Peter Dreier: This year’s May Day rallies will focus on issues like pushing Congress to adopt a fair budget and raise the federal minimum wage, but the central focus will be on pending legislation for immigration reform.
The Great Realignment
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Brent Budowsky: President Obama blew it, but he can still lead Democrats to a landslide victory in 2012 by understanding the sources of the third great realignment in more than a century, which should have been realized after his election in 2008.
Drop the “I” Word
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Unai Montes-Iruest: Welcome to the one Nation, under God, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for All, where 96 year-old, former Arizona Governor, Mexican American, Raul Hector Castro, has already been detained three times.
Ryan-Akin, Romney-Trump
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Brent Budowsky: The coming Republican convention might well dramatize to the nation the extremism and Obama-hate that is modern Republicanism and become an epic disaster for the GOP.
LIBOR and Super PACs: A Heck of a Way to Run Capitalist Democracy
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Joseph Palermo: Everybody seems to know (whether they’re willing to admit it or not) that the 2012 elections are going to be the most corrupted elections by corporate money than any held in this country since the Gilded Age.
Dictatorship of Dollars
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Brent Budowsky: The armies of the dictatorship of dollars have mobilized for the grand battle of the gathering storm. Kennedy was only elected in 1960 because he ran with Johnson. Democrats have no margin for error in 2012.
Rude Dispatches from the Class War
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Tom Degan: Republican governors all across this diseased land have been trying to undo the job growth of the last 25 months for no other purpose than to make the president look bad for the November Election
Activists Breathe New Life Into May Day
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Peter Dreier: This year, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street and the rebirth of a national movement for social justice, a wide spectrum of activist groups will be out in the streets to give voice to the growing crusade for democracy and equality.
Defending Civil Liberties: If They Take You In The Morning
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Defending Civil Liberties in the Era of the Wars on Drugs, Terror, and Immigrants. Sunday, April 29, Neighborhood Church, Pasadena. With “Reckoning with Torture” and panel discussion.
The Sad Spectacle of Obama’s Super PAC
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Robert Reich: The sad truth is Obama has never really occupied the high ground on campaign finance. He refused public financing in 2008. Once president, he didn’t go to bat for a system of public financing.
The Rebirth of Social Darwinism
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Robert Reich: Today’s Republicans are not conservatives. They’re regressives. And the America they seek is the one we had in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.
The Great Switch by the Super Rich
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Robert Reich: Forty years ago, wealthy Americans financed the U.S. government mainly through their tax payments. Today wealthy Americans finance the government mainly by lending it money.
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Municipal Workers
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Joseph Palermo: I cannot believe that in the 21st Century we are having this kind of a debate on the role of labor unions in this country. But I suppose it isn’t surprising since we have a new Gilded Age going on.
The Reagan Centennial: Celebrating Reaganomics
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Joseph Palmero: If you like the way things are in the United States today — with Gilded Age levels of inequality, weak labor unions, low-wage service jobs for most of the workforce, and a public sector that’s dying on the vine — then you can thank Ronald Reagan.
Civic-Minded Plutocrats
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Joseph Palermo: Wouldn’t it be something if the Bin Ladens of the world funneled untraceable cash into Republican candidates’ coffers because they know they can count on the GOP to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, two of their greatest recruiting vehicles?
Economic “Recovery?” Not for You and Me
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Jim Fuller: The essential hidden fact of economics in 21st century America: What we have is exactly what the tiny economic elite, the one or two percent of richest Americans, wants us to have.
“Citizens United” for More Corporate Power
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Joseph Palermo: The next ten to twelve years promise to be a turning point in American democracy unless some drastic civic action is taken to blunt the effects of this egregious example of Far Right judicial activism.
Black Robes, Black Shirts
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Joseph Palermo: With the latest Supreme Court ruling by the “fabulous five,” Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a single corporation will be able to disfranchise a million citizens. What’s to stop these conglomerates from implanting their servants at every level of municipal, state, and federal government?
Far Worse Than a Big Zero
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Joseph Palermo: We can call the 2000s the “Worse Than Zero” decade or the “Big Zero,” or anything we wish, but what characterized it most for me was the near total control of corporations, especially over our civic institutions. All of the terrible economic and governing ideas from the Reagan era crested and then crashed in the last eighteen months leaving something far less than “zero” in their wake.
What Passes for “Populism” These Days Is Laughable
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The Populist experience offers a rich resource for grappling with the current crisis. To make use of it, however, means setting aside nonsense about “sharpened pitchforks,” and learning from a vital historical movement of citizen education and political mobilization.
Republicans Playing a 1993 Strategy
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In 1995, the Republicans swept into the House of Representatives winning 57 seats and running on term limits and a balanced budget amendment that they never passed. They implemented a strategy of obstructing everything that President Bill Clinton wanted to do and initiated a huge set of overlapping and expensive Congressional investigations of every aspect [...]
Laissez-Faire Economics? It’s a Code Word for One-Sided Interventions
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As he refines his economic message on the campaign trail this summer, Republican John McCain has made it clear that, previous positions notwithstanding, he has now embraced the Republican economic orthodoxy: eliminate regulation, cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and the free and unfettered market will take care of everything. This economic formula was [...]
McCain Gets Economics Backwards. Too.
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by Steven Conn – As he refines his economic message on the campaign trail this summer, Republican John McCain has made it clear that, previous positions notwithstanding, he has now embraced the Republican economic orthodoxy: eliminate regulation, cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and the free and unfettered market will take care of everything.
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