“Any investor who can get shares of the Facebook IPO should purchase as many shares as possible.” That was Jim Cramer’s tout on his CNBC Mad Money program, which promises viewers “an in-depth look at Wall Street, stock, and the market.” It is Cramer’s good fortune that he is not legally responsible for the bullshit he […]

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…of incomes that Americans had long taken for granted as a happy fact of modern life was reversing itself.” Nearly 30 years after this trend began, income inequality in America was as large as at any point since the Great Crash of 1929, with the wealthiest 1 percent controlling nearly a quarter of the country’s […]

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There has been little media coverage of the tension between the Occupy Wall Street movement and the progressive institutions—such as MoveOn.org, the AFL-CIO, the United Auto Workers, SEIU, and Rebuild the Dream—that are working together as 99% Spring. Adbusters, the Vancouver-based anti-corporate collective that incited the September 2011 Occupy protest, warns that the movement is being […]

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First, an attempt to define the odd bubble in which CPAC exists. I am sitting in the press gallery listening to Iowa Congressman Steve King tell a crowd of 3,500 that he orders his interns to replace the energy-efficient light bulbs in his Capitol office with “black-market Edison light bulbs.” “The janitors, Nancy’s [Pelosi] Stasi […]

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As Lawrence Lessig explains in Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress — and a Plan to Stop It (TWELVE, 383 pp., $26.99), the disastrous nibble for American democracy was the change in the relationship between money and power. It may not have been a fall from Eden, but it was a headlong descent from the […]

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