Big money isn’t just pouring into the 2016 presidential race-which is already on pace to break several campaign spending records. The campaign-finance arms race has also driven big money into several contentious U.S. Senate races much earlier than usual. “Early money is like yeast, or so goes the saying, implying that when you raise and […]
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Posted inWorking in America
Supreme Court Case That Almost Busted Public-Sector Unions is Dead. What Now?
A dark cloud that’s loomed large over public-sector unions has cleared away-for now. The Supreme Court split 4-4 Tuesday in its decision on Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a case centering on the legality of “fair-share” fees, which non-union members are required to pay to cover collective bargaining costs. And while the decision came down […]
Posted inEconomic Policy
Lester Thurow, an Economist Ahead of His Time
Lester Thurow, one of the leading economists to challenge American inequality before that view became fashionable, died last week at 77. He spent most of his career at MIT, where he also served as dean of the Sloane School of Management between 1987 and 1993. Born in Montana, he was a Rhodes Scholar, an avid […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Group Drafts Secret Proposal to End Taxpayer-Funded Veteran Care
Deliberations by the Department of Veterans Affairs Commission on Care, the congressionally mandated group planning the future of the Veterans Health Administration, have, as The American Prospect has reported, become increasingly marred by controversy. When the 15-member commission met in Washington in mid-March, another furor erupted. A recently uncovered proposal to privatize the VHA set […]
Posted inHealth and Social Policy
House Veterans Affairs Chairman Blasts Health-Care Commission Member
The VA Commission on Care, the 15-member bipartisan body created by Congress to make recommendations about the future of the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), has been meeting for months and plans to publish its findings in June. Until this week, Congress had not interfered with the commission’s supposedly independent deliberations. That all changed on March […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Will Disclosure Fight Doom SEC Nominees?
The question of whether the Securities and Exchange Commission should require public corporations to more publicly disclose their political spending has emerged as a growing point of contention in Senate deliberations over who should serve on the SEC. At a Senate Banking Committee hearing this week to consider two potential commissioners nominated by President Barack […]
Posted inWorking in America
Legislative Primary May Help Tighten Democrats’ Supermajority in Illinois
Illinois Democrats’ ability to thwart Republican Governor Bruce Rauner’s right-wing, union-busting agenda has just been enhanced by the defeat of a state representative who regularly broke party ranks on key union votes. Incumbent state representative Ken Dunkin, a Democrat whose defections on key votes often thwarted the party’s slim supermajority in the house, lost by […]
Posted inEconomic Policy
Clinton Wins Illinois, but Chicago Feels the Bern
Hillary Clinton carried Illinois, swept through three other states, and kept Bernie Sanders at bay in a too-close-to-call race in Missouri. But Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who endorsed Clinton, cannot revel in the presumptive Democratic nominee’s home state victory anytime soon. Instead, he will face questions about the blowout defeat of the incumbent Cook County […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Sanders’s Chances in November: A Bloomberg Addendum
An update to “Why Bernie May Have a Better Shot at Winning Than Hillary“ In the past, I’ve written that if Bernie Sanders were the Democratic nominee, Michael Bloomberg would enter the race and thereby win enough electoral votes to throw the election into the House, which, assuming it’s still under Republican control, would elevate […]
Posted inEconomic Policy
Senate Bill Targets Corporations Moving Overseas to Dodge Taxes
Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, has introduced a new bill that would force deserting corporations to pay taxes before they head overseas-The Pay What You Owe Before You Go Act of 2016. U.S. multinational corporations have been evading paying U.S. taxes by renouncing their corporate citizenship and formally becoming formal foreign corporations (though […]
