Economy and Business
Where Would We Be Without Social Security?
Nearly every single American is intimately connected with the earned benefits of Social Security and Medicare — as either a contributor, a recipient, or both. In fact, a recent national poll indicated nearly 90 percent of us favor taking strong measures to preserve...
Runaway CEO Pay Gets a Free Pass
Only 10 percent of Americans now have confidence in Congress, Gallup informs us. No other major American institution has ever had an approval rating this low. But public confidence in Congress would probably sink even lower if average Americans knew more about what...
A New Housing Emergency
Folks, there's a serious housing shortage in America these days. The stress it's creating for needy families is approaching heart-attack levels. Did you know, for example, that the inventory of million-dollar homes in Carmel, California, dwindled to only four...
Don’t Squat in Your Spurs or Be an Idiot
June is the month of the summer solstice and America's biggest blizzard. I don't mean a weather event blowing in from the Arctic, but a merciless storm of words blowing from the mouths of commencement speakers at high school and college graduations. This year, I was...
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...
