Economy and Business
The Day the Music Stopped
What do bank executives who make $19 million a year do in their spare time? The same thing they do in their executive suites. They squeeze America's middle class. That's not, of course, what the flacks at U.S. Bancorp, the nation's fifth-largest bank, will tell you....
It’s Time Corporations Flew Old Glory Instead of the Jolly Roger
The swashbuckling pirates of olde amassed private fortunes by raiding ships and stealing them. Once they captured a ship, they would replace its flag — which represented one of the world's sovereign nations — with the Jolly Roger. By flying the skull and crossbones,...
Pirates of the Cayman Islands
This Week in OtherWords: A Spotlight on Poverty
This week in OtherWords, Jill Richardson puts her own brush with food stamps into a broader context, Jim Hightower lampoons a rich Tennessee lawmaker who wants to slash spending on the program but pockets plenty of farm subsidies, and Marc Morial calls for raising the...
None of My Business
It was late, I was grumpy, and the woman in front of me was buying cigarettes. I noticed the items in her cart: brand-name snacks, colas, and frozen foods. I looked at how she dressed, considered the carton of cigarettes she requested, and made a wager to myself that...
Prosperity for All
With the stock market breaking ever-higher records, Americans should be celebrating our economic resurgence, right? After all, why else are we supposed to care when the Dow ticks up or down? Although half of us own no stocks at all and the richest 10 percent of us own...
Boosting the Economy from the Bottom Up
The minimum wage is $7.25. If it had kept up with inflation since 1968, minimum-wage workers would be earning $10.69 an hour today. During his State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama put a face on the growing chasm between the "haves" and "have nots" with a...
The Wealthy’s Free Pass
All of a sudden, almost everybody — in Congress at least — seems to want to talk about the IRS. Fine. We need a good debate about taxes. But let's have a debate that zooms in on the core issues. Like who's paying taxes in America today and who isn't. Interested in a...
The Irish Tax Blight
Now that Apple's shady-yet-legal scheme to funnel its income to low-tax Ireland is common knowledge, a question arises. Are its tactics connected to the concentration of massive wealth at the top of society while average Americans hang on by their fingernails...
Oklahoma’s Biblical Irony
There's an almost biblical irony to Oklahoma's latest tornado disaster. Not a funny irony, but the grim, tragic kind so common to acts of God. Four months before this twister, five of Oklahoma's seven members of Congress — including both of its senators — all...
