Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Trying to Make Progress on Redefining ‘Progressive.’ And ‘Establishment.’

A progressive is someone who makes progress. That’s what I intend to do. — Hillary Clinton, during last night’s debate. Clinton also thinks a “conservative” is someone who conserves. Which, she says, also is what she intends to do. First, though, she intends to redefine the entire Oxford English Dictionary.  Progressive, and presumably then, conservative don’t […]

Clinton Says Margaret Thatcher Wasn’t Part of Britain’s Establishment Because She Was a Woman

Okay, what she actually said is that she can’t be part of the establishment, because she is a woman.  Because by definition, women aren’t part of the establishment. Shucks! No one told all those corporate folks who paid her $225,000 to hear her reminisce to them about how stressful it was to advise President Obama on whether he should approve the raid on […]

No, Sanders is not trying to boot moderates out of the Democratic Party and erect a progressives-purity test. He just objects to Clinton’s misrepresenting herself as a progressive Democrat when she is, by her own fairly recent and proud description, a moderate Democrat.

I’ve been a fan of New Republic senior editor Brian Beutler dating back to his days as a Salon writer, but in a piece today called “Bernie Sanders Will Be Unelectable If He Keeps This Up” he misinterprets the essence of Sanders’s current criticism of Clinton as a fair-weather progressive in a way that I […]

New OECD tax agreement improves transparency — but the US doesn’t sign and the US press won’t tell you UPDATED

Last week 31 countries signed a new Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) agreement providing for country-by-country corporate information reporting and the automatic exchange of tax info between countries under the Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement (MCAA). Country-by-country reporting, the brainchild of noted tax reformer Richard Murphy,* is a principle that makes it possible to […]