There are basically only four ways to accumulate a billion dollars – and none of them is a product of so-called free market capitalism. Billionaires themselves aren’t the problem. The real failure is in how our economy is organized.
Across America, the fastest-growing category of new jobs is gig work—contract, part-time, temp, self-employed and freelance. Estimates vary but it's safe to say almost a quarter of American workers are now gig workers. The jobs problem today isn't just stagnant wages. It's also uncertain incomes. A downturn in demand, change...
Top executives see AI as their path to windfall profits and personal enrichment by replacing whole swaths of their workforce with an automated army of cheap machines that don’t demand raises, take time off, or form unions.
The powerhouses of Wall Street have tunneled directly into the cloistered backrooms of Washington deal making, extracting trillions of dollars worth of government bailouts, special tax breaks and regulatory favors every year. Yet, in a stupefying act of hypocrisy, they have also been the major force pushing policymakers to embrace...
To the conservative mind, the specter of socialism conjures up a society in which no one is held accountable, and no one has to work for what they receive. Yet, that’s exactly the society Trump and the Republicans are promoting for the rich. Meanwhile, most Americans are subject to an...
“The Government and Mayor tried to impose a secretly negotiated deal with Amazon, that wasn’t released to the public or public officials, and it led to resistance. That should be the lesson here. If you want to make good public policy, you have to include the public.”
The Trump-critical coverage of The Washington Post, and Bezos’s counterattack on The Enquirer, shouldn’t buy Bezos a “Get Out of Jail Free Card” for the unjust ways he accumulates his dynastic wealth.
Are we stuck in this deadly spiral toward ever greater concentration of economic power? No, we can do better. We know we can because some of us already are. Americans in all walks of life are creating companies with business models driven by social purpose, not just their own pocketbook...
The real source of the rise of repressive authoritarianism, nativism, and xenophobia is a pervasive sense that elites are rigging the world economy for themselves. And, guess what? They are.
If the stress of making ends meet and economic inequality were the distinguishing causal forces of the Yellow Vest movement in France, shouldn’t Americans have been the first to hit the streets? What’s to explain the relative quiescence of Americans confronting more extreme violations of basic fairness than their French...