(Source: Polis) I’ve long been bothered by activists’ recent habit of focusing on debt both as a political target and analytical center. This came to the fore during the Occupy moment, and continues today in, well, should we call it the post-Occupy era? Yes, debt is a problem, no doubt about it. Given the age […]

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(Richard Trumka | Source: Creative Commons) Sitting in the office of the AFL-CIO president, Richard Trumka, one sees books on labor history, economics, corporate crimes and proposals for change piled up everywhere. Perhaps that helps explain why Mr. Trumka, a former coal miner who became a lawyer, presented his besieged organization’s quadrennial convention in Los […]

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(Source: Coalition of the Academic Workplace) Here’s the biggest obstacle to organizing adjunct professors who comprise 75 percent of college faculty, with part-timers working for $2,700 per course on average. Fear. Most assume adjuncts fear retribution. That worry is not unfounded. But many adjuncts feel paralyzed by a deeper, unspoken fear, one primarily internal and […]

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(Daniel Gallagher | Source: Bloomberg) Watching grown men fulminate in public can be an unnerving experience. Michael Piwowar and Daniel Gallagher—two distinctly CEO-friendly members of the five-person federal Securities and Exchange Commission—did plenty of fulminating last week. This article was originally published in Inequality.org and appears here by way of special arrangement. Piwowar and Gallagher […]

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(Source: Creative Commons) To reduce carbon emissions, we must tax fossil fuels—but, say the pundits, we can’t do so because the tax would be regressive, clobbering the poor. In general, sales taxes are indeed regressive; moreover, as I recently argued, sales taxes are partly “passed back” onto suppliers, hitting small businesses hardest. This article was […]

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