Missing from Occupy Wall Street: Barack Obama
Flickr/_PaulS_ This story originally appeared at MotherJones.com. At Zuccotti Park, the shoebox-shaped spit of land in lower Manhattan that for three weeks Occupy Wall Street has called home, there are signs everywhere—strewn on the ground, taped to trees, thrusted skyward, hand-painted on the bulging belly of a pregnant mom. Their messages run the gamut: “We Are the 99%,” “Jesus Is With The 99%,” “Get Wall St. Off Welfare,” “Corporations... Read More
The Right-Wing Network Behind the War on Unions
From New Hampshire to Alaska, Republican lawmakers are waging war on organized labor. They’re pushing bills to curb, if not eliminate, collective bargaining for public workers; make it harder for unions to collect member dues; and, in some states, allow workers to opt out of joining unions entirely but still enjoy union-won benefits. All told, it’s one of the largest assaults on American unions in recent history. Behind the onslaught is a well-funded network of conservative... Read More
Inside Big Labor’s Epic Battle in Wisconsin
Thousands of protesters jam inside the rotunda of the Wisconsin state capitol. Originally published at MotherJones.com. They piled off of buses and out of cars, filling the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, and surrounding the towering Capitol. Thousands crowded inside the building’s beautiful rotunda, their cheers echoing throughout the domed structure. An estimated 100,000 people had descended on frigid Madison to protest Republican Governor Scott Walker’s “budget... Read More
Fannie and Freddie’s Foreclosure Barons
My latest investigative piece at MotherJones.com. A few days after this story came, the Florida Attorney General’s Economic Crime division opened an investigation to the David Stern law firm. Read more about that here. *** LATE ONE NIGHT IN February 2009, Ariane Ice sat poring over records on the website of Florida’s Palm Beach County. She’d been at it for weeks, forsaking sleep to sift through thousands of legal documents. She and her husband, Tom, an attorney,... Read More
Why Won’t the GOP Criticize BP?
Flickr/talkradionews First published at MotherJones.com. Elected Democrats haven’t been shy about slamming BP for the horrific oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Last month, Senate majority leader Harry Reid emotionally declared on the Senate floor that the oil company’s “greed led to 11 horrific and unnecessary deaths. It has harmed an enormous tourism industry, threatened business at countless fisheries and disrupted life for many along the Gulf Coast. As the... Read More
We’re All Bernie Madoff: Welcome to the Ponzi Nation
This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website. Every great American boom and bust makes and breaks its share of crooks. The past decade—call it the Ponzi Era—has been no different, except for the gargantuan scale of white-collar crime. A vast wave of financial fraud swelled in the first years of the new century. Then, in 2008, with the subprime mortgage collapse, it crashed on the shore as a full-scale global economic meltdown. As that wave receded, it left hundreds... Read More
Chris Dodd’s Race to the Bottom
Flickr/David Berkowitz Cross-posted from Mother Jones.com In just six months, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), the stately front man of the Senate’s campaign to crack down on Wall Street, has transformed from financial-reform avenger, scourge of the Federal Reserve, and ally of the average consumer to a GOP pushover. Last fall, the veteran Senator and chairman of the banking committee opened financial reform talks as if shot out of a cannon: He rallied around an independent consumer-protection... Read More
Lawyers, Guns, and Money: How Banks Snooze and Arms Dealers Profit
CROSS-POSTED FROM MOTHERJONES.COM Among Bank of America’s 50 million customers, Pierre Falcone was far from ordinary. An infamous global arms dealer who unlawfully sold weapons to Angola for its civil war and an international fugitive, Falcone was convicted of tax fraud and illegal arms dealing in 2007 and 2009 and is currently serving six years behind bars. Yet for nearly two decades, Falcone and his relatives freely used 29 different bank accounts to funnel at least $60 million... Read More
A Crash Course on the Financial Meltdown — Pecora Part II Begins
Cross-posted from MotherJones.com. The 10 members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the modern heir to the famous Pecora Commission convened in the wake of Wall Street’s 1929 crash, kicked off a marathon set of hearings on Wednesday and Thursday by grilling some of Wall Street’s most powerful executives, the regulators supposedly tasked with reining them in, and outside experts who watched the collapse. What they heard amounted to something of a crash course... Read More
Has Teach for America Solved the Teacher Conundrum?
Cross-posted with MotherJones.com The Atlantic has a story in its January/February issue promisingly titled “What Makes a Great Teacher?” What indeed? As someone who follows education reform closely and occasionally writes about it, I clicked through to the article, eager to see what the writer, Amanda Ripley, had to say on one of the most puzzling, beguiling, confounding questions in all of education. What I found was far from inspiring or groundbreaking, and to be... Read More
