Tom Degan: It’s always a hoot watching Rick Perry trying to lure business from California to his state. His pitch? Texas has a “predictable” business climate, by which he means, “ain’t no gub’ment messin’ round here with all them damn regulations”.
What Small Businesses Need
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Caitlin Vega: It’s time to stop using this economic downturn to take away workers’ rights, eviscerate environmental protections or slash our safety net. Let’s get real about what we need to move California forward. It’s all about the jobs.
Politics, Reality Show Style
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Tina Dupuy: For the last two and a half years politics has been trash television. We’ve had right-wing stars staying relevant through mudslinging and shamelessness. The tea party wouldn’t be satisfied with just one Snooki. We’ve had fake stings by phony pimps and ideology-driven hoaxes. Astroturf is being sold as organic outrage.
Inside Job
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Tom Degan: What is incredible about this very important film is that a few of the perpetrators of this incalculable theft arrogantly sat down with the makers of the film for interviews that are as jaw-dropping as they are outrageous.
The Saccharine Republican Ire
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Joseph Palermo: The “conservatives” and “Tea Partiers” are quite convincing at playing the aggrieved victims, but what, exactly, do they have to be “aggrieved” about?
Don’t Use The ‘Free Market’ As An Excuse
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Tina Dupuy: The truth is we don’t have a “free market.” Never have and probably never will. So when politicians like representatives Paul Ryan and Michele Bachmann talk about how this savior-in-theory can deliver us – it can’t.
For the Right: A Regular Deregulation Celebration
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Michael Sigman: Now that Republicans control the House, they’re hell-bent on further deregulating corporations — now, thanks to the conservative Supreme Court, designated as “people” — while threatening the freedoms of actual people, such as those with preexisting medical conditions or public-sector union memberships.
Winner-Take-All
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John Peeler: “Winner-Take-All Politics” provides a well-documented analysis of how the United States government, since the 1970s, has systematically enriched the top one percent of the country at the expense of everyone else. Written by distinguished political scientists, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, the book shows how big business interests ratcheted up their national organizations to defend their interests in national policy debates. In addition to employing far stronger lobbying, these interests created think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, designed to challenge the liberal conventional wisdom of the New Deal and Great Society and replace it with an explicitly conservative, free-market-oriented way of thinking.
Party Like It’s 1994
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The vast majority of Americans never supported a “privatize-and-pillage” attack on Social Security. Yet many of the Republican candidates in 2010 are on record supporting all manner of schemes to dismember Social Security.
Should We Regulate Cities?
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Ron Wolff: I can’t help thinking what the “deregulation contingent” of political thinkers would do about the situation in Bell, California, where a corrupt city council, in collusion with a city manager accused of criminal activity, raped the treasury of millions of dollars by paying themselves excessive salaries, sometimes for meetings that lasted only a few minutes.
Big Media At It Again: Broadcasters Want FCC to Let Them Own Even More
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Sylvia Moore: As if the proposed Comcast/NBC Universal merger just wasn’t enough, the nation’s big broadcasters are strapping on the feed bag, ready to engorge themselves with more tasty snacks of the public’s television and radio airwaves.
Oil Spills and B Movies
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Tom Degan: As the decade of the teens unfolds, the price we will be forced to pay as a result of decades of neglect of America’s infrastructure will be astronomical. This disaster could have been avoided by means of a simple ounce of prevention.
Corporations/GOP Run Wild
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Jerry Drucker: Corporations in with the Republicans have created and are holding a savage tiger by the tail. Combined, they let an uncontrollable, hateful and dangerous genie out of their Communist Chinese manufactured bottle and can’t stuff it back in. Today the Republicans share two major goals with the international terrorists. Both want to bring down the U.S. Government and both will kill Americans.
Goldman Sucks
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Tom Degan: It’s highly unlikely that any serious reform is going to be put forward until the Republican presence on Capital Hill has been significantly diluted if not eradicated. I do not believe that it is a given that they are going to gain major ground come Election Day. In fact there is every reason to believe that they will only continue to self-destruct between now and then. They can’t win without the section of the electorate who describe themselves as “moderate”. The moderates are taking a good look at the train wreck that is the modern GOP and by all accounts they’re becoming more and more disgusted by what they see.
Trust in the GOP’s Dearth of Experience
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Tina Dupuy: When Republicans warn that a policy is a job-killer – Americans should listen. If any group of lawmakers and thinkers know about killing jobs it’s the Grand Old Party. In 2008, the final year of the Bush Administration, after two terms of careless deregulation implemented with bastardized pseudo-free market battle cries, the economy lost 2.6 million jobs. An annual job loss not equaled since 1945. When it comes to job extermination the GOP’s display case has a full assortment of trophies. So, of course Republicans are now the best authority on how not to kill jobs. Basically, don’t do what they did.
Rediscovering Principles — But Which Ones?
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Ron Wolff: Appointed judges, intellectual and political elites, mainstream journalists, bureaucrats, and Europeans — the customary targets of conservatives — fall victim to his keyboard. He almost equates property rights to the means of pursuing happiness, totally ignoring reams of evidence to the contrary. (As we know from last week’s article, nobody expects a correlation any more between belief systems and evidence.)
Is Obamanomics Conservative or Revolutionary?
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There are two ways to see Obamanomics. The first, much preferred by the White House, is as a set of initiatives so modest as to hardly merit a raised eyebrow. Yes, steps must be taken to deal with the current economic crisis. But assuming the economy recovers next year, Obama’s budget projects that government spending [...]
Color of Law: Now the Robber Barons Replace the Welfare Queens (and Rightly So)
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Gordon Gecko had a long run of it, but now the party is over. I’m talking, of course, about the character in the film Wall Street, that conniving titan of finance who would sell his mother for a buck and a quarter, and there is scant evidence that he had not already accomplished that goal. [...]
An Inaugural Poem
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America is the greatest country in the world… Or at least that’s what they tell me. The greatest country? Now, exactly what yardstick were you using just now? Such a bold statement with such paltry evidence! Sounds like the words of someone who hasn’t been anywhere, Yet those who have lived, traveled and studied Beyond [...]
So What Do I Do Now?
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This is a heckuva hangover. More than just the sun dawned on me on the morning after Obama Day. I realized as I woke up following the Inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States that I’m not sure how to behave anymore. For eight years I’ve felt like a hostage. [...]
Too Big To Fail: Unless It’s the Entire EEKonomy!
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by Gene Rothman – A new Goldilocks gauge has gripped the Guardians of Greed. Too Big to Fail (TBTF) used to be one size fits all. Big corporations would be bailed out only if they were Big Enough. But now, the fickle public has grown Leery of the Too Large. It may now be seen [...]
Mourning in America: Reagan’s New Steal
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The Republican death wish for the U.S. government almost came to their hoped-for fruition. Kill Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and replace it with Reagan’s New Steal of privatization and corporate control. It’s not what our founding fathers or our U.S. Constitution had in mind. “Death and fear’ was the message from the Republicans when [...]
Blame Ronald Reagan For Our Current Economic Crisis
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by Robert Brent Toplin– Ronald Reagan rarely catches any blame these days for the present economic mess that is destabilizing markets in the United States and around the world. In fact, Americans often praise the former president for taking the country in bold new directions during his years in the White House. Politicians contribute to [...]
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