The Senate on Thursday, in a real sense, filibustered the future. A Republican minority set themselves up as a roadblock against college students struggling to pay for their education and establish financial stability. A narrow, 51-vote majority in the Senate supported legislation that would have kept student loan rates from increasing above 3.4 percent for [...]
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Today the Social Security trustees released their annual report, and regardless of what you might hear otherwise from the chattering class, the underlying message is that there is no need to consider cuts in Social Security or Medicare benefits. In fact, we can and should increase benefits by taking a couple of basic, straightforward steps. [...]
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On the menu this morning MORNING MESSAGE: The Latest Lie – IRS Targeted Conservatives The Bite of Apple: Worming Through Tax Loopholes Homeowners Arrested; Say Bankers Should Have Been Good Deficit News Bad News for Right Latest Immigration Bill Twists Breakfast Sides MORNING MESSAGE: The Latest Lie – IRS Targeted Conservatives http://blog.ourfuture.org/20130520/the-latest-lie-irs-targeted-conservatives “The corporate media [...]
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OurFuture.org’s Roger Hickey and Richard Eskow explain during their appearance Sunday on “Pivot Point with Maya Rockeymoore” what it will take for progressives to win the fight against conservative austerity economic policies that are holding down the economy and preventing the job growth that we need. “The great thing is that the idea of austerity [...]
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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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On Thursday, House Republicans have scheduled a vote on a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Haven’t they already done that, you ask? Yes, they have, in one form or another, 36 times since it has been enacted. This week’s vote would make 37. It’s gotten to the point that today the director of [...]
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Do you think that student loan debt is only a problem for college students and perhaps their parents? Think again. The escalation of student loan debt in the past decade is a millstone around the neck of the entire economy, and you are touched by its effects. Especially if you or someone you know has [...]
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Right-wing obstructionism reached another low today when Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee would not even show up to vote today on the nomination of Gina McCarthy to be director of the Environmental Protection Agency. The spectacle was the equivalent of the six-year-old, willful diva-to-be slamming the doll on the ground and [...]
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Rick Perlstein, a former writer for the Campaign for America’s Future who now writes for The Nation, has a detailed and deeply troubling two-part examination (Part I and Part II) of President Obama’s nominee to be Commerce secretary, Penny Pritzker. We interviewed Perlstein earlier this week to get his views on the kinds of questions [...]
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The scheme that Apple cooked up this week to finance a $55 billion stock buyback for its shareholders was orchestrated to avoid paying $9.2 billion in taxes, Bloomberg reported Friday. That $9.2 billion tax bill that Apple dodged would have been enough to make unnecessary all of the major budget cuts we’ve been writing about [...]
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