Inequality

( Foreign Policy in Focus) – The global economy hit a new milestone in 2022 by surpassing $100 trillion. This expansion, which has experienced only the occasional setback such as the 2020 COVID shutdowns, has been accelerated by trade. The world trade volume experienced 4,300 percent growth from 1950 to 2021, an average 4 percent […]

Far Right

Inside the “Private and Confidential” Conservative Group That Promises to “Crush Liberal Dominance”

ProPublica

by Andy Kroll and Andrea Bernstein, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented Co-published with Documented ( ProPublica ) – A few months ago, Leonard Leo laid out his next audacious project. Ever since the longtime Federalist Society leader helped create a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, and then received more than a billion dollars from […]

Corporations

Before RR Co. Norfolk Southern Poisoned Palestine, Oh., It Poisoned the Ohio Statehouse

OtherWords

The company plied state lawmakers with cash and lobbied against common sense rail safety measures. By Jim Hightower | ( Otherwords.org – “The Wreck of the Old 97” is a classic bluegrass song recounting a spectacular train crash in 1903, caused by the company’s demand that the engineer speed down a dangerous track to […]

Authoritarianism

End the “Citizens United” Ruling with a “Democracy for All Amendment”

F. Douglas Stephenson

Gainesville, Fl. (Special to Informed Comment) – In the United States government has been privatized by the Citizens United ruling of the SCOTUS. Government is now really up for sale and auctioned off to the highest campaign contributors.The Supreme Court ‘Citizen’s United’ decision opened the floodgates for big money in our politics, allowing giant corporations […]

Corporations

Derailments across the Country: Rail Workers Warned Us that Greed Is Dangerous

OtherWords

By Rebekah Entralgo | – ( Otherwords.org ) – The toxic clouds that billowed up from a derailed freight train in Ohio this February are a chilling metaphor for the toxic greed that has infected so many of our big corporations. After having to evacuate, residents of East Palestine, Ohio are cautiously going back home, […]

Employment

Poverty amid Plenty: A World Fragmented by Inequality

Liz Theoharis

By Liz Theoharis | – ( Tomdispatch.com) – A few weeks ago, the world’s power brokers — politicians, CEOs, millionaires, billionaires — met in Davos, the mountainous Swiss resort town, for the 2023 World Economic Forum. In an annual ritual that reads ever more like Orwellian farce, the global elite gathered — their private jets […]

Featured

Billionaires Gobbled up 2/3s of New Wealth at $2.7 bn/ day, as 800 million go to bed Hungry: Oxfam

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Oxfam , the British charity, has released a new report finding that the global problem of wealth inequality is growing ever more threatening. Of all the new wealth the entire human race has produced in the past two years, the richest 1% gobbled up 66% of it. The less-rich 99% […]

Food Insecurity

Housing Unaffordable for Half of US Renters

Human Rights Watch

By Matt McConnell | Researcher, Economic Justice and Rights Division | – ( Human Rights Watch ) – New survey data released recently by the United States Census Bureau found that housing payments for about half of all US renters were unaffordable in 2021 under guidelines set by the US Department of Housing and Urban […]

Drugs

Big Pharma spent more on Stock Buybacks and Dividends than on Research and Development even during COVID

F. Douglas Stephenson

Gainesville, Florida (Special to Informed Comment) – The 14 largest publicly-traded pharmaceutical companies spent $747 billion on stock buybacks and dividends from 2012 through 2021 — substantially more than the $660 billion they spent on research and development. So argue economists William Lazonick, professor emeritus of economics at University of Massachusetts, and Öner Tulum, a […]