Poverty

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – Who is at fault for a standoff on the debt ceiling? Republicans are the obvious choice because when in power deficits don’t matter but out of power deficits and a growing debt are the path to hell. Deficits will burden our grandchildren and so we must accept […]

Democracy

How Billionaires’ Utopias could End American Democracy

Sam Pizzigati

( Inequality.org) – Great wealth can do great damage. Grand personal fortunes, we’ve come to understand, can menace our democracy and distort our economic life. But these fortunes can also wreak a much more hidden havoc: They can mess up the minds of people who hold them. Great fortunes can leave their owners feeling supremely […]

Congress

Why is Social Spending Controversial but Congress lavishes $7 trillion a Decade on Pentagon?

OtherWords

By Sister Karen M. Donahue | ( Otherwords.org) – Right now, the United States is locked in a contentious debate over the Build Back Better plan, which will make a significant difference in the lives of millions of individuals and families. Even though the provisions included in the plan — including universal child care, home […]

Corporations

Our Future vs. Neoliberalism

Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davies

( Code Pink) – In country after country around the world, people are rising up to challenge entrenched, failing neoliberal political and economic systems, with mixed but sometimes promising results. Progressive leaders in the U.S. Congress are refusing to back down on the Democrats’ promises to American voters to reduce poverty, expand rights to healthcare, […]

Banking

Make them Pay Up: Pandora Leaks show that the Super-Rich rob Public of $200 bn a year in lost Tax Revenues

John Feffer

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The rich have always flaunted their wealth. It was rarely good enough to enjoy financial success, you had to be conspicuous about it. They build enormous homes for everyone to gawk at. They throw lavish parties. They commission paintings, statues, biographies. They endow institutions so that their names […]

Inequality

Could Lebanon, Looted and mismanaged by its Plutocrats, become a Failed State?

The Conversation

By Tony Walker | – In the midst of a pandemic that has wrenched the world off its axis, Lebanon’s precipitous decline has not received the attention it deserves given the country’s strategic importance. Bordering Syria to its north and east, and Israel to its south, Lebanon occupies a critical space in the Eastern Mediterranean. […]

Democratic Party

Arguing with Sen. Joe Manchin

John Buell

As I write this piece the so called moderate Democrats are locked in combat with the party’s progressives, but what issues besides numbers to be appropriated receive scant attention. Since Senator Manchin plays so pivotal a role in this conflict it is imperative that progressives understand from where he is coming and formulate careful responses. […]

Employment

Unemployment Insurance Isn’t Holding Back the Economy. Inequality Is.

OtherWords

By Rebekah Entralgo | – An estimated 9 million Americans got the rug pulled out from under them over Labor Day weekend as enhanced pandemic federal unemployment benefits expired, leaving millions of families in the lurch during a record-breaking season for COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. Some 35 million people — nearly 1 in 10 Americans […]

Homelessness

The Land of the Free, Where So Many of the Brave Are Homeless: Resisting Evictions Amid a Pandemic

Liz Theoharis

( Tomdispatch.com) – Over the past weeks, multiple crises have merged: a crisis of democracy with the most significant attack on voting rights since Reconstruction; a climate crisis with lives and livelihoods upended in the Gulf Coast and the Northeast by extreme weather events and in the West by a stunning fire season; and an […]