Plutocracy

By Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski ( ProPublica) – In late June 2019, right after the U.S. Supreme Court released its final opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas boarded a large private jet headed to Indonesia. He and his wife were going on vacation: nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago […]

Climate Crisis

Savage Capitalism: From Climate Change to Bank Failures to War

Tomdispatch

By David Barsamian and Noam Chomsky | – [The following is excerpted from David Barsamian’s recent interview with Noam Chomsky at AlternativeRadio.org.] David Barsamian: On March 20th, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its latest report. The new IPCC assessment from senior scientists warned that there’s little time to lose in tackling the […]

Arms Sales

Congress Has Been Captured by the Arms Industry: And We’re Paying the Price (and What a Price It Is!)

William D. Hartung

( Tomdispatch.com ) – On March 13th, the Pentagon rolled out its proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2024. The results were — or at least should have been — stunning, even by the standards of a department that’s used to getting what it wants when it wants it. The new Pentagon budget would come in […]

Neoliberalism

The End of Renting? In Some Cities Affordable Housing is a Thing of the Past

Rebecca Gordon

( Tomdispatch.com) – In 1937, the American folklorist Alan Lomax invited Louisiana folksinger Huddie Ledbetter (better known as Lead Belly) to record some of his songs for the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Lead Belly and his wife Martha searched in vain for a place to spend a few nights nearby. But they were […]

Far Right

Inside the “Private and Confidential” Conservative Group That Promises to “Crush Liberal Dominance”

ProPublica

by Andy Kroll and Andrea Bernstein, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented Co-published with Documented ( ProPublica ) – A few months ago, Leonard Leo laid out his next audacious project. Ever since the longtime Federalist Society leader helped create a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, and then received more than a billion dollars from […]

Corporations

Before RR Co. Norfolk Southern Poisoned Palestine, Oh., It Poisoned the Ohio Statehouse

OtherWords

The company plied state lawmakers with cash and lobbied against common sense rail safety measures. By Jim Hightower | ( Otherwords.org – “The Wreck of the Old 97” is a classic bluegrass song recounting a spectacular train crash in 1903, caused by the company’s demand that the engineer speed down a dangerous track to […]

Authoritarianism

End the “Citizens United” Ruling with a “Democracy for All Amendment”

F. Douglas Stephenson

Gainesville, Fl. (Special to Informed Comment) – In the United States government has been privatized by the Citizens United ruling of the SCOTUS. Government is now really up for sale and auctioned off to the highest campaign contributors.The Supreme Court ‘Citizen’s United’ decision opened the floodgates for big money in our politics, allowing giant corporations […]

Banking

$1 trillion in the Shade – the annual Profits that Multinational Corporations shift to Tax Havens continues to Soar

The Conversation

By Ludvig Wier, University of Copenhagen and Gabriel Zucman, University of California, Berkeley | – (The Conversation) – About a decade ago, the world’s biggest economies agreed to crack down on multinational corporations’ abusive use of tax havens. This resulted in a 15-point action plan that aimed to curb practices that shielded a large chunk […]

Joe Biden

Biden is Right: You Shouldn’t Pay a Higher Tax Rate than Billionaires

OtherWords

By Rebekah Entralgo | – ( Otherwords.org ) – In his third State of the Union address, President Joe Biden renewed his call for a billionaire minimum income tax, demanding Congress take action on a broken tax system that rewards wealth over work. “Pass my proposal for a billionaire minimum tax,” Biden proclaimed. “Because no […]