To be one of the 50 richest Members of Congress last year, you would have had to have a net worth north of $7.47 million. Everyone knows longtime criminal and former car thief Darrell Issa is the richest Member of Congress- worth between $300 and $400 million dollars. Less well-known is that at least a third of Congress are millionaires (including half the senators).
How the Very Very Rich Fly to St. Andrewsby Gaius Publius Thom Hartmann has a TV show, The Big Picture, which airs every weekday. Often The Big Picture includes a segment called "Conversations with Great Minds," an excellent watch if you're as much a fan of thoughtful talk as I am.
I used to wonder if I was the only person who regretted NYC letting the real estate developers "clean up" Times Square. I miss the seediness and grit, now replaced with the bland anti-reality charmlessness of DisneyWorld. I've seen similar homogenization initiatives ruin interesting and unique corners of the world from Thailand to tiny Essaouira in Morocco.
The very very richby Gaius Publius I wrote recently about the lame-duck battle-- behind the scenes and in the press-- being waged over end-of-year "tax extenders." I offered a progressive strategy (repeated below) for maximizing the number of "good" tax credits that would be extended ("renewed"), like credits for renewable energy and expiring-in 2017 expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit
Last week we talked about how Republicans were unleashing a barrage of attack ads against weak conservative Democrats, like John Barrow, for voting with Republicans. Democrats who crossed the aisle to vote with Republicans to cut Social Security benefits for retired people are now being bombarded with ads-- that are true, regardless of the disingenuous source-- pointing out that they are the enemies of working people.
The defining economic challenge of our time is secular stagnation. It is the risk of inadequate growth, leading to inadequate potential, leading to inadequate growth.
— Lawrence H. Summers, former U. S. Treasury secretary, now teaching at Harvard
The sainted Ronald Reagan bequeathed Americans the right to revel in their ignorance, bigotry, and savagery even as they were being so carefully lined up in the bent-over position."What [William Lazonick] has uncovered is a shift in corporate conduct that transformed the U.S. economy -- for the worse. From the end of World War II through the late 1970s, he writes, major U.S.
The police response to public protests in Ferguson, Missouri in the wake of the deadly August 9 shooting of Michael Brown, Jr., an unarmed eighteen-year-old black man killed by a white police officer, was a prime illustration of the hyper-aggressive nature of policing in America today. The residents of Ferguson fed up with hostile and abusive police behavior continue to flood the streets to demand justice for Mike Brown and other victims of police brutality. They have been joined in solidarity by people of conscience in other cities (e.g., Oakland, NYC).
The whole purpose of the vote Friday afternoon was, euphemistically called the Child Tax Credit Improvement Act of 2014-- and sponsored by 4 corporate shills, Lynn Jenkins of Kansas, Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania, Devin Nunes of California and Tom Reed of New York-- was to expand tax credits for wealthy families while leaving kids from poor families behind, standard operating procedure for Republicans, of course.
