Economic Injustice

  By John M. Repp Common Dreams (6/15/18) Philip Alston is the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. He traveled to the United States last December to some of our most destitute communities such as Skid Row in LA, poor African American areas in the Alabama, impoverished coal communities in West Virginia and to Puerto Rico. He issued his report on June 1, 2018. It should be front page news. The report is a terrible indictment of our country and of the Trump Administration. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize winning economist told The Guardian“This administration inherited a bad situation with…

  Wisconsin Democracy Campaign (6/13/18) Owners and employees from about two dozen companies that received corporate welfare from the state in 2017 have contributed more than $800,000 to Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign. These companies were among the 59 businesses that were awarded nearly $3 billion in economic development tax credits and loans last year by the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. The giveaways were made so the companies would either locate or expand their operations in the state. Most of the recipients, 50 of 59 (or 85 percent), were businesses already located in Wisconsin. Owners and employees of 25 companies, which…

Proves the lies of Paul Ryan. The Young Turks (5/22/18) Trump and his fellow republicans believe that giving massive corporations tax cuts will turn into more jobs for the American people. Turns out that’s not how it works! Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, host of The Young Turks, break it down. “In September 2017, House Speaker Paul Ryan traveled to a Harley-Davidson plant in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, to tout the Republican tax bill, which President Trump would sign later that year. “Tax reform can put American manufacturers and American companies like Harley-Davidson on a much better footing to compete in…

  By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams (5/18/18) “Is that really the kind of society we want to be living in?” That’s how Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) responded to a new study from United Way’s ALICE Project, which found that 43 percent of U.S. households—nearly 51 million families—cannot afford “a bare-bones household budget of housing, child care, food, transportation, and healthcare.” Bernie Sanders ✔@SenSanders The three wealthiest people in America own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent — over 160 million people. Meanwhile, almost half of families in America can’t afford basic necessities. Is that really the kind of society we want to be…

By Libby Watson Splinter News (4/20/18) The Associated Press reported this morning that the nation’s six biggest Wall Street banks got a honking great $3.6 billion tax cut from the Republican tax bill, which will raise taxes on Americans earning less than $75,000 by 2027. The tax plan, as has already been well established, is a big scam. Many activist groups worked tirelessly to try and defeat it; average Americans called their congressional offices, wrote letters, made demands on social media. It was for naught. The six biggest Wall Street banks spent a total of $19 million on lobbying in 2017 and received a…

  Democracy Now! (4/12/18) In the continuing teachers’ rebellion sweeping the U.S., dozens of Oklahoma teachers have completed a 7-day, 110-mile march from Tulsa to the state capital Oklahoma City. Public schools across Tulsa and Oklahoma City remain closed as thousands of teachers continue their strike for education funding into a ninth day. The strike comes as the Supreme Court is considering Janus v. AFSCME, a case that could deal a massive blow to public unions nationwide—and as President Trump is successfully appointing right-wing judges to federal courts, reshaping the judiciary for decades to come. We continue our conversation with Corey…

  By Ed Pilkington The Guardian (12/15/17) Los Angeles, California, 5 December “You got a choice to make, man. You could go straight on to heaven. Or you could turn right, into that.” We are in Los Angeles, in the heart of one of America’s wealthiest cities, and General Dogon, dressed in black, is our tour guide. Alongside him strolls another tall man, grey-haired and sprucely decked out in jeans and suit jacket. Professor Philip Alston is an Australian academic with a formal title: UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. General Dogon, himself a veteran of these Skid…

  This American Life (3/8/17) There’s a program that brings together kids from two schools. One school is public and in the country’s poorest congressional district. The other is private and costs $43,000/year. They are three miles apart. The hope is that kids connect, but some of the public school kids just can’t get over the divide. We hear what happens when you get to see the other side and it looks a lot better. Link to Story, Transcript and 60-Minute Audio ***** Low-Income Students Hit Hardest In Public Schools By Tracy Lee Newsweek (1/11/18) Poverty and segregation drive the gap…

  Editor’s Note Advisory: Some in the west may find this challenging video unsettling and gross, but before problems can be addressed they must first be seen and understood. The kind of grotesque, criminal concentration of capitalist wealth in which eight men own as much wealth as the bottom 3.6 billion people on the planet makes this kind of daily injustice and degradation inevitable. (In the U.S. three men — Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet own as much wealth as the bottom half of the American population.) — Mark L. Taylor By Video journalist: Howard Johnson / Producer: Virma…

