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

US Legislators Profiting from War? Say it ain’t so, Joe

Seems it’s not just the executive branch and their friends that have “invested” in this war. From IPS comes a news article about the money invested by our legislators. Members of Congress invested nearly 196 million dollars of their own money in companies that receive hundreds of millions of dollars a day from Pentagon contracts […]

About funding education

From Rdan’s Sallie Mae post I got the urge to hunt because vtcodger mentioned greed. Greed? Yes, I have recently learned that one person who works to manage the endowment fund for Harvard got a bonus for last year performance that was less than the year before of $2M. Imagine that! The endowment is so […]

Reality going to the Dogs

This one is for those concerned about how we spend our tax dollars. It is a robotics project funded by the pentagon performed by Boston Dynamics called the BigDog. I’m not going to comment because I can think of many positives as in the moon shot program and transitors and I can think of many […]

I’m converting dollars. (In order to save the rustbelt)

With all the discussion about our plight money wise I thought it would be interesting to see just how distorted our view can become depending on what factor we choose as a comparison. Also, I find this site fun. So, just how do we compare today to the fondly remembered yesterday? I am very grateful […]

Colbert Report explains the unemployment rate

On Monday’s 3/17/08 episode Mr. Stephen Colberts to the opportunity in his “The Word” segment to explain the need for confidence in the economy, the declining unemployment rate and the loss of 63,00 jobs. Titled: The Audacity of Hopelessness The blog would not let me embed the video.

Labor’s fighting back

Seems Colorado wants to change to a “right to work” state. They have been trying for at least a decade. Funny phrasing. I always thought I had a right to work. You know… pursuit of happyness, freedom and all. What does it mean for me if I have no right to work? Would I need […]

Ain’t been no progressiveness since 1980

In this post, Bruno commented and posted this link to reference this statement: In 2005, the top 1 percent of tax returns paid 39.4 percent of all federal individual income taxes and earned 21.2 percent of adjusted gross income, both of which are significantly higher than 2004 when the top 1 percent earned 19 percent […]

How are we going to fix a money from money economy?

Just sounding the broken record: Money from money. I have posted about the share of our money coming from licensing agreements. I’ve posted Bogle’s opinion that we have $560 billion/yr loss because we focus to much on the finance end of making money. I’ve shown that there has not been enough money in the hands […]

Job openings for the progressive minded

I was cruising around The Center for American Progress. They have a nice report looking at credit card use rise and a rise in writing off the bad ones. Any way, I like to click on the Job Opportunities at these sites just to see. Sometimes I think it might be fun to work with […]

Free trade, Republican’s no like (along with others)

From a poll by the WSJ/NBC reported in October, 2007 comes: While 60% of respondents said they want the next president and Congress to continue cutting taxes, 32% said it’s time for some tax increases on the wealthiest Americans to reduce the budget deficit and pay for health care.Can you imagine? They have started to […]