by Leo Gerard | Jan 8, 2013 | Blog
Last week, as Congress opened its new session, two regular Joes - Sen. Manchin of West Virginia and Vice President Biden of Delaware - gave a hand to Sen. Mark Kirk, a Republican from Illinois, who'd suffered a stroke a year earlier. Joe and Joe assisted Sen. Kirk in...
by Richard Eskow | Jan 8, 2013 | Blog
It must've been like old home week when the old gang of Wall Street and Washington insiders finalized a couple more cushy settlements last week. Everybody knew the drill: Ignore the potential criminal charges and agree on settlement figures they think the public will...
by Sam Pizzigati | Jan 7, 2013 | Blog
The Bush years gave America's rich new and unprecedented preferential treatment at tax time. The fiscal cliff deal enacted in the early moments of 2013 leaves that preferential treatment in place. Who won the New Year’s eve standoff over the “fiscal cliff”? In one...
by Digby | Jan 7, 2013 | Blog
Why Austerity May Be Worse Than We Thought--And Hard To Predict Taking an axe to a governmental budget can cut off growth in a most troubling way. Indeed, austerity has proved worse for a country than most economists suspected. That is, in essence, what a new IMF...
by Dave Johnson | Jan 7, 2013 | Blog
Senate Republicans have been using filibusters to block ... everything. You might not even know it, because the filibuster is no longer the talk-all-night event that most people expect. Democrats are trying to fix this by restoring the old "talk all night" rules. They...
by Richard Eskow | Jan 6, 2013 | Blog
Three public figures associated with the movement to cut government spending - marketed in this country as "deficit reduction" - appeared in the news this week. It was like a modern-day morality play, those church-sponsored medieval performances meant to dramatize the...