“Hmmm, is this a coincidence or did Trump confidant Carl Icahn have insider information?” By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams (3/2/18) Carl Icahn, a former special adviser to President Donald Trump, is facing allegations of possible insider trading after a federal filing revealed the billionaire investor started selling off millions of dollars in stock for a company that significantly depends on steel just a few days before the Trump administration started publicly considering a steel tariff, which the president officially announced Thursday. As Common Dreams reported Thursday, Trump flouted warnings of a trade war from several members of his cabinet and announced that he will impose…

  Democracy Now! (2/1/18) The United States is one of the most depressed countries in the world. Could it be because of the country’s adoption of neoliberal economic policies? We speak to Johann Hari, author of a controversial new book, “Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression—and the Unexpected Solutions.” He writes, “Junk food has taken over our diets, and it is making millions of people physically sick. A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that something similar is happening with our minds—that they have become dominated by junk values, and this is making us mentally sick, triggering soaring…

  By Paul Kiel ProPublica (1/23/18) In 2013, ProPublica published an investigation of the subprime lender World Finance. World was charging annual interest rates that could exceed 200 percent, often trapping customers in cycles of debt by enticing them to renew the loans over and over. In states where laws barred such high rates, the installment lender loaded many loans with nearly useless insurance products that bloated the cost. The company boasted over 800,000 customers, part of an installment loan industry that claimed to loan to millions. The following year, World disclosed that it was under investigation by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau….

  By Sam Adler-Bell In These Times (11/17/17) The Paradise Papers, a stash of over 13 million documents from 19 tax-haven nations and two offshore law firms leaked this month to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, present an archive of global avarice. Today, the richest one percent own half of the world’s wealth. The Paradise Papers show how this global elite uses offshore tax arrangements, often perfectly legal, to circumvent both the obligations of citizenship as well as the consequences of ownership. The demands which apply to the rest of us—the obligation to pay our taxes, to pay our debts and our civil…

 Less For You. More For Them! (And The Republicans Just Cut Their Taxes To The Bone!)   By Leo W. Gerard, International President United Steelworkers Union The HuffPost (1/11/18) Fat Tuesday is Mardi Gras, a day of revelry, gluttony, intoxication and showers of shiny plastic beads. It is the party to end all parties because it’s followed by Ash Wednesday, when Lenten sacrifices commence. Fat Cat Tuesday is the day – Jan. 2, 2018 – on which the boards of directors of America’s biggest corporations handed their CEOs more money than those same CEOs would deign to pay their workers…

  Fresh Air/NPR (11/20/17) Reporter Jake Bernstein helped break the story of the Panama Papers, the leaked documents that detail the offshore tax havens of the super rich. His new book is Secrecy World. TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. Before Donald Trump was elected president, some of his business partners on Trump-branded hotels and condos and the Miss Universe pageant were oligarchs from Russia and former Soviet bloc countries who kept a lot of their money hidden in the secret world of shell companies. Those business partnerships are the subject of the final chapter of my…

“The way a government treats refugees is very instructive because it shows you how they would treat the rest of us if they thought they could get away with it.” – Tony Behn  

  By Richard Eskow Our Future (11/13/17) The concentrated wealth of the global plutocracy is the dark matter of the world economy: it is rarely glimpsed and difficult to measure, yet it reshapes everything around it. Two recent reports – the UBS/PwC report on the “new Gilded Age” of the international billionaire class, and the “Paradise Papers”  released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) reveal ways corporations and the ultra-wealthy avoid taxes. In doing so, they offer a glimpse into this darkness. Together, these releases tell us a lot about the wealthy few who run the world. We now know that…

  By Russ Feingold The Guardian (11/8/17) Russ Feingold: hen powerful lobbyists work hard over the coming weeks to convince Republican lawmakers to change their tax package to please them, it would probably be of interest to know exactly how much campaign cash these so-called stakeholders and their industries have given or spent in recent years for the members of Congress who are writing tax laws. But because federal disclosure laws need to be updated, it’s probably too difficult to ever really know the complete answer. An opaque system of legalized bribery and legalized extortion is not an outrageous way…