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Recent Articles in Commentary and Opinion
Every summer, several financial firms competing to get the banking business of the world’s mega millionaires release what amounts to scorecards on global wealth. These data-packed reports tally the current number of our international rich and superrich, by nation and region.
World Wealth Report 2010 is the most comprehensive of these scorecards. It’s got some fascinating details about the planet’s wealthiest of the wealthy, those households worth at least $30 million--that’s not counting their primary residence and “collectibles.” These “ultra-high-net worth” households make up less than 1 percent of the global millionaire total, yet in 2009 and 2008 they held more than a third of combined global millionaire wealth. In other words, the global financial crash that mega-millionaire speculation triggered has ended up concentrating even more wealth in mega millionaire pockets.
The Merrill Lynch and Capgemini researchers who prepared this report also offer some lusciously revealing information about what they…
Perhaps the greatest freedom in a democracy is freedom of speech. Throughout our nation’s history, people have died fighting not only for our right to speak, but for our right to be heard.
The Internet is the greatest communications network ever created because it allows us to speak for ourselves without first asking permission from corporate gatekeepers. The Internet’s importance as a forum for speech is the result of the principle called net neutrality, which prevents the phone and cable companies that provide Internet service from discriminating against content online or interfering with the free flow of Internet traffic.
But net neutrality and the open Internet may be in serious trouble. Julius Genachowski, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has been holding closeddoor meetings with Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and Google that could pave the way for a corporate takeover of the Internet. The big phone and cable companies…
Deficit hawks are on the fly in Washington, madly screeching that America can no longer afford...well, the American people.
Having slashed taxes for the wealthiest 1 percent of our society, having lavished gabillions of dollars on unnecessary wars that enrich politically connected government contractors, having laid out trillions of dollars to bail out Wall Street’s casino banksters who crashed our real economy--Washington’s brave fighters for extending more of our nation’s wealth to the already-rich have suddenly turned into born-again budget whackers.
Are they cutting back on any of the above elites, you ask? What a joker you are! No, no--it’s regular folks who must pay the price for the decade of excess that these politicos lavished on the rich.
In recent weeks, for example, Republican senators have repeatedly blocked an extension of jobless benefits for America’s hardest-hit families. They’ve also denied aid that would keep states and cities from firing…
BP’s catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico demonstrates how risky oil and gas drilling really is. For the 11 crew members killed in the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Gulf communities, ocean water and wildlife, the impacts were immediate.
The long-term repercussions will also be devastating.
Stopping the leak, cleaning up the mess, and restoring the economic viability to the Gulf’s many industries that rely on clean, healthy water is going to be an enormous challenge.
The multi-billion-dollar question is: How are we going to pay for it? The answer should be easy. BP is responsible for this disaster. BP should pay for everything-- the cleanup and damages. On the surface, it may seem like BP agrees. In congressional testimony and a series of expensive ads, BP has assured us its efforts in the Gulf will “not come at any cost to the taxpayers.” But the facts are murkier. Taxpayers already underwrite…
President Obama’s Fiscal Commission-- a group of lawmakers, former officials, and other experts charged with developing a bipartisan plan to stabilize our soaring national debt--is primarily holding closed-door hearings. The commission’s cochairman Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, recently became an instant YouTube star with his rant against seniors as he exited one of the panel’s sessions. That put Social Security defenders on high alert about what’s going on in these meetings.
Simpson, who is nearly 80, has maintained that the founders of the program never expected anyone to actually live to 65 and collect. “People just died,” he has said. “Social Security was never [for] retirement.” The program has always been an easy target for deficit hawks and budget cutters because it’s so big-- the government’s largest expenditure, just ahead of the Pentagon. But setting up a target isn’t as easy as actually hitting it. George W.…
