Economy

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – That unions lost the battle to organize Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama plant should and did come as no surprise. The workers were up against one of the world’s most affluent and powerful corporations. Yet despite the 2 to 1 loss, the organization effort did help to reveal Amazon’s […]

Egypt

The Ever Given’s Blockage of the Suez Canal and World Trade showed the Downsides of Monopoly Capitalism

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – News media, maritime experts, and a curious public could hardly take their eyes off the Ever Given, the mega cargo ship as long as the Empire State Building is tall. Viewers were stunned to see the ship swung sideways to the canal and thus blocking transit in […]

Inequality

How the Pandemic spelled the end of Trickle-Down Economics: We need Wealth to Percolate up

Jim Hightower

( Otherwords.org) – The past year proves that a lot of conventional economic wisdom is neither true nor wise. For example: 1) “We don’t have the money.” The power elites tell us it would be nice to do the big-ticket reforms America needs, but the money just isn’t there. Then a pandemic slammed into America, […]

Inequality

On Tax Day, the Billionaires must Start Paying their Fair Share

H. Patricia Hynes

Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – On Tax Day, there’s more than one elephant in the room, and they’re all in mansions. Elephants occupy the bulging mansions of 657 American billionaires, 43 of them new this past pandemic year. Their combined wealth soared to $4.2 trillion – up $1.3 trillion – between March 21, […]

Banking

An Open Letter to Senator Joe Manchin: Stop worrying about Inflation and Focus on Keeping Hurting Workers Afloat

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – Dear Senator Manchin; Corporate media now portray you as on of the most powerful politicians in DC. Hard bargaining on the amount and length of unemployment insurance chopped 100 dollars a week off the compensation workers will receive. This compromise, which you defended on the grounds it […]

Employment

Making America more Equal . . . by Rebuilding the Country

Nomi Prins

(Tomdispatch.com ) – During the Trump years, the phrase “Infrastructure Week” rang out as a sort of Groundhog Day-style punchline. What began in June 2017 as a failed effort by The Donald’s White House and a Republican Senate to focus on the desperately needed rebuilding of American infrastructure morphed into a meme and a running […]

Coal

As Solar, Wind costs Plummet, Coal, Gas vastly Over-priced in Bubble that could Burst worse than 2008

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – A new report by RethinkX, a think tank using the ideas of Tony Seba, who teaches Business at Stanford University, demonstrates that the value of fossil fuels and of the electric plants they fuel is vastly overstated by government agencies and financial analysts. Seba and his colleagues point out that […]

Employment

Can Biden-Harris make a Counter-Revolution against Reaganism and Restore Dignity to Work?

Rebecca Gordon

( Tomdispatch.com ) – A year ago, just a few weeks before San Francisco locked itself down for the pandemic, I fell deeply in love with a 50-year-old. The object of my desire was a wooden floor loom in the window of my local thrift shop. Friends knowledgeable on such matters examined photos I took […]

Employment

The Decades-Long Struggle Over Big Corporations and Poverty Wages

Inequality.org

By Phil Mattera | – ( Inequality.org ) – The Senate Parliamentarian dealt a strong blow to the Fight for $15 movement by ruling that a federal minimum wage increase could be included in the stimulus bill. Senator Bernie Sanders is pushing back with an amendment to take tax deductions away from large, profitable corporations […]