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
Obama, rhetorical fisticuffs, and the new “jobs surge”
Flickr/phil dokas Below is a new, short piece of mine—an introduction, to be precise, to Steve Fraser’s most recent piece for TomDispatch.com, “The New Deal in Reverse: How the Obama Administration Ended Up Where Franklin Roosevelt Began.” Fraser’s piece compares the first years of Obama and FDR, and unlike any other historian, he describes how the first 365 days of these two historic presidents (albeit for different reasons) resemble mirror images of... Read More
The Illusion of Recovery in Subprime America
That’s the gist of my new piece published today at TomDispatch.com. While there’s plenty of projections and guesses on how long it’ll taking the housing industry to recover, far fewer are the firsthand, boots-on-the-ground reports on how struggling homeowners are faring right now with explosive interest rates, underwater mortgages, and uncooperative servicers or lenders. Today’s piece, I hope, will offer that perspective, a story in three acts set in the... Read More
OBAMA vs. THE WASHINGTON INFLUENCE MACHINE
That’s the title of my new piece published at TomDispatch.com, a dive into the onslaught by lobbyists and their special interest clients to derail the Obama administration’s legislative agenda. The piece looks at the vast amount of money being spent on lobbying, the growing numbers of lobbyists working on K Street and Capitol Hill (six health-care lobbyists for every one member of Congress), and the close ties between lawmakers and these lobbyists (see: Max Baucus). The... Read More
The Greatest Swindle Ever Sold
That’s the title of my latest TomDispatch piece. It’s about the U.S. government’s financial bailout, and how that bailout rips off taxpayers by the billions. Here’s a link to the piece. There’s an excerpt from the piece below. Check it out! And while you’re at it, subscribe to TomDispatch’s e-mail alerts too. How can you beat three long-form pieces a week from the likes of Mike Davis, Noam Chomsky, Rebecca Solnit, and much, much more? *** The... Read More
American dream deferred: The educational crisis sweeping across the U.S.
Photo courtesy of flickr user acidcookie. I’ve got a new piece published at TomDispatch.com today about the crisis of college affordability sweeping throughout higher education, from community colleges to elite, four-year public and private colleges and universities. It’s a crisis that’s been long coming. The Pell Grant, created in 1972, was the last real effort to democratize access to higher education, and since then colleges and universities... Read More
