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Krugman Exposes the Hypocrisy of Fiscal Conservatives

Tue, 07 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

TruthDig - By Tracy Bloom - May. 07 (News Analysis) - In his latest column for The New York Times, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman writes that the case for economic austerity has collapsed, though that hasn’t stopped the pro-austerity faction from continuing to push for deep spending cuts.

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Obama Embraces Plutocrats Again With His Billionaire Commerce Secretary Choice

Tue, 07 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Steven Rosenfeld - May. 07 (News Analysis) - her record as a businesswoman shares similarities with Mitt Romney’s. Her massive wealth is kept in tax-avoiding offshore accounts. Her family’s best-known business, the Hyatt hotel empire, is known for bitter and ongoing disputes with labor unions. Her resume includes running a bank that pioneered high-interest subprime loans and then failed miserably, leaving uninsured depositors with losses averaging $6,000.

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Your Retirement for a Bottle of Champagne: How Wall Street Fraudsters Ripped You Off, Again

Tue, 07 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Lynn Stuart Parramore - May. 07 (Special Report) - LIBOR was, in the opinion of many, the con of the century. But is it a crime without punishment? About a month ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that a federal court judge had let several banks off the hook, dismissing claims that 16 banks targeted by lawsuits had broken federal antitrust laws by rigging LIBOR. As Matt Taibbi explained in his must-read article on the banking scandal, the federal judge bought the banks’ ridiculous blame-the-victim story that if cities and towns and other investors lost money over LIBOR rigging, it was their own fault.

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5 Ways That Raw, Unregulated Capitalism Is Acting Like a Cancer on American Society

Sun, 05 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Paul Buchheit - May. 05 (Opinion) - The uncontrolled growth of investment wealth is diverting resources away from vital programs, effectively smothering them.

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We Decide How to Share Gains

Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Stan Sorscher - May. 02 (Opinion) - Multinational employers steadily move work offshore, and lay off thousands of workers. We've cut funding for education; student debt is over a trillion dollars. We've terminated pensions, weakened unions, made work more contingent and more precarious. Wal-Mart cuts hours to avoid paying for health care. Some elected officials demonize teachers, and public employees, and turn public opinion against any regular worker daring to hope for a higher standard of living. Globally, workplace insecurity and inequality are at historic levels.

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'The Gilded Age' Statistics Corporations Don't Want Workers, or Anyone, to See

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Common Dreams - By Jon Queally - May. 01 (News Report) - If there's one thing about what many are calling the "The New Gilded Age," it's that well-known corporations—not to mention less well-known, but extremely powerful ones—will fight extremely hard to keep secret just how lopsided the economic disparities have become in recent decades between low-paid workers in the society and the executive and ruling class that have reaped the words of a globalized, top-heavy economy. read ...

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2 More Grad Students Claim To Find Another Flaw In Reinhart-Rogoff Research

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Mark Gongloff - Apr. 30 (News Report) - Like Scooby-Doo villains, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff keep getting done in by meddling kids. First, University of Massachusetts-Amherst grad student Thomas Herndon shot holes in their influential research paper, "Growth In A Time Of Debt," by pointing out several mistakes and omissions the Harvard economists had made. Now, two PhD students at the University of Missouri-Kansas City have a new paper that they say finds another flaw in that same research.

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Billionaires Flee Havens as Trillions Pursued Offshore

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Bloomberg - By David de Jong, Robert LaFranco - Apr. 29 (News Analysis) - The lawsuits provide a window into the offshore structures and secrecy jurisdictions the world’s richest people use to manage, preserve and conceal their assets. According to Tax Justice Network, a U.K.-based organization that campaigns for transparency in the financial system, wealthy individuals were hiding as much as $32 trillion offshore at the end of 2010. Fewer than 100,000 people own $9.8 trillion of offshore assets, according to research compiled by former McKinsey & Co. economist James Henry.

