by Bill Scher | Mar 30, 2016 | Blog
It may be that Hillary Clinton is not as progressive as Bernie Sanders. And it may be that Donald Trump holds some positions, such as opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that hold sway with economic populist. But when it comes to the climate, there's no...
by Dave Johnson | Mar 30, 2016 | Blog, Jobs and Growth
"We knew the tech industry was booming, but we weren't seeing that translate into an abundance of jobs for our communities - until we looked at the low-wage jobs in contracting industries. Those are growing fast, just like tech profits are. It's no wonder that one in...
by People's Action | Mar 30, 2016 | Breakfast
Sanders, Clinton Criss-Cross Wisconsin Bernie Sanders looks to turn out Madison to win WIsconsin. Politico: "When Bernie Sanders takes the stage at a town hall in Madison on Wednesday, it’ll seem like a homecoming of sorts ... there are few places more familiar with...
by Dave Johnson | Mar 30, 2016 | Blog, Democracy
The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has reversed what was the expected outcome of one of the most important cases facing the Supreme Court, demonstrating the importance of who is and is not on the court. The case, Friedrichs vs. California Teachers...
by Dean Baker | Mar 29, 2016 | Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership
Lately the media have been going wild mocking Donald Trump’s plans to put 45 percent tariffs on imports from China. They are partly right. It’s not clever to indiscriminately impose large tariffs on major trading partners in violation of existing trade agreements. On...
by People's Action | Mar 29, 2016 | Breakfast
Burning Issues: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Daniel Kalik, the chief of staff at J Street, a progressive Jewish “pro-peace” organization, discusses which 2016 presidential candidate is best positioned to help Israel and the Palestinians reach a peace agreement, in...
by Burning Issues Video | Mar 29, 2016 | Blog, Burning Issues, Defense/Foreign Policy
[fve]https://youtu.be/RwMejx5-ftY[/fve] Daniel Kalik, the chief of staff at J Street, a progressive Jewish "pro-peace" organization, discusses which 2016 presidential candidate is best positioned to help Israel and the Palestinians reach a peace agreement. J Street...
by Richard Eskow | Mar 29, 2016 | Blog, Financial Reform
“I've said if the big banks don't play by the rules, I will break them up.” Hillary Clinton Our nation’s largest and most powerful banks have repeatedly engaged in widespread fraud, causing both individual suffering and a recession that millions of Americans are still...
by Dave Johnson | Mar 28, 2016 | Blog, Trade
On Monday, yet another "elite" pundit tells us that moving our jobs and factories and manufacturing ecosystem out of the country is good for us. This time it is Neil Irwin writing at the New York Times' Upshot, "The Trade Deficit Isn’t a Scorecard, and Cutting It...
by Bill Scher | Mar 28, 2016 | Blog, Jobs and Growth
Tenacity and flexibility is helping California workers get a raise. Despite labor activists having won an hourly minimum wage increase to $10 in the state three years ago, and despite the reluctance for another raise from Gov. Jerry Brown, a compromise between the...
by People's Action | Mar 28, 2016 | Breakfast
Burning Issues: Understanding the Crisis in Syria Jim Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute, explains the “conflict within a conflict within a conflict” in Syria in this segment of the Burning Issues video series. Weekend at Bernie's Brings Momentum...
by Robert Borosage | Mar 28, 2016 | Blog, Election 2016, Progressive Vision
Bernie Sanders routed Hillary Clinton in three Western states on Saturday. He isn’t just winning; he’s winning with stunning percentages: Alaska 82-18; Hawaii 70-30; Washington 73-27. He’s taken five of six in the West, and chipped away Clinton’s lead in pledged...
by Burning Issues Video | Mar 28, 2016 | Burning Issues, Defense/Foreign Policy
[fve]https://youtu.be/bXDmZ7k2Dgo[/fve] Jim Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute, explains the "conflict within a conflict within a conflict" in Syria in this segment of the Burning Issues series. Zogby, who also does public opinion polling in the...
