A two-hour “teach-in” Monday afternoon prompted by the Wall Street protest produced an array of ideas from economists and their students about how to counter big-monied interests and nurture a more egalitarian society that values genuine wellbeing over raw growth.
The forum, organized by the Gund Institute of Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont, drew more than 200 people to the Ira Allen Chapel and offered a mix of rousing rhetoric and lower-key policy-speak.
Thank you, Members of the Minnesota Judicial Special Redistricting Panel, for providing the opportunity to submit written testimony. Dēmos is a national, non-profit, non-partisan research and policy organization. The Dēmos Democracy Program works to ensure high levels of voting and civic engagement, and supports reforms to achieve a more inclusive and representative democracy.
It's no secret that the technology industry is gung-ho about a corporate tax repatriation holiday. After all, many big tech firms do a huge amount of business abroad and have piled up a mountain of foreign profits that they are now itching to bring home during a one-time holiday where they would pay a fraction of the usual tax rate. In fact, no other industry now holds more cash overseas.
Here's a data point that slipped under the radar when the U.S. Labor Department released its latest job numbers earlier this month: Layoffs of public sector workers accounted for the biggest chunk of pink slips handed out overall in September.
The latest attack on green jobs attempts to portray the U.S. Department of Labor’s green jobs training program as a failure and claims that President Obama failed on his promise to create 5 million green jobs by the end of the decade.
A few decades ago, it also would have been difficult to imagine how such a Kol Nidre service could have come together. Like Occupy Wall Street and its growing number of spin-offs, these events happen because of the extensive use of social media by savvy organizers who don’t need or seek the blessings of communal leadership.
Corporations are pushing hard to bring back billions in cash now stashed overseas at very low tax rates. They argue that, in effect, they should be able to avoid paying normal taxes on huge overseas profits because all sorts of great things will happen once this money comes home.
The last time that corporations won a repatriation holiday was in 2004, and so it's worth taking a close look at the effect of this holiday back then. A Senate committee has been doing just that, crunching numbers to closely scrutiny the effect of the 2004 law.
In case you haven't noticed, leading conservatives -- including Sarah Palin -- have been talking a lot lately about "crony capitalism." This phrase started turning up well before the hyped up Solyndra scandal and is now heard even more often.
A debate over the cozy ties between government and corporations is long overdue. Unfortunately, that is not the debate we are likely to get from the likes of Ron Paul and Sarah Palin.
Last week, the Department of State held its final public hearing on whether a Keystone XL pipeline should be built to bring crude oil from the Alberta, Canada tar sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The pipeline would be an extension of an existing pipeline and would be 1,700 miles long and run through six states. It would also support an environmentally destructive extractive industry that furthers the addiction to fossil fuels and detracts from a clean economic future.
Here's one more reason to be puzzled by the GOP's animus toward green jobs: It turns out that the clean economy is disproportionately fueling economic growth and opportunity in states that tend to send Republicans to Congress -- states that are also struggli
One grievance of the protesters targeting Wall Street is that financial elites wield way too much power in our democracy. That complaint is hardly new, but the latest figures on money in politics tells a truly troubling story about the vast resources that Wall Street has put into shaping both the legislative process and elections.