Economy and Business
Shielding Wall Street from the Ravages of Bigotry
Phil Gramm, the former right-wing senator from Texas, has surprised me. I assumed he had zero charitable instincts. In office, he kept trying to kill safety net programs, such as food assistance: "We're the only nation in the world where all our poor people are fat,"...
A Welcome New Yardstick for Measuring CEO Greed
Should corporations in America have to annually reveal how much they pay their most typical workers compared to how much they pay their CEOs? In 2010, Congress embraced that idea. Lawmakers plugged into the landmark Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer...
Running on Greed
Donald Trump alienated millions of voters with his ugly attacks on Mexican immigrants and John McCain's war record. But he rocketed to the top of GOP presidential polls anyway. Is Trump's racism driving this surge? Maybe. But I'd argue it's something else: his...
Holder Proves You Can Go Home Again
Novelist Thomas Wolfe famously wrote: "You can't go home again." But Eric Holder has proven him wrong. Holder, who served as President Barack Obama's attorney general until stepping down earlier this year, recently returned to his old home — Covington & Burling....
Co-Branding America’s Wonders
While Americans celebrate the 100th anniversary of our National Park Service, America's so-called "leaders" are aggressively converting these jewels of the common good into just another corporate cash cow. This commercialization started with "co-branding" agreements,...
Who Will Care For Grandma?
Who will take care of grandma? It’s a question we need to answer. As baby boomers grow older, the elderly population — seniors who are 80 and older — will increase almost 200 percent by 2050. Our long-term care system isn’t ready. Studies show that older Americans...
The Millennial Generation’s Literacy Crisis
Summer is a time of endings and beginnings. For most of the approximately 1.8 million people who just graduated from college, this season marks the end of at least 17 years of formal education and the launch of their careers. My career started a little sooner than...
Blood from a Stone
Like many other proud Greek-Americans, I’ve visited the country of my ancestors many times over the years. I even lived in Athens for two years while working for the U.S. government. I recently returned to Athens for a week to help the Greek government draft a new...
Don’t Get Burned by Coal’s Demise
Stanford, Georgetown, and other universities are stripping coal stocks and bonds out of their endowments. Why? For starters, they don’t want to lose money. At least 200 U.S. coal-fired power plants have stopped operating since 2010, shrinking the total fleet by 40...
Getting Down to Business in Cuba
In case you missed it, the United States and Cuba now have diplomatic relations for the first time in 54 years. Unfortunately, the outdated economic embargo is smothering the tremendous potential this opening offers. First, some background. The embargo, put in place...
