An Economy for All

Governing on Empty

The Senate, having struck its compromise, has gone home. The House, controlled by delusional Republicans, has gone home. Payroll taxes are slated to rise, and unemployment insurance is set to expire before they return in January. The compromise wasn’t just between the two parties in the Senate, apparently. According to Wednesday’s Washington Post, House Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor met with Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell on Friday and told him they’d get the votes to pass the two-month extension deal he’d worked out with Harry Reid. But Boehner, who is turning out to be the weakest speaker since the House was first gaveled to order in 1789, couldn’t hold his troops, whose caucus meetings, by numerous accounts, increasingly resemble the pep rallies of cults that have lost all feel for how other humans think.

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The Foreclosure Fraud Machine

For the past few days, our blog team has been chronicling the implications of a fraud machine run by some of the nation's largest financial institutions. The same machine that peddled the predatory loans that helped create the Wall Street financial crisis is now mass-producing the legally dubious paperwork that seeks to put thousands of people out of their homes.

Read our reports and analysis »

The GOP Payroll Tax Plan Does So Stink

No doubt Republicans know the fight over extending the payroll tax is one they could lose. Thus, they've pivoted away from opposing the extension, and have presented a plan of their own — one that Timothy Noah says the Democrats should be willing to work with because it "doesn't stink."

Well, in my experience, just because you can't smell something doesn't mean it doesn't sink. Some things "pass the smell test" because of a faulty sniffer; not because they don't stink. And the GOP's payroll tax plan does so stink.

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Battling Messages: Democrats Need to Enter the Fray

New polling with the same results:

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Campaign Cash: Who's Selling Our Democracy Out From Under Us

With the help of members of the Media Consortium, Zach Carter has chronicled some of the most outrageous examples of corporate America literally buying our democracy, exploiting legitimate populist concerns about the economy to advance an agenda that will only benefit the wealthy few at the expense of the rest of us. What impact did the Supreme Court's Citizens United really have in the 2010 election?
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Pay Teachers More

From the debates in Wisconsin and elsewhere about public sector unions, you might get the impression that we’re going bust because teachers are overpaid. That’s a pernicious fallacy. A basic educational challenge is not that teachers are raking it in, but that they are underpaid. If we want to compete with other countries, and chip away at poverty across America, then we need to pay teachers more so as to attract better people into the profession.

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The Conservative Pledge to Rob the Middle Class

Congressional Republicans have released their "Pledge to America," but it is a threat to Americans struggling in today's economy. This slate of proposals will slash needed spending, kill jobs, declare open season on the public's health and safety, and end any hope of growing the economy. Read Richard Eskow's analysis »

The Return of Sanity

The common thread in yesterday’s unbroken string of Democratic and progressive victories was the popular rejection of right-wing overreach. The series of elections held across the country yesterday weren’t supposed to yield a coherent narrative. Yet a common theme emerged: Radical-right Republicans hit a wall last night all over the country, even on a conservative social issue in what may be the most socially conservative state in the nation. So can Democrats take some hope from last night’s results? Provisionally; sort of. If Barack Obama can make next year’s election a choice between his ineffectual moderation and the Republicans’ wacked-out lunacy, the Democrats should do well. If next year’s election is a referendum on his stewardship of the economy the Democrats will likely get clobbered. It’s clear that Americans have had it with Republican extremism. Whether that will be a decisive issue in 2012 is not yet apparent.

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Getting the Message Right on the Economy

While the public is profoundly disenchanted with the state of the economy and have soured on conservative economic policies, progressives still have the challenge of coming up with the right message that convinces voters that progressive solutions are better. more »

The Right's "Winner-Take-All Politics"

Author Jacob Hacker discussed his latest book, a probe of "the DNA evidence" behind the growing inequality of incomes between the vast majority of Americans and the richest of the rich, at an October 14 talk co-sponsored by the AFL-CIO and the Institute for America's Future. "Winner-Take-All Politics" shows how to take back a political system hijacked by the super rich.
» Watch video highlights
» Buy the book