by Lori Wallach | Mar 25, 2016 | Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership
The high-profile presidential primary revolt against decades of damaging American trade policy finally has forced the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) into mainstream media coverage. The usual free-trade-agreement cheerleading squad of chronic-job-offshoring...
by Dave Johnson | Mar 25, 2016 | Blog, Trade
Bernie Sanders' and Donald Trump's campaign criticisms of our country's disastrous trade policies are resonating with voters. In response there has been a flurry - a blizzard - of op-eds from noted celebrity, "establishment" pundits, explaining that moving millions of...
by Terrance Heath | Mar 25, 2016 | Blog, Conservatism
The dust had not yet settled, the smoke had not yet cleared, and the body count had not yet begun before right-wingers used the terrorist attacks in Brussels to spout their usual brand of bigotry. Normally, when there’s a mass shooting or an act of right-wing...
by People's Action | Mar 25, 2016 | Breakfast
Burning Issues: Why Honduras Matters In The 2016 Campaign Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research discusses the candidate's the assassination of a Honduras environmental activist and what it says about the Democratic candidates' foreign policy, in...
by Burning Issues Video | Mar 25, 2016 | Burning Issues, Defense/Foreign Policy, Democracy
[fve]https://youtu.be/d4FKwJluPTE[/fve] Berta Cáceres was an indigenous and environmental activist in Honduras who was the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize winner for her success in blocking the Agua Zarca dam project, which would have decimated the communities and...
by Jeff Bryant | Mar 25, 2016 | Blog, Education
After years of electing people who declare that “government is the problem” and who avow to “drown it in a bathtub,” the results are apparent that, yeah, government might not work so well when you have people who hate it in charge. New reports reveal that years of...
by Bill Scher | Mar 24, 2016 | Blog, Conservatism, Election 2016
Karl Rove is making sense. In his Wall Street Journal column, Rove makes the mathematically accurate point that Donald Trump has no claim to the Republican nomination if he goes to the convention with only a plurality of delegates and not a majority. A majority, The...
by Robert Reich | Mar 24, 2016 | Blog, Conservatism, Economy, This Is The GOP
[fve]https://youtu.be/5KiXBqCS_wg[/fve] The tax cuts for the rich proposed by the two leading Republican candidates for the presidency – Donald Trump and Ted Cruz – are larger, as a proportion of the government budget and the total economy, than any tax cuts ever...
by People's Action | Mar 24, 2016 | Breakfast
Burning Issues: Will More Nuclear Weapons Make Us Safer? Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, discusses the drawbacks of investing in our nuclear arsenal in the latest video installment of Burning Issues. Click here for the full Burning Issues series....
by Dave Johnson | Mar 24, 2016 | Blog, Economy, People's Budget
You've heard people ask, "How come they can come up with a couple trillion dollars to invade Iraq, or hundreds of billions for corporate tax cuts, but say we're broke when we need to fix our infrastructure so pipes don't contaminate children with lead poisoning?" The...
by Burning Issues Video | Mar 23, 2016 | Blog, Burning Issues, Defense/Foreign Policy
[fve]https://youtu.be/B-UXE6OuA7E[/fve] A ghost of the Cold War – the nuclear arms race – could come back to haunt us in a very big way if it is not brought out of the shadows in this presidential election, according to Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares...
by Bill Moyers | Mar 23, 2016 | Blog
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship There are two Democrats whose resignation from office right now would do their party and country a service. Their disappearance might also help Hillary Clinton convince skeptical Democrats that her nomination, if it happens, is about...
by Bill Scher | Mar 23, 2016 | Blog, Election 2016
Great America PAC just dropped $1 million on a TV ad touting Donald Trump as a "unifier." What's important is not the disingenuousness of the message, but the source. It's a super PAC ad. And Donald Trump claims to disavow all super PACs. In October he said: "I am...
by Diane Archer | Mar 23, 2016 | Health, Retirement Security
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently sanctioned Cigna for threatening the health and safety of its members in Medicare Advantage plans. But, notwithstanding Cigna’s sanction and “its longstanding history of noncompliance with CMS requirements,” a...
