Author: Sam Pizzigati

The new conservative ‘Mount Vernon Statement’ unveiled last week claims that right-wingers are upholding what the Generation of 1776 held dear. But those right-wingers, history shows, are conveniently overlooking what the Founders truly feared. The pillars of American right-wing thought and action — top officials from over a dozen national groups — assembled along the […]

Never before in modern American history, suggests a new look at America’s highest 400 incomes from the IRS, have so few made so much at the expense of so many. Or paid so precious little in taxes. The IRS has released, with not a trace of fanfare, the latest figures on America’s 400 highest incomes. […]

The British already have universal health care. So why do average life expectancies in the UK vary so dramatically by neighborhood? A new UK blue-ribbon commission has some answers to questions that Americans ought to be asking. Policy makers in the United States spent last year talking about health care. In the UK, policy makers […]

In contemporary American political life, only the rich can afford to be politically impatient. The big question: How long will the rest of us tolerate such a starkly unrepresentative status quo? By Sam Pizzigati Four score years ago, amid the tumult of the Great Depression, Americans rethought their democracy. Out of that rethinking came the […]

President Obama’s new federal budget plan won’t end plutocracy in America. But this second Obama budget, if adopted, might actually inconvenience it. By Sam Pizzigati The Heritage Foundation, the right wing’s most lavishly funded think tank, doesn’t much like the federal budget plan the Obama White House released last week. Heritage hired guns are blasting […]

Labor leaders at last week’s Alpine assembling of global bankers and CEOs came with a simple pledge: We’re going to fight to cap your pay. At Davos, the Swiss resort where global corporate and financial execs assemble every winter at a glittery “World Economic Forum,” gentility typically reigns. The notables and experts who show up […]

A relative handful of Americans, a key congressional panel forecasts, will take home more this year than half the nation’s taxpayers combined. Americans worried about the ever-intensifying concentration of wealth at America’s economic summit have been focusing of late, quite understandably, on the latest annual round of Wall Street bank bonus awards. But we now […]

Would a stiff tax on banker bonuses blunt Wall Street profiteering — or let the vast majority of America’s wealthy off the hook? “Wall Street,” the New York Times observed earlier this month, “is confronting a dilemma of riches: How to wrap its eye-popping paychecks in a mantle of moderation.” The wrapping isn’t working. President […]

Congress may be gridlocked, but the Obama administration has the power, even without congressional action, to take on the CEO set — and the windfalls that are so enraging average Americans. A year ago, movers and shakers at the upper echelons of the Democratic Party were celebrating the biggest congressional majorities for Democrats in a […]

By nearly every measure, average Americans lost ground in the “Aughts.” They’ve been losing ground — to the rich — for three full decades now. Will the ‘Teens’ make that four? Pawn shops always do well in recessions. CEOs of pawn shops, at least these days, do even better. At EZCorp, the Texas-based regional chain […]