Progressive Media Advocates
Vijay Prashad: The drain of wealth to the war economy is a massive regressive taxation on the population: the rich who pay a much smaller proportion of their taxes and the corporations are insulated from the costs of war, and indeed some of them benefit from the windfalls of war.
Robert Reich: The nation and Oba,ma remain hostage to the ideology of right-wing Republicans who won’t let the government spend more money. Yet if the government can’t spend more – at least this year and next, until the pump is primed and the economy is growing again – we won’t see job growth. And without job growth, the economy will remain anemic.
Denis Campbell: Many economists predict a failure to act before Asia markets open Sunday or Monday night could see an immediate stock market loss of up to 5% and wipe out 10% of US GDP by Tuesday night. It’s that serious.
Adam Eran: The metaphors that frame the current Federal budget and debt ceiling debates are completely inaccurate, and if the media coverage is any indication, the public has swallowed them hook, line and sinker, too.
Robert Reich: Standard & Poor’s insists any deal must also contain a credible, bipartisan plan to reduce the nation’s long-term budget deficit by $4 trillion — something neither Harry Reid’s nor John Boehner’s plans do.
Steven Hill: Fearful headlines hide success stories such as Poland, which show Europe is taking the right steps to economic recovery.
Lee Fang: Rep. McHenry received $63,800 from lobbyists and executives from banks, mortgage companies, payday lenders, and other predatory lenders in the last three months alone.
Steve Hochstadt: But neither party has tried very hard to protect the poorest Americans from the outsized greed of the wealthy. About half of all members of Congress are millionaires, and all of them are beholden to the very wealthy for donations to their constant campaigning.
Ted Vaill: In less than a month, unless they relent in their effort to destroy the American (and the world) economy to curry favor with their Tea Party wing, the Republicans in Congress will cause the American government to default on its debt, on August 2, 2011 or thereabouts.
Brent Budowsky: Let’s add a “repatriate prosperity” provision that would require participating global companies to increase the size of their American workforce by a designated amount, within a designated window, such as six months, in order to receive the tax holiday.
Robert Reich: In truth, the most important variable explaining the rise and fall of tax revenues as percent of GDP has been the business cycle, not the effective tax rate.
Craig Williams: The best cure for California’s budget problems might be a big statewide tax reform campaign based on the commercial property tax legislation proposed by the progressive organization Cal Tax Reform (CTR) and sponsored by Assembly member Tom Aminao.
Robert Reich: According to JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, the recovery has stalled because of strict banking regulation. I’m not making this up.
Marian Wang: The U.S. Treasury still holds a stake in Chrysler that it intends to sell, and an Obama administration official has said that the government doesn’t expect to fully recover about $1.9 billion in remaining investments.
Robert Reich: Tea Partiers have almost as much contempt for big business and the Street as they do for government. After all, the Tea Party was born in anger over the Wall Street bailout. This is the heart of the civil war in the GOP.
Robert Reich: The question on everyone’s mind: Will the Fed signal it’s now more worried about inflation than recession?
Seth Hoy: One of the biggest myths perpetuated by restrictionist groups is that the roughly 12 million unauthorized immigrants currently living in the U.S. use a variety of public services yet paying nothing in taxes.
Lee Fang: Koch along with Enron pioneered a number of complex financial products to leverage its privileged position in the energy industry.
Walter Brasch: “There are four million words in the IRS Code,” said Marshbaum. “Lower-class and middle-class Americans get a few thousand of those words. The rest of the code is a roadmap to help the wealthy and their corporations avoid paying taxes.”
Marian Wang: By the end of last year, the program had given nearly 1.5 million households “a chance” of a mortgage modification through a trial modification. For most, that chance never turned developed into permanent help.
Robert Reich: Republicans offered Democrats two more weeks before the doomsday shut-down. Democrats countered with four. Republicans held their ground. Democrats agreed to two. This is what passes for compromise in our nation’s capital.
Lydia Howell: Madison is ground zero for resistance to the dismantling of workers’ rights and cutting anything in government budgets that serves human needs while corporate “persons” get subsidies and tax cuts and are in effect made exempt from law supposedly governing such offenses as pollution and worker safety.
Robert Reich: The Republican strategy is to split the vast middle and working class – pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don’t believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class.
Bob Letcher: I just never forgot that my maternal grandfather was an immigrant bricklayer. I didn’t want to “dress-up” because going “up” might distract me from my commitment to working for justice for “little guys”.
Walter G. Moss: Florida’s new governor, Rick Scott, is demonstrating why most of us who consider ourselves progressives dislike the politics of Tea-Party-backed candidates. For many of us, compassion and empathy are central political values, and Scott’s first budget proposal, unveiled on February 7th, reflects little of either value.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: The issue trifecta of Benghazi, the IRS audits, and the AP investigations has resuscitated the near moribund Tea Party. While each of these issues deals with different agencies and actors they share the common denominator of heightening distrust in the government.
RJ Eskow: Dimon isn’t the cause of our economic problems. He’s merely a symptom. He’s no more responsible for the wreckage he leaves behind than a surfer is responsible for the undertow of the wave he’s riding. Dimon may lack moral sensitivity, but then, that’s the character that got him where he is today.
Randy Shaw: Garcetti kept the progressive base he earned from this City Council record and combined it with conservative San Fernando Valley voters angry at the Valley-based Greuel for her campaign receiving million of dollars from unions representing Department of Water and Power workers.
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