Economy and Business
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...
Forget the Dow Jones. How’s Doug Jones?
Language matters. For example, the words that corporate and government officials use to report on the health of America’s economy can either make clear to us commoners what’s going on — or hide and even lie about the reality we face. Consider the most common...
Just How Unequal Are America’s Major Corporations?
That America’s income distribution has grown dramatically more unequal in the past 40 years is beyond debate. The share of the top 1 percent has doubled since 1980, to over 20 percent of all income. Could it get any worse? A look at America’s large, privately held...
Corporations Are Spending Their Tax Cut — on Themselves
Remember last year when Donald Trump and his congressional Trumpeteers bragged that their "yuge" tax cut for corporations would spark a "yuge" corporate spending spree to create new jobs and higher wages? Well, just as they promised, we’re now seeing corporate...
The Tax Scam Is Starting to Sink In
It’s no fun being scammed. I distinctly remember looking for my first big city apartment and finding an ad that looked perfect. Beautiful picture, cheap rent, great location. It sounded too good to be true and, sadly, it was. Just send a check in the mail, and don’t...
Long Live the Jersey Tomato
Food corporations and their academic cohorts keep trying to "make" an industrial tomato to rival Mother Nature’s product. And they keep failing. They might consider this instead: the Rutgers 250. It’s a revived version of the classic hybrid tomato bred in 1934 by...
