Plutocracy

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 […]

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 […]

Climate Change

#ExxonKnew Escalates as NY Att’y Gen. Subpoenas Oil Giant Over Climate Crimes

contributors

By Deirdre Fulton, staff writer | (Commondreams.org) | – – “‘Exxon Knew’ just joined the category of truly serious scandals,” said 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben “Just as New York’s Teddy Roosevelt took on the Standard Oil Trust a century ago, New York’s attorney general has shown great courage in holding to account arguably the richest […]

Climate Change

Fury as Probe Demanded into Exxon’s Historic Climate Crime

contributors

By Jon Queally, staff writer | (Commondreams.org) | – – A broad coalition of community groups along with prominent leaders from the nation’s top civil rights, environmental, and indigeneous people’s movements on Friday sent a joint letter to the U.S. Department of Justice demanding a federal investigation into allegations that oil giant ExxonMobil knew about […]

Climate Change

Top Five Things Congress Should investigate instead of Benghazi

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – – The fruitless carnival barking that was the GOP Benghazi inquisition did the nation the disservice of taking focus off the things really wrong with US policies, and places there really was wrongdoing. So here are some suggestions for real investigations: 1. We still don’t know why Bush-Cheney […]