Police in Washington made numerous arrests today in connection with the ongoing mortgage foreclosure crisis, in which millions of homeowners lost billions of dollars due to the fraudulent actions of bank executives. But the arrests were not of the criminals who caused the crisis; the people led away in handcuffs today were the victims of [...]
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Sunday, May 19, 2013, was one of the saddest and most notorious moments in the sordid history of the federal budget.
Let's start from the beginning.
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Did you know that Washington, DC is the 9th most expensive American city to live in? Did you also know that thousands of private sector workers whose jobs are supported by taxpayer dollars don’t earn enough to live in the city where they work? Tomorrow, those workers are rallying for livable wages, in America’s 9th [...]
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Last week I wrote to the Executive Vice President of CBS News asking for a comment on Lesley Stahl’s unpublicized withdrawal from the Advisory Board of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. The inquiry was acknowledged and forwarded on to the press officer for 60 Minutes. There’s been no response since then. That’s a disservice to [...]
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Apple (like many giant, multinational corporations) has been avoiding paying the taxes they owe to the country by setting up foreign “subsidiaries” in tax-haven countries, and moving jobs and profit centers out of the country. They have accumulated billions upon billions of dollars in these tax havens. Now they want a special tax break to [...]
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I got my first job while I was in high school through a small community organization run by Willie J. Hardy, a community activist (and later D.C. City Council member) who operated out of what legendary Washington Post writer William Raspberry described as a “tiny, hopelessly cluttered quonset hut” in the Deanwood section of Washington. [...]
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The day may come when the worst nightmare a crooked banker or compromised regulator can have begins with the words, “You have a letter from Senator Warren.” But before we get to that, here’s an experience that may seem familiar: You’re at a party or family get-together – a Sunday barbecue, perhaps – and someone [...]
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If President Obama played basketball with the king of Bhutan, would the world have a better shot at becoming a happier place? What makes us happy? A simple question. In America, we’ve been asking it ever since 1776, the year we declared for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Back in those days, Americans [...]
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These days the economic news reads like some strange collaboration between John Steinbeck and Eugene Ionesco, a mashup of The Grapes of Wrath and The Bald Soprano. Grim statistics of poverty, lost hope, and widespread tragedy – the stuff of human reality – are juxtaposed with a surrealistically disconnected political debate that focuses on the incidental and the irrelevant. We’re [...]
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