cases Spike to Unprecedented 21,683, Ron “Satan” DeSantis wants to Kill your Kids

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Jeffrey S. Solocheck at the Miami Herald reports that Florida governor Ron DeSantis on Friday issued a royal decree forbidding school districts to require that pupils wear a mask and threatening to cut funding from any that defied him. DeSantis has also banned Florida municipalities from putting in renewed mitigation […]