Don’t be fooled: McConnell’s victory in Kentucky is also a Tea Party win Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s primary victory Tuesday night in Kentucky will undoubtedly tempt many a pundit to write the Tea Party’s eulogy. But the Tea Party will achieve in electoral death what it could never achieve in life: lasting control of the…
Not everyone shares in Boeing’s success Taxpayers around Washington state are trying to understand Boeing’s recent announcement of layoffs, just months after the Legislature met in special session to grant $8.7 billion in tax preferences—the largest such deal in American history. Our relationship with Boeing has definitely changed. For decades, Boeing products excelled in the marketplace. The…
Jane Kleeb vs. the Keystone Pipeline TransCanada, the $48 billion Canadian company that owns the Keystone, has repeatedly said the XL will be “the safest pipeline ever built on U.S. soil,” a technological marvel with automatic shutoff valves and satellite monitoring. The exact composition of what will flow through the pipeline is not publicly available,…
The problem with Piketty: “Capital” destroys right-wing lies, but there’s one solution it forgets What makes Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” such a triumph is that it seems to have been written specifically to demolish the great economic shibboleths of our time. The stock market is not an instrument of economic democracy, it…
ALEC fires back, but proves its ‘pro-business’ state index is bogus Plainly stung by the chorus of ridicule that has greeted their latest attempt to paint anti-union policies and tax cuts for the rich as pathways to economic nirvana, the folks at the American Legislative Exchange Council have struck back with a “response to the critics.” If you…
Look who the folks who took down ACORN are targeting now In a presentation at the Drake Hotel in Chicago last October, Joseph Kefauver addressed a conference of executives from companies like Nike, Macy’s, and Crate & Barrel, among other leading brands. Kefauver, a key player in the rising cottage industry of lobbyists and consultants…
Is an ideological agenda destroying the future of Boeing? This is not a story about Boeing versus Airbus. It’s about the view in management schools that an unhappy, insecure and more anxious society is better for capital than one that is happy, cooperative and mutually reliant on common objectives. The most perplexing thing about Boeing for…
How the Cliven Bundy saga exposes America’s most enduring myth When the anti-government rancher Cliven Bundy stepped before the cameras to “tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he also stepped into far-reaching and noxious American historical myths about self-sufficiency, race, and rugged individualism. Bundy’s actual words—delivered in a Western drawl by…
New type of poverty: How the iPhone became a placebo for the poor The face of poverty in America has changed dramatically from what Walker Evans and James Agee indelibly captured in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, their book documenting the lives of our nation’s poverty-stricken tenant farmers during the Great Depression. Now, an American family…
LIAR: Rand Paul says 40 times more Kentuckians have had health insurance canceled than have signed up for Obamacare A reader sent us a newsletter to constituents released by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), a critic of the law and a potential presidential candidate in 2016. The claim that leapt out at us was, “For every Kentuckian that…