Economy and Business
Making Science History
We've all seen those touchy-feely TV ads with baby deer, butterflies, and sylvan streams — claiming that some big corporate polluter is nature's best friend. There's a word for such hokum: greenwashing. Leave it to the Koch brothers, however, to invent a whole new...
America’s Billionaires Owe You a Thank You Note
This tax season, America’s billionaires are toasting you, the ordinary taxpayer. That’s because you’re the one picking up the tab for our nation’s ailing infrastructure of roads, bridges, and rail transport. You’re also footing the bill for military forces, disaster...
Saving Coal Country
Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell recently took the extraordinary step of calling on governors to ignore Washington’s Clean Power Plan, an EPA mandate to curb carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. "Declining to go along with the administration’s legally...
A Higher Education Revolution
You might not have noticed it yet, but student protests are undergoing something of a renaissance. They're rising to levels unseen in decades. In California, students are stripping half naked to oppose tuition hikes and shutting down highways to draw attention to...
Debt Collectors or Pick Pockets?
Whenever a corporation issues a statement declaring that it's committed to "treating consumers fairly and with respect," chances are it's not. Otherwise, there would be no need for a statement. This particular claim came from Encore Capital, one of our country's...
What Are Women Workers Worth in Your State?
For years, Time magazine has a run a feature on the best places to live in the United States. But nobody ever ranked the best places for women — until now. A major factor for anyone's quality of life, of course, is the ability to earn a living. And nationally,...
Will Congress Be Duped Again on Offshore Taxes?
Like a savvy bargainer on a used car lot, big multinational corporations have mastered the art of feigning indifference and walking away. What they walk away with is their profits, stockpiling them abroad where they legally remain untaxed until returned to the United...
Household Debt Is a National Crisis
Years after Toni Potter’s husband passed away from pancreatic cancer, debt collectors in her state of Washington were still relentlessly hounding her about his hospital bills. Andrea Anderson, a young student in Oregon, has been saddled with $150,000 in college loans...
Your Dollars at Work — for the Rich
Conservative pundits and politicians routinely divide our U.S. economy into two totally distinct spheres. We have the noble private sector over here, they tell us, and the bumbling, bloated public sector over there. In reality, of course, we have just one economy,...
Student Debt Collectors