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When Your Boss Steals Your Wages: The Invisible Epidemic That’s Sweeping America

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Lynn Stuart Parramore - Apr. 29 (Special Report) - Americans like to think that a fair day’s work brings a fair day’s pay. Cheating workers of their wages may seem like a problem of 19th-century sweatshops. But it’s back and taking a terrible toll. We’re talking billions of dollars in wages; millions of workers affected each year. A gigantic heist is being perpetrated against working people: they’re getting screwed on overtime, denied their tips, shortchanged on benefits, defrauded on payroll, and handed paychecks that bounce like rubber balls. A conservative estimate of unpaid overtime alone shows that it costs workers at least $19 billion per year

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Explaining the upper crust’s preference for austerity economics

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

seattletimes.com - By Paul Krugman - Apr. 27 (Opinion) - At this point, the austerian position has imploded; not only have its predictions about the real world failed completely, but the academic research invoked to support that position has turned out to be riddled with errors, omissions and dubious statistics. Yet two big questions remain. First, how did austerity doctrine become so influential in the first place? Second, will policy change at all now that crucial austerian claims have become fodder for late-night comics?

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Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Apr. 25 (Investigative Report) - Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game.

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Nobel Prize-Winner Joe Stiglitz Blasts America's 1 Percent-Coddling Tax System

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Yves Smith - Apr. 15 (News Report) - It’s a sign of how well relentless propagandizing works that Joe Stiglitz has to devote a lengthy op-ed in the New York Times to debunking the idea that our income tax system, whose salient characteristic is low tax burdens for the rich, is good for anyone other than the rich.

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California's Dark-Money Investigation Is Making Conservatives Sweat

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Andy Kroll - Apr. 15 (Opinion) - Investigators with California's election watchdog and attorney general's office are hot on the trail of the true source of millions in dark money spent to defeat two hard-fought ballot propositions last fall. The wide-ranging probe has conservatives worried that a network of nonprofit groups used to move secret money around the country could be in for some unwanted exposure. The investigation, led by the state's nonpartisan Fair Political Practices Commission, has already done more than most watchdogs to pry open the black box of the conservative dark-money groups that spent freely in 2012 without disclosing the sources of their money. Last fall, the FPPC revealed what it called "the largest contribution ever disclosed as campaign money laundering in California history" after it discovered that three nonprofits had funneled $11 million from Virginia to Arizona to California. As the probe progresses, some conservatives are nervous that more details—such as the identities of actual ...

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Bill Moyers: We Are Living in the United States of Inequality

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Bill Moyers - Apr. 12 (Opinion) - Inequality matters. You will hear people say it doesn’t, but they are usually so high up the ladder they can’t even see those at the bottom. The distance between the first and the least in America is vast and growing.

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Margaret Thatcher Was a Privatization Pioneer, and This Is the Story of How Her Agenda Did Nothing But Make Life Worse for Millions of People

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Michael Hudson - Apr. 11 (News Analysis) - by 1997 the Conservatives were voted out of office by one of the largest margins in their history. What concerned voters were the results of privatization that Mrs. Thatcher had not warned them about. Prices did not decline proportionally to cost cuts and productivity gains. Many services were cut back, especially on the least utilized transport routes. The largest privatized bus company was charged with cut-throat monopoly practices. The water system broke down, while consumer charges leapt. Electricity prices were shifted against residential consumers in favor of large industrial users. Economic inequality widened as the industrial labor force shrunk by two million from 1979 to 1997, while wages stagnated in the face of soaring profits for the privatized companies. The tax cuts financed by their selloff turned out to benefit mainly the rich.

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5 Juicy Tax Breaks That Corporations Enjoy That the Public Can't Touch

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Scott Klinger - Apr. 10 (Investigative Report) - Corporations are quick to claim “corporate personhood” and their First Amendment rights when it comes to their ability to donate to political candidates, influence elections, and lobby or when it comes to advertising their products, especially those deemed dangerous or socially destructive. But on tax day, corporations are quite content with a tax code full of perks and privileges for corporations that are not available to living, breathing human beings.

