Economy

It's not personal, it's business. The Supreme Court recently ruled 5-4 that George Bush will be President corporations can spend unlimited amounts to support or oppose candidates. Corporations! Since there are no restrictions on the citizenship of the owners of...

To be thrown out of work is a crushing blow. Homes are lost. Families split. Children are terrified. Hopes are dashed. Today, nearly one in five American workers is without a job or scraping by on whatever part-time, short-term work there is. We need a real jobs bill...

"Our government," wrote Justice Lewis Brandeis, "is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example." And also by what its leaders frame as important. No one has greater ability to teach than the president with what...

The White House today announced its economic initiatives for middle class families, described as a preview of the State of the Union Address. They’re all good ideas and I hope every one of them passes. But something is missing. Mostly, the new initiatives don’t create...

Okay, there was an election in Massachusetts yesterday but I’m not writing about it. I’m writing about something nobody noticed during the election. Infrastructure. Lots of people drove to the polls. Other people traveled by train, walked on sidewalks, or communicated...

On top of last week's bad news on unemployment, with 85,000 more jobs lost in December, today's initial claims for unemployment insurance benefits report was 444,000, an increase of 11,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 433,000 The "rule of thumb"...

I generally try to avoid watching political talk shows on TV because the lack of journalism is, much more often than not, infuriating. That wasn't exactly the case the other night on Hardball, however. During a segment with Todd Harris, a Republican strategist, and...

Who deserves to sit on this year's list of our most avaricious? We could pick ten eminently deserving greedy straight from any big bank on Wall Street. But why spoil all the fun? Has picking a year’s greediest “top ten” ever been easier? We don't...

The last time I made a trip to Home Depot was for a space heater for my bedroom, and I did what I suspect many people are doing on purchases like this: In addition to comparing the price tags, looking for the "Energy Star" label and asking whether this heater is any...