Jim Hightower PHOTO BY LARRY D. MOORE What’s past, as Shakespeare has told us, is prologue. 2016 has been a wild political season. This year, despite the unnerving presidential freak show the Republicans are putting on, Hillary Clinton is the one who recently stunned me. Attempting to convince very wary working class families that she […]
Wall Street
Posted inOpinion
Who says crime doesn’t pay?
Jim Hightower PHOTO BY LARRY D. MOORE Hey, can we all just stop complaining that our government coddles Wall Street’s big money-grubbing banks? Sure, they went belly-up and crashed our economy with their frauds, rigged casino games and raw greed. And, yes, the Bush and Obama regimes rushed to bail them out with trillions of […]
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Thieves get richer the old-fashioned way
Jim Hightower PHOTO BY LARRY D. MOORE With the 2016 presidential campaigns in full swing, the burdens of the working middle class have taken center stage. And believe it or not, there is bipartisan support from the front-runners on a key issue brought up over and over again. Donnie Trump is for it. Hillary Clinton […]
Posted inOpinion
How the grassroots derailed the TPP train
White House spokesperson Josh Earnest dismissed it as a procedural snafu, and it was – but not in the way he meant. The “it” was the stunning June 12 vote last week in the House of Representatives that wrecked that high-balling freight train called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. TPP is the global trade scam that was […]
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A whining Wall Street banker pleads for pity
J.P. Morgan was recently socked in the wallet by financial regulators who levied yet another multi-billion dollar fine against the Wall Street baron for massive illegalities. Well, not a fine against John Pierpont Morgan, the man. This 19th-century robber baron was born to a great banking fortune and, by hook and crook, leveraged it to […]
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Citigroup becomes its own lawmaker
Congress, which has long been so tied up in a partisan knot by right-wing extremists that it has been unable to move, suddenly sprang loose at the end of the year and put on a phenomenal show of acrobatic lawmaking. In one big, bipartisan spending bill, our legislative gymnasts pulled off a breathtaking, flat-footed backflip […]
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Has America gone crazy?
It might appear that the U-S-of-A has gone bonkers. So let me clear up any confusion that you might have: Yes, it has! Yet, it hasn’t. More on that in a moment. First, though – whether looking at the “tea party” congress critters who’ve swerved our nation’s political debate to the hard right, or at […]
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Growing ‘populist lobby’
Imagine a bold headline blaring, “An Army of 1,500 Lobbyists Swarms Capitol Hill.” But that wouldn’t be news, since it happens every day. In fact, an occupying army of Gucci-clad corporate lobbyists is permanently encamped in Washington, numbering not a mere 1,500 – but more than 12,000. Yes, that works out to nearly 22 lobbyists […]
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A tax on high frequency traders
Have you heard about High Frequency Trading? HFT is sweeping, purely speculative financial transactions that have been made possible by huge leaps in technology. Done by super-fast computers, using mathematical algorithms, HFT searches millions of prices at lightning speeds and places bets automatically. Transaction times are measured in milliseconds, as the global network of “trading […]
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Can Wall Street buy redemption?
Goldman Sachs churns out enormous profits from its high-rolling, casino investment schemes, while also churning out fat paychecks for its top executives. They literally sack up the gold, even as their speculative gambles have wreaked havoc on our real economy. But, finally recognizing that their public approval rating has sunk lower than mad-cow disease, Goldman’s […]
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Trans-Pacific Partnership: Aka corporate coup
What if our national leaders told us that communities across America had to eliminate such local programs as Buy Local, Buy American, Buy Green, etc. to allow foreign corporations to have the right to make the sale on any products purchased with our tax dollars? This nullification of our people’s right to direct expenditures is […]
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Where Labor Day came from, and where it’s going
Webster’s dictionary tells us that Labor Day was “set aside for special recognition of working people.” That’s nice, but “set aside” by whom? It certainly wasn’t the Wall Street corporate and political powers that be. They nearly swallowed their cigars when the idea of honoring labor’s importance to America’s economy and social well-being was first […]