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Powerful Right-Wing Groups Are on a Stealth Mission to Make America Look Like Texas

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Lee Fang - Apr. 05 (Special Report) - “This is a battle we can win, and we are winning in many places around the country,” DeMint told the assembled donors confidently. He implored them to look beyond Washington, DC, and see that conservatives were scoring victories in state after state, citing the December move by Michigan Republicans to ram through anti-union legislation, as well as similar laws passed in Wisconsin and Indiana. Some of these victories would influence the Beltway as well. After all, the GOP’s control of state governments guaranteed that congressional districts were drawn in such a way that, in the 2012 elections, Republicans retained a thirty-three-seat majority in the House despite Democrats earning 1.3 million more votes for their candidates.

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6 Ways the 7th Richest Man in America Has Screwed the Poor

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Tana Ganeva - Mar. 27 (Special Report) - As the 7th richest man in America finishes his final term in office, he leaves behind one of the biggest wealth gaps in the country: income inequality in Manhattan is the second worst in the US, according to the New York Times. New York's poverty rate has risen to the highest level in a decade, the Times also noted. 1 in 3 New York kids live below the poverty line. In parts of the Bronx, two thirds of residents live in areas of extreme poverty.

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How a Modern Inquisition, With the Help of Pope Francis, Stifled the Movement Protecting the Poor

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By George Monbiot - Mar. 27 (Opinion) - “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.” So said the Brazilian archbishop Dom Hélder Câmara. His adage exposes one of the great fissures in the Catholic Church, and the emptiness of the new Pope’s claim to be on the side of the poor.

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The GOP's Real Agenda

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Tim Dickinson - Mar. 14 (Opinion) - The year was 1985. The president was Ronald Wilson Reagan. Today's Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan – which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits – is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us. Modern-day Republicans have become, quite simply, the Party of the One Percent – the Party of the Rich.

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Cardinals Elect a New Pope from Argentina -- Does the New Pontiff Come with a Dark Past?

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Adele M Stan - Mar. 14 (News Report) - when liberation theology, born of the theological notion of a preferential option for the poor, was sweeping his continent, Bergoglio backed away, and a frequent criticism of his term as archbishop is that, despite his simple lifestyle, he speaks little of social justice, stressing individual spirituality. In fact, he's theologically closer to the last two prelates, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, than to the liberal and beloved Pope John XXIII, whose legacy leaves many Catholics yearning for someone similar. But Bergoglio campaigned against same-sex marriage in Argentina, and said that adoptions by LGBT people discriminate against children.

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Since Alan Simpson has the President on the Defensive, House Dems Must Hold the Line

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0800

nationofchange.org - By Richard (RJ) Eskow - Feb. 21 (Opinion) - Alan Simpson, along with Erskine Bowles, represents a well-funded cadre of spokespeople who are only willing to present a narrow band of corporate- and billionaire-friendly economic policies. There’s just one approach in their world, one which Simpson and Bowles reiterated just this week: Medicare and Social Security benefit cuts for seniors and the disabled and the gutting of middle-class tax breaks, paired with further tax reductionsfor corporations and the wealthiest Americans.

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Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0800

readersupportednews.org - By Joseph Stiglitz - Feb. 18 (Opinion) - The gap between aspiration and reality could hardly be wider. Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has exposed the myth that America is a land of opportunity. This is especially tragic: While Americans may differ on the desirability of equality of outcomes, there is near-universal consensus that inequality of opportunity is indefensible.

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In Wall Street Journal World, We 'Don’t Exist'

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0800

aflcio.org - By Mike Hall - Jan. 27 (News Analysis) - Take a look at that down-trodden family at the left. Maybe, they’re lining up for shelter after a natural disaster, or waiting for the food bank doors to open or at a donation center to gather up winter coats for the kids. Damn, they look so sad. But no, none of the above is true. They live in “Wall Street Journal World.” It’s a place where, according to a recent Journal story on the impact of the new federal tax rates, most Americans—those of us who make less than $180,000 a year and pay taxes—"don’t exist" (we're not mentioned at all).

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New Congress even wealthier after millionaire freshmen join its ranks

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0800

rt.com - Jan. 17 (News) - The 113th Congress has become wealthier than the last, with incoming freshmen bringing in a median net worth of $1,066,515 each -- about $1 million more than that of the average American. While US citizens are getting poorer and increasingly applying for

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