Archive
If You Work, This Appointment Matters to You
Fast food CEO Andrew Puzder was recently tapped by Donald Trump to lead the Department of Labor. It’s easy enough to think of the Department of Labor as just another distant bureaucracy shuffling paperwork around in Washington. At any given time, in fact, most...
America’s Construction Carnage
Try this the next time you find yourself standing on a Wall Street corner. Ask the first power suit you see why Wall Street’s finest deserve to be making $25 billion in bonuses a year. Wall Streeters actually have a ready response for impertinent questions like this:...
Ruling by Chaos
As Donald Trump was sworn in, my inbox filled up with concerns about the future of the Environmental Protection Agency. Allegedly, scientists were being censored. References to climate change were being erased. But all that was just a warm-up act. Before we could...
Uncle Sam Wants… Your Social Security Check
Uncle Sam wants you! Not the Uncle Sam who’s the symbolic caricature of our country, but Sam Johnson. Although he’s been a member of Congress for more than a quarter of a century, you've probably never heard of him. Johnson's been what’s known in legislative circles...
You’re Fired!
In OtherWords: January 25, 2017
This side of Donald Trump's inauguration, the headlines are coming quickly. We've seen cabinet nominee hearings, a flurry of controversial executive orders, and a record-setting Women's March on Washington and beyond. There's also that mind-boggling debate over...
The Trouble with Trump’s ‘Alternative Facts’
About an hour after Donald Trump was sworn in, I was having lunch with my wife and our five-month-old. As we picked at our food outside my office in D.C.’s Dupont Circle neighborhood, groups of tourists trickled by in Trump regalia. Early the next morning, as I dumped...
Trump’s First Test on Taxes
Donald Trump's voters have high hopes that he'll boost the economy and protect jobs for those who've been left behind after three decades of flat or shrinking paychecks. They didn’t vote to make the super-wealthy even wealthier. Even Steve Mnuchin, the Goldman Sachs...
Climate Change Is Now a Local Issue
It's not often that the physical world changes overnight. On January 20, though, it did. On that day — when Donald Trump was inaugurated — our national efforts to combat the causes of global warming were shelved, leaving Americans on their own to protect themselves...
A Special Loophole for Trump’s Millionaire Cabinet
The wealth of Donald Trump's proposed cabinet is unprecedented. According to the Boston Globe, Trump and his top nominees are together worth over $13 billion. With that unprecedented wealth comes unprecedented potential for conflicts of interest. Before ExxonMobil CEO...
