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In the last several years we have all been fleeced, looted, robbed, swindled, thieved, tricked, cheated, scammed, exploited, ponzied, stung, conned, extorted, ripped off and bankrupted by the banks and other big financial companies. Finally the Congress is working on...

Sen. Olympia Snowe, before breaking party ranks to join all Democrats on the Senate Finance in support of health care reform, said the most accurate thing of the day: "This will not be the final bill." Knowing that fact, one wonders why Snowe wanted to wait for a more...

The renomination of Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve should not be rubber-stamped by the Senate until Bernanke and the Fed are more transparent and accountable to the public, says a growing coalition of activists roused by Reps. Alan Grayson and Ron...

As the House Financial Services Committee begins markup on Wednesday of key financial reform legislation, the stakes are clear. Without strong regulation of the banks and the shadow banking system, large banks will feel free to gamble with the assumption that...

New public opinion research by the Economic Policy Institute contains reassuring findings. The American people are smarter than they sometimes look on TV. The survey of 802 registered voters in September 2009, revealed a clear sense of who’s winning and who’s losing...

Just as the Senate Finance Committee is about to pass a health care bill without a public option, the insurance lobby's last-minute hissy fit exposed the weakness of its argument against a public option. America’s Health Insurance Plans, the main insurance lobby...

In closely knit communities, people care about each other and help each other, too. But healthy “social fabrics,” as the expression goes, can tear. Inequality can tear them. The wider the income gaps between us, the less we share in common, the less we...

Last week, I struck a hopeful note after GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham expressed interest in a climate bill compromise that included a carbon cap in exchange for support for some nuclear power and coastal drilling. But my expectations it would really happen remained low....

I'm reading a a review of"€œCapitalism: A Love Story" at naked capitalism, and came across this, "I grew up in small towns dominated by manufacturing plants, and I remember that they were prosperous, optimistic, and stable. People who had good jobs at the local mill...