Media

Once again, maybe for the last time, Senator Carl Levin and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation has demonstrated how government, and the legislative branch in particular, can work in the public’s interest regardless of partisanship.

Yesterday’s hearing laid out a complex system of price manipulation in which Goldman Sachs appears to have pocketed huge sums by marrying aluminum derivatives and warehouses. The public was the victim.

As Ferguson, Mo. and the nation await a grand jury decision on whether or not to indict police officer Darren Wilson for killing Mike Brown, authorities are “preparing for the worst.”

Last year, the Daily Show hilariously lampooned the Goldman Sachs “merry-go-round of metal” in which the firm uses its ownership of the major Midwest aluminum warehouse (think auto manufacturing and beer) to slow availability of supply, with a predictable effect on prices.

Thousands of families in the United States are separated due to immigration laws that have affected hard-working immigrants who are just trying to support their families.

The Daily Show last night had a great segment highlighting Detroit's ongoing water crisis. They point out that out of the $145 million dollars in delinquent water bills, nearly half is owed by commercial and municipal accounts, including the Joe Louis Arena, a local golf course, and an ice skating rink. People in Detroit pay much higher rates than the rest of the country, and continue to suffer from severe economic hardship, with 47% of mortgages still underwater at the end of 2013.

While Corinthian and its campuses may downsize or disappear completely, we should be concerned the students who attended its campuses and are currently in no man’s land.

Branko Milanovic is a World Bank economist and development specialist. He's currently a visiting presidential professor at CUNY's Graduate Center and a senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center. His book, The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality, examines—as the title suggests—income inequality. Milanovic and Demos Research Assistant Sean McElwee recently discussed Milanovic's research and the major shifts within the inequality research field.

English writer Daniel Defoe famously said that only two things in this life are certain: death and taxes. After a dismally low turnout in the 2014 midterm elections, folks are considering adding voting to that list, but should we? And—for proponents of compulsory voting—what’s the fairest, most commonsense way to go about mandating the vote?

If the Federal Reserve were democratic, there’s no chance it would raise interest rates.

The Fed is nearing a decision on when to raise rates for the first time since 2008. But raising them now would be a disaster: the Fed would quash economic growth and keep wages and employment from rising.