The national leader of one of America's feistiest unions is aiming to expand the economic fairness debate. He's proposing a cap on incomes at the top that rises only if incomes at the bottom rise first.
Mitt Romney (or someone) writes (or writes for him) in Murdoch/Al-Waleed's Wall Street Journal, that lessons he learned at Bain Capital will help him turn the country around if he is elected President. Is he right? more »
There's a new town in Colorado. It has about 50 buildings, including a saloon, a church, a jail, a firehouse, a livery and a train station. Soon, it will have a mansion on a hill so the town's founder can look down on his creation.
But don't expect to move here — or even to visit.
This town is billionaire Bill Koch's fascination with the Old West rendered in bricks and mortar. It sits on a 420-acre meadow on his Bear Ranch below the Raggeds Wilderness Area in Gunnison County. It's an unpopulated, faux Western town that might boggle the mind of anyone who ever had a playhouse. Its full-size buildings come with polished brass and carved-mahogany details and are fronted with board sidewalks and underpinned by a water-treatment system. A locked gate with guards screens who comes and goes.
Koch's project manager has told county officials that the enclave in the middle of the 6,400-acre Bear Ranch won't ever be open to the public. It is simply for Koch's amusement and for that of his family and friends — and historians. It is the ultimate repository for his huge collection of Western memorabilia.
Yeah. This is a guy who really needs another tax break. Koch's "own private Dodge City" reminded me of something I once read about Marie Antoinette.
We as a country have been running enormous trade deficits that enormously benefit our 1% at the expense of the rest of us. As a country we get poorer while they get richer, so they want things to stay just the way they are. And that is where we are today -- an increasingly poorer country with an increasingly richer 1%.
Every day we rise and tell ourselves this will be a good day, free of that unique combination of predation, self-pity, mediocrity and disingenousness which characterizes the modern bank executive. And every day somebody proves us wrong. more »