Economy and Business
When Citizens Shocked Plutocrats
A hundred years ago, on October 3, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the first modern federal tax on income. John Buenker has been writing about the events that led to that signing for a good bit of the last 50 years. His 1985 book, The Income Tax and the...
The Fine Art of Milking Government
Our tax money As it stands, Oft ends up In private hands. These economically challenging times haven't ended the golden deals every level of government offers business. State and federal statutes remain loaded with these giveaways. They include grants, subsidized...
Socking it to the Shareholders
Someone should make a movie about JPMorgan and title it: "Bankers Gone Wild." Not long ago, America's biggest Wall Street Empire was hailed as a paragon of financial integrity. Not now. JPMorgan has been assessed record fines of nearly a billion bucks for management...
Our Road to Elysium
The Hollywood blockbuster film, Elysium, depicts a polarized Los Angeles in the year 2154. The vast majority of inhabitants live in overpopulated and polluted slums, toiling in grinding poverty. Meanwhile, a wealthy elite live on Elysium, a space station modeled after...
A Golden Rule that Might Chip Away at Inequality
Watching grown men fulminate in public can be unnerving. Michael Piwowar and Daniel Gallagher — two distinctly CEO-friendly members of the federal Securities and Exchange Commission — recently did plenty of fulminating. Piwowar and Gallagher had little choice. They...
The Latest Trend in Trade Secrets
As our jobs And pay degrade, Moguls smirk And tout “Free Trade” It's no wonder President Barack Obama refuses to let Americans see those two new trade deals he's negotiating. Neither the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) nor the Transatlantic Trade and Investment...
USS Inequality
Operation Secret Loopholes
The federal budget expresses our nation's values and priorities in numbers. It's a blueprint for how our elected officials plan to make money and how they plan to spend it. What happens in Washington, D.C. has a profound local impact. About 80 percent of all federal...
A Higher Minimum Down Under
Fast-food workers are holding strikes and demonstrations in dozens of U.S. cities. The "Fight for 15" campaign demands a $15 living wage and the right to form a union without interference from employers. Critics say a living wage would drive fast-food restaurants and...
The Stiffing State
My cousin Mona called me the other day about her husband Harry, who had came home from work and said: "We're spending too much money, Mona. It's got to stop. We're going broke." "Really? I thought we were doing OK, sort of." "OK? Look at the stack of bills on my desk....
