Media

A new Explainer from Dēmos looks at why Washington focuses so heavily on deficit reduction and not on job creation, even as unemployment rates remain high. In short: the affluent donor class and big business interests prioritize deficit reduction and Congress, in turn, prioritizes what they prioritize. As detailed in the Explainer, if deficit reduction was really the priority, Congress would increase spending and invest in job creating projects, like infrastructure upkeep.

Why it's as if there were a tax on the non-financial portions of the economy that redistributes wealth to the financial sector.

The Center for American Progress is out with a budget plan that would reduce deficits by $4.1 trillion over the next decade and, at first glance, seems to makes a good deal of sense.

A few months ago, I wrote about the fracked up logic used by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to outsource reviewing the health impacts of fracking to the Health Commissioner. The ramifications of this decision are now becoming clear.

Before the Great Recession, the financial sector had consistently been eating up a greater and greater share of the economy. In 2007, it accounted for a whopping 40 percent of corporate profits. Before 1950, the financial sector made up less than 3 percent of GDP; now it makes up more than 8 percent.

We’ve been talking a lot this year on PolicyShop about the work of groups like Fast Food Forward, OUR Walmart, the Retail Action Project, the Restaurant Opportunities Centers,

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Massachusetts Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren is likely to focus her efforts on the Senate Banking Committee in areas that go far beyond her bread-and-butter expertise in consumer protection, analysts say.

In response to my short primer on the corporation, Professor Colleen Dunlavy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison sent her interesting article, From Citizens to Plutocrats: Nineteenth-century  Shareholder Voting Rights and Theories of the Corporation.

Four-year-old John Kaykay is a serious and quiet boy—“my thoughtful one,” his dad calls him. When the official greeters at the front door of the McClure early-childhood center in Tulsa welcome him with their clipboards and electric cheer—“Good morning, John! How are you today?”—he just slowly nods his small chin in their direction. When he gets to Christie Housley’s large, sunny classroom, he focuses intensely on signing in, writing the four letters of his name with a crayon as his dad crouches behind him.