To put the situation in sound bite language we spend twice as many healthcare dollars as almost all of our competitor nations and get developing country results. That Mr. Faso is your challenge. —>> read more –>>

President Reagan was not the originator of this central trope of free-market (neo-liberal) politics, but he famously said in his first Inaugural Address in 1981, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” President Clinton, a Democrat, continued this theme during his terms culminating the the —>> read more –>>

There is much ongoing discussion about steps needed to turn the enormous one day action of the global Women’s March in to a sustained movement to achieve better outcomes for the vast majority of Americans. To focus on just one strategic element, the movement needs to move beyond identity politics —>> read more –>>

Park Avenue puts faces to many of the wealthy and the corporations. Do not for a moment think that if we could just rid ourselves of these avaricious individuals that our problems would be solved. —>> read more –>>

The values of capitalism, especially as expressed through free market (neoliberal) ideology, have come to dominate how we organize our lives. Silicon Valley and the tech sector is busy celebrating the “gig” economy. Companies have simply stopped hiring employees and now conduct much of their work using “temps”, “1099ers”, part-time —>> read more –>>

In the current moment much of the concern about privacy online and otherwise has been overwhelmed by Trump, inequality, racism and other matters. The NSA and other spies, government and corporate, are not taking a vacation.  I wrote earlier about this in  “The Uses of Metadata – an experiment you can —>> read more –>>

A friend asked the following question of me on Facebook the other day: What’s wrong with the word LIBERAL …. This word … progressives … is only a diluted weak solution of the real thing …. the L word has become like the N word … it can’t be mouthed —>> read more –>>

The Trump election debacle demonstrates the bankruptcy of the current leadership of the Democratic Party. Faced with a foe who has engaged in serial bankruptcy as a business strategy, is a notorious know-nothing bully with a very sensitive ego, and is best known as the red-faced guy on reality TV —>> read more –>>

– The Morning After – The election of Trump and the continued Republican control of both Congress and Senate guarantee that the rich will continue to get richer at the expense of the shrinking middle class and further aggravate conditions for the poor. Trickle down economics and tax subsidies will flow —>> read more –>>

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: the US standard of living since the Civil War by Robert J. Gordon ((Princeton U. Press. 2016)) is a weighty book in every regard. At 762 pages it is a heavy lift – not beach reading or even bed-time either. But I found —>> read more –>>

Bernie Sanders is the only candidate not in the pocket of the rich and corporations. To even begin to think about how to work our way out of our many problems and to capitalize on the opportunities, we need to retrieve our politics from the tsunami of money that now controls it. Bernie Sanders is a step in that direction. —>> read more –>>

Defense Dept. Budget (does not include CIA, NSA, and other departments like DEA that conduct international operations) Military Bases and Personnel (all data from DOD Base Structure Report – 2015) Military Bases Department of Defense Personnel Army – 540,330 Navy – 321,599 Marines – 187,891 Air Force – 312,453 SubTotal —>> read more –>>

The trail of money around Hillary and Bill Clinton and their foundation continues to attract lots of comment and not a few efforts to prove that money changed hands in return for specific acts by Hilary as Secretary of State. Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and —>> read more –>>

this transformation in attitudes towards homosexuality should be studied so that we can understand how and why it took place. Perhaps we can learn some lessons that will enable us to attack some of the other destructive hatreds shared so broadly by human beings. —>> read more –>>

Since the beginning of the 2008 Great Recession we have hoped that the government would return to applying some real rational restraints on the financial system. To be honest, with both political parties deep in the pocket of the industry, this is probably merely wishful thinking. —>> read more –>>

The 1/2% of the Population That Run Our Politics Recently I came on a Ted Talk by Lawrence Lessig, “We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim” filmed in February 2013 (18:19 minutes). This typically brief TED talk provides a compelling argument for why the dominance of big money in —>> read more –>>

We are within days of the anniversary of the first revelations from Edward Snowden’s archive of NSA documents. The drum beat of new stories emerging from this trove continues even to this moment. ((NSA Collecting Millions of Faces from Web Images http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/nsa-collecting-millions-of-faces-from-web-images.html accessed 06012014)) So, Glenn Greenwald’s book, No Place To —>> read more –>>

Recently I stopped at the US Marine Corp War Memorial in Washington DC. Walking around the base with its lengthy list of Marine engagements since 1775, now a double row on several sides, I thought, “How many of these can faithfully be considered to be in defence of the homeland? —>> read more –>>

We should demand that our financial markets serve their findamental purposes – connect investors with those who can deploy those resources to create new products and services and enable the flow of these goods and services. To call holding financial insturments whether stocks, bonds, or other assets for mere seconds investments is to beggar the mind. —>> read more –>>

The government and the press continue to refer to the FISA Court as a judicial review, a third party oversight of the government’s intrusions on our privacy. This misuse of words and concepts needs correction. —>> read more –>>

With the recent revelations of the NSA vacuum cleaner collecting metadata about every aspect of our lives ((We are forced to assume that they are collecting everything, emails, telephone calls, financial transactions, text messages, anything digital which is virtually every aspect of life unless you took to the woods before —>> read more –>>

An article in the NY TImes today reports ((Regulators Examining Early Sales of Financial Data http://nyti.ms/12hDF3t )) that NY Attorney General Schneiderman is pursuing various information providers, Thomson Reuters in the immediate case, for their practices of selling market sensitive information preferntially. Those paying a premium get information several minutes —>> read more –>>