Economy and Business
Draining the Swampsky
King’s Dream Included Economic Equality, Too
April 4 marks the 50th anniversary of the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, King was fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. American history...
If You Want to Kill Drug Dealers, Start with Big Pharma
At a recent rally in New Hampshire, Donald Trump called for the death penalty for drug traffickers as part of a plan to combat the opioid epidemic in the United States. At a Pennsylvania rally a few weeks earlier, he called for the same. Now his administration is...
A Shiny New Tool to Pad Profits: Stealing
Workplace exploitation is at least as old as the industrial revolution. But rather than using whips to make the assembly lines move ever faster, today’s corporate exploiters use technology, devious work schedules, and lobbyists to extract more work from employees —...
A Sick New Game from the Executive Suite
Today’s corporate captains like to think of themselves not as mere businesspeople, but as geniuses of modern innovation. But innovation for what purpose? After all, some of society’s most inventive minds are flimflammers, Ponzi-schemers, gamers, and embezzlers —...
Billionaires Won’t Save the World — Just Look at Elon Musk
Will Mars save humanity? Or will our savior be billionaire Elon Musk? Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, humbly believes we don’t have to choose. Mars will save us, he promises, and Musk himself will engineer this Mars miracle. In 2019, Musk claims, SpaceX will start...
Teachers Deserve a Raise. Here’s How to Fund It.
Teachers are ready to revolt. That’s the message we should take away from West Virginia, where educators in every county went on strike recently. The teachers secured a major victory, including a 5 percent raise for state employees. The win couldn't be more...
Business Leaders Agree: Inequality Hurts The Bottom Line
For decades, big business leaders have warned that redistributing wealth is bad for business. Taxing the rich to pay for infrastructure and education, they say, will kill the goose that lays the golden egg. But what if it’s the opposite? What if decades of stagnant...
Clean Energy is Calling. Will Your Phone Company Answer?
There currently is a cavernous lack of leadership in our federal government on tackling climate change. Fortunately, cities, states, universities, and some businesses have stepped up to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and grow our renewable energy. But there’s...
We Need to Talk About ‘Free Trade’
America, can we talk? We need to talk about "free trade." We've needed to have this conversation for a while, actually. Like, since the 1980s. For the past several decades, the U.S. political establishment has advocated free trade as part of a broader economic...
