Plutocracy

Oakland, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment) – Tennessee Governor Bill Lee is killing his constituents by pandering to Donald Trump. He’s following the leads of Texas’ Greg Abbott and Florida’s Ron DeSantis, as state executives, reading the tea leaves of the Tea Party and blowing in the political wind – lives of their citizens be […]

Banking

This time, it is the Students and the Unions that the Gov’t Needs to Bail out for a Healthy Economy

John Buell

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 […]

Authoritarianism

Around the World, Excessive Corporate Power Breeds Political Repression

Inequality.org

By Manuel Perez-Rocha | – Free trade agreements and other neoliberal economic rules grant excessive privileges to transnational corporations, elevating their narrow interests above people’s livelihoods and the environment. Beyond mere economic prescriptions, neoliberalism also embraces repressive and anti-democratic measures. We are increasingly seeing this in the Northern Triangle of Central America, which includes Honduras, […]

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 […]

Inequality

The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax

ProPublica

By Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen and Paul Kiel | – The Secret IRS Files ( ProPublica) – Inside the Tax Records of the .001% In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, […]

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, […]

Inequality

Biden’s modest corporate tax increases to fund public infrastructure projects are wildly popular — except among CEOs

Jim Hightower

By Jim Hightower ( Otherwords.org) – “Outrageous,” screeched the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “It doesn’t feel fair,” whimpered a top corporate executive. The wailing by those who run corporate America is not for the plight of the workaday families who’ve seen their incomes stagnate and even plummet to zero during the pandemic. Rather, this chorus […]

Employment

On How there is no Restaurant Worker Shortage, only a Shortage of Safe Jobs with Adequate Pay

John Buell

From the earliest days of the Pandemic relief initiatives business lobbies and conservative pundits have griped about the $600 Federal Unemployment Insurance supplement. They complained that combined state and federal programs would give many employed workers more income than they received in their current jobs. Workers would have an incentive to stay home to sit […]

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 […]