By Robert Reich – Martin Shkreli, the former hedge-fund manager turned pharmaceutical CEO who was arrested last week, has been described as a sociopath and worse. In reality, he’s a brasher and larger version of what others in finance and corporate suites do all the time. Federal prosecutors are charging him with conning wealthy investors.…
By David Underhill – MOBILE, Ala. – You must have been naughty children. Although you didn’t get a lump of coal in your stocking, you got a wad of glop. It’s your present from Alabama governor Robert Bentley, often confused with creepy Mr Burns in The Simpsons show. But that’s only because of their eerily…
By Edgar Wilson – As popular as it has become (frankly, it has crossed the threshold to cliché) to compare governance to private-sector business management, America’s selection of would-be Manager-Politicians routinely fail to grasp the single most dynamic force of business today: innovation. It isn’t entirely their fault. By design, America’s political structure is slow…
By Eugene Robinson – History will remember 2015 as the year when The Republican Party As We Knew It was destroyed by Donald Trump. An entity called the GOP will survive – but can never be the same. Am I overstating Trump’s impact, given that not a single vote has been cast? Hardly. I’m not…
By Robert Reich – The great American middle class has become an anxious class – and it’s in revolt. Before I explain how that revolt is playing out, you need to understand the sources of the anxiety. Start with the fact that the middle class is shrinking, according to a new Pew survey. The odds…
By Juan Cole – The price of petroleum fell Monday to levels not seen since the crash of 2008, at one point hitting $35 a barrel in New York. There is every reason to expect prices to remain low for a few years, and they could easily go lower as Iranian crude comes back on…
By David Underhill – MOBILE, Ala. – If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the Paris climate conference just built an eight-lane freeway to Hades. Leaders and nerds from 195 countries sifted through separate plans for saving the species from itself and tried to meld them into an agreed text about shrinking…
By Anne Applebaum – Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has announced that he wants to give away $45 billion. I’m sure he needs some advice on how to spend it. Here’s mine: He should use it to undo the terrible damage done by Facebook and other forms of social media to democratic debate and civilized…
By Glynn Wilson – MONTGOMERY. Ala. – Governor Robert Bentley issued a statement on Wednesday in response to the Obama administration’s announcement of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Transportation into the proposed closure of state driver license offices in mostly poor counties populated by minorities. Bentley claimed there were no offices closed and…
By Bill Boyarsky – Watching Donald Trump on television Monday urging that Muslims be banned from entering the United States was like listening to Hitler on the radio in the early 1930s. As was the case with Hitler, Trump appeals to a substantial number of angry people who cheer his call for making outcasts of…
By Eugene Robinson – “A cancer that has no immediate cure” was not the most soothing metaphor President Obama could have chosen, but it was the most honest. He has no idea how to prevent another terrorist attack like the one in San Bernardino – and neither does anyone else, including his Republican critics. The…
By Chris Hedges – The charade of the 21st United Nations climate summit will end, as past climate summits have ended, with lofty rhetoric and ineffectual cosmetic reforms. Since the first summit more than 20 years ago, carbon dioxide emissions have soared. Placing faith in our political and economic elites, who have mastered the arts…
By Edgar Wilson – America’s political leaders are not agents of change. They campaign as thought-leaders and strategists, but they are really glorified marketers. Their primary wares for sale to the public? Overwhelmingly, incentives and punishments—typically financial in nature—that will supposedly herald a sea change in behavior, shepherding the country into the future. Everything from…
By Robert Reich – In this holiday season it’s especially appropriate to acknowledge how many Americans don’t have steady work. The so-called “share economy” includes independent contractors, temporary workers, the self-employed, part-timers, freelancers, and free agents. Most file 1099s rather than W2s, for tax purposes. It’s estimated that in five years over 40 percent of…
By Eugene Robinson – The Republican presidential candidates and the far-right echo chamber have made “politically correct” an all-purpose dismissal for facts and opinions they don’t want to hear. Take Donald Trump’s claim that when the World Trade Center towers collapsed on 9/11, “I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of…
By Glynn Wilson – When we were young and naive, back in the day before the Bush Years, we consumed the government and American history text books that told us how the judicial branch of government is supposed to be above politics. When I first set foot in a newsroom across the street from a…
By Juan Cole – As Donald Trump supporters beat a ‘Black Lives Matter’ protester at a rally in Birmingham, Ala., Trump himself reminded us of the dark days when a paranoid J. Edgar Hoover had the FBI monitor the Rev. Martin Luther King and black Churches of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “I want surveillance…
By William Greider – At his inauguration in 1981, Ronald Reagan declared that “government is not the solution — government is the problem.” The election of 2016 will tell us whether the American people are ready to overthrow the tyranny of that reactionary proposition. I know it’s possible — but only if the Democratic Party…
By Elizabeth Warren – Over the past four years, millions of people have fled their homes in Syria, running for their lives. In recent months, the steady stream of refugees has been a flood that has swept across Europe. Every day, refugees set out on a journey hundreds of miles, from Syria to the Turkish…
By Robert Reich – The next president of the United States will confront a virulent jihadist threat, mounting effects of climate change, and an economy becoming ever more unequal. We’re going to need an especially wise and able leader. Yet our process for choosing that person is a circus, and several leading candidates are clowns.…
