Media

Say you’ve got a booming industry, one that already employs 2 million workers in the U.S. and is poised to add 1.3 million additional jobs by 2020. Imagine that the jobs cannot be off-shored, that the work helps decrease federal deficits, and millions of Americans depend on the industry just to get through their daily lives.

While the attention of Connecticut's legislature has been occupied by the recent budget battles, an even larger crisis has been brewing: retirement security.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the first ever survey of green jobs today with some very promising numbers. In 2010, 3.1 million jobs were Green Goods and Services jobs (GGS) with 2.3 million in the private sector and 860,300 in the public sector. These numbers are even higher than the Brookings Institution estimates released last fall. Brookings estimated that 2.7 million people were employed in the green economy.

State governments are in for a rough year, according to a recent report from Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "For fiscal year 2013, the fiscal year that begins July 1, 2012, 29 states have projected or have addressed shortfalls totaling $47 billion."

Credit: Flickr/doneastwestA lesson in how not to reduce gas prices: the White House is backing TransCanada’s bid to build the southern por

Warren Buffett once referred to derivatives as "financial weapons of mass destruction" created by "madmen." Real WMD have rarely been used. However, derivatives are used quite a lot, a $600 trillion per year market dominated by a narrow oligopoly of mega-banks. It appears that Italy got hit by the derivatives WMD in January.

TheWall Street Journal ran a disingenuous and misleading opinion piece on Sunday evening titled "The Corporate Disclosure Assault," arguing that “[u]nions and liberal activists are using proxy rules to attack business political speech.” The piece—exactly like the undisclosed corporate money it’s pandering to—doesn’t even have an author listed.

Sounding the alarm about climate change has long been an uphill battle because its effects can seem remote or too far in the future. Even if the planet is warming, skeptics say, how do we know that human activity is the cause and why should we care?

Every year, though, comes more concrete evidence of why we should care as the very real costs of climate change start to kick in.