by People's Action | Mar 23, 2016 | Breakfast
Burning Issues: Is Our Military Big Enough? Miriam Pemberton of Institute for Policy Studies challenges Republican claims of an underfunded military in the latest video installment of Burning Issues. Click here for the entire Burning Issues video series with expert...
by Robert Borosage | Mar 23, 2016 | Blog, Election 2016, Progressive Vision
Bernie Sanders is ignored by the media, dismissed by the pundits and the president, but he keeps on rising. Donald Trump continues to outrage, generating well-deserved condemnation in the media, opposition of panicked Republican poobahs and a barrage of negative ads...
by Isaiah J. Poole | Mar 23, 2016 | Blog, Economy, People's Budget
[fve]https://vimeo.com/160077235[/fve]Jasmine Tucker, senior research analyst at the National Priorities Project, discusses the negative impact the House Republican budget would have if it became law. The House Republican budget proposal for fiscal 2017 faces an...
by Terrance Heath | Mar 22, 2016 | Blog, Conservatism, This Is The GOP
Republicans love to complain about people who get money from the government and refuse to work. That is, unless they’re doing so, by refusing to consider the president’s Supreme Court Nominee. Tell U.S. senators to do their jobs, and give President Obama’s Supreme...
by Dave Johnson | Mar 22, 2016 | Blog, Economy, Election 2016, Progressive Vision
Steven Pearlstein, in the ominously titled "What Bernie Sanders would do to America" at The Washington Post, warns that asking our government to do things like raising the minimum wage to $15, extending public education by four years, providing Medicare-for-All and...
by Leo Gerard | Mar 22, 2016 | Blog, Conservatism, Democracy, This Is The GOP
Senate Republicans are flipping off the President of the United States by refusing to conduct a confirmation hearing for his nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. By doing this, the majority party in the Senate is saying it doesn’t acknowledge that Barack Obama is the...
by People's Action | Mar 22, 2016 | Breakfast
Contests in AZ, UT and ID Today Clinton and Sanders jockey for position on immigration in Arizona. NYT: "Hillary Clinton sharply denounced Sheriff Joe Arpaio, saying the Maricopa County sheriff, who became the face of hard-line anti-immigration policies because of his...
by Thomas Palley | Mar 21, 2016 | Election 2016, Progressive Vision
The Democratic Party establishment has recently found itself discomforted by Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign to return the party to its modern roots of New Deal social democracy. The establishment’s response has included a complex coupling of elite media and elite...
by Terrance Heath | Mar 21, 2016 | Blog, Conservatism, This Is The GOP
Fifty-two years after Lester Maddox famously chased African-Americans out of his restaurant with an ax handle, the phrase “We don’t serve your kind here” may be heard once again in Georgia. On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled Georgia General Assembly...
by Isaiah J. Poole | Mar 21, 2016 | Democracy
Cable news viewers on Sunday morning got an opportunity to meet for perhaps the first time the woman who was propelled by grassroots people power in line to become Chicago's next state's attorney. She is Kim Foxx, and if she wins in the general election for Cook...
by Bill Scher | Mar 21, 2016 | Blog, Climate
We in America do a poor job chronicling what works and building on success. So kudos to Mother Jones and its reporter Gabriel Kahn for covering how California and its governor Jerry Brown have created a template for cutting carbon emissions, creating green jobs and...
by People's Action | Mar 21, 2016 | Breakfast
Arizona, Utah and Idaho Vote Tomorrow Dems joust in AZ. USA Today: "[Bill Clinton] appeared at an afternoon rally at Central High School in Phoenix after he was scheduled to appear at a Tucson event with former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords ... [Sanders] invested...
by Burning Issues Video | Mar 21, 2016 | Burning Issues, Defense/Foreign Policy, Election 2016
[fve]https://youtu.be/LkIOxvlRS5c[/fve] What should voters make of claims from Republican presidential candidates and lawmakers that our military is weak and underfunded? According to Miriam Pemberton, a research fellow and defense expert at the Institute for Policy...
