Big U.S. corporations shift profits to foreign tax havens to cut their US taxes to zero. US loses about $100 billion annually from corporate tax games by Apple, Google, Coke, Nike, Caterpillar, others while.Billionaires enjoy a boom – $1 trillion in new wealth in 2020. Biden calls for corporate minimum tax to restore fairness, fight inequality..
Washington – While you and I have focused on the economic havoc of job losses, pay cuts and business failures caused by the corona pandemic, we missed noticing that the tiny sliver of super-super-rich at the apex of our economy was simultaneously fattening their already phenomenal fortunes, thanks to the pandemic. A surprise perhaps because […]
Washington – The flood tide is still rising, but already the Mega-Money tsunami of Election 2020 is going into the record books as the most expensive election in American history with the biggest flow of dark money ever funneled anonymously to candidates – $750 million, up from a minuscule $5 million a decade ago. With […]
by Hedrick Smith What struck me when I began reporting on grassroots citizen reform movements in states as varied as Florida, Connecticut, and South Dakota was how creative and ingenious political amateurs were in generating ideas for reform and how gutsy and resourceful they were in mobilizing millions of voters to adopt state-level reforms […]
by Hedrick Smith It’s been a couple of weeks since our film, THE DEMOCRACY REBELLION, began airing on PBS stations across the country, and the response to these stories of grassroots political reforms has been fantastic! “Your brilliant program is the only bright spot in my day. I actually watched it on my cellphone in […]
Washington – When it comes to the influence of political money on our election campaigns, you know the bad news, but you probably don’t know the good news – or even that there is good news. The bad news is that billionaires and corporations are pouring tons of money into our elections to buy influence […]
Washington – The most lethal damage to American society embedded in the Republican tax plan now being rushed through Congress is that it will metastasize the cancerous economic inequality that has been eating away at the health and fabric of American democracy over four decades – an issue some Democrats plan to take to voters […]
Washington – What got lost in the mudslinging of the second presidential debate and the political uproar over Donald Trump’s bragging about predatory sexism was an important watershed in U.S. political history – the political reforms that a majority of Americans back in opinion polls gained a first tier advocate moving closer to the White […]
Washington – The untold story of Campaign 2016 is that political reform is on the move in grass roots America. Not just Bernie Sanders’s trumpet call for a political revolution, but citizen movements at the state level pressing for political reforms against Citizens United, partisan gerrymandering and dark money to make elections fairer, ease gridlock in […]
Washington – The political earthquake now shaking the foundations of the Republican Party throws into bold relief the unique feature of Campaign 2016 – the fault-line this year is not the typical polar clash of Left vs Right, but a far more fundamental Up-Down cleavage between rank and file Americans and what C. Wright Mills […]
Hedrick Smith, who conceived this website and is its principal writer and architect, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter and Emmy award-winning documentary producer for PBS and PBS FRONTLINE. more »
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