Plutocracy

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Jeffrey S. Solocheck at the Miami Herald reports that Florida governor Ron DeSantis on Friday issued a royal decree forbidding school districts to require that pupils wear a mask and threatening to cut funding from any that defied him. DeSantis has also banned Florida municipalities from putting in renewed mitigation […]

Inequality

Jeff Bezos Should Have Thanked American Taxpayers for Paying for His Space Ride

Inequality.org

By Scott Klinger | – ( Inequality.org ) – Shortly after emerging from his 10-minute space flight last week, Jeff Bezos thanked Amazon customers and employees for their primary role in paying for his Blue Origin joyride to the edge of space. The Amazon founder’s comments quickly elicited scorn from many employees who toil in […]

Inequality

Artificial Intelligence Wants You (and Your Job); ;We’d Better Control Machines Before They Control Us

John Feffer

By John Feffer | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – My wife and I were recently driving in Virginia, amazed yet again that the GPS technology on our phones could guide us through a thicket of highways, around road accidents, and toward our precise destination. The artificial intelligence (AI) behind the soothing voice telling us where […]

Anti-Vaccination

Anti-Vaxxer Trumpian Pols are Killing their own Constituents for Profit — and Endangering us All

H. Scott Prosterman

Oakland, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment) – Tennessee Governor Bill Lee is killing his constituents by pandering to Donald Trump. He’s following the leads of Texas’ Greg Abbott and Florida’s Ron DeSantis, as state executives, reading the tea leaves of the Tea Party and blowing in the political wind – lives of their citizens be […]

Banking

This time, it is the Students and the Unions that the Gov’t Needs to Bail out for a Healthy Economy

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – Digging our way back out of the pandemic recession will not be easy, but we have the advantage of knowing what worked and did not work in the 2008 crisis. Any policy choice today does not operate on a blank slate. No one knows this more than […]

Authoritarianism

Around the World, Excessive Corporate Power Breeds Political Repression

Inequality.org

By Manuel Perez-Rocha | – Free trade agreements and other neoliberal economic rules grant excessive privileges to transnational corporations, elevating their narrow interests above people’s livelihoods and the environment. Beyond mere economic prescriptions, neoliberalism also embraces repressive and anti-democratic measures. We are increasingly seeing this in the Northern Triangle of Central America, which includes Honduras, […]

Employment

Dear National Public Radio: The Stock Market is not the Economy– Tell us about Hunger and the Real Unemployment Rate

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – I have a pet peeve with NPR. Why do so many of its top- of- the- hour five minute newscasts begin and end with short stock market updates? Is there no more important factoid its news editors could be passing along to us? NPR likes to portray […]

Inequality

The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax

ProPublica

By Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen and Paul Kiel | – The Secret IRS Files ( ProPublica) – Inside the Tax Records of the .001% In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, […]

Epidemics

Lest we Forget: Trump’s and Billionaires’ Covid Profiteering, Debasing Science and Death on the scale of the Civil War

Tomdispatch

By Nina Burleigh | – ( Tomdispatch.com) – Now that we’re all unmasking and the economy seems set to roar into the 2020s, what will we remember about how disastrously, how malignantly, the Trump administration behaved as the pandemic took hold? And will anyone be held to account for it? The instinct to forget pandemics, […]