Washington – The populist revolt against the Electoral College burst into action after Al Gore won the nationwide popular vote for president in 2000 but George W. Bush won the Presidency. It gained new momentum after Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes in 2016, but Trump won the White House in the […]
Washington – Alan Krueger, the Princeton professor and economic adviser to two presidents who died last weekend, rang the alarm bell for me as a reporter six years ago with a disturbing speech that he gave, of all places, at Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Museum. Krueger was one of those rare economists who break out […]
Washington – Fired up by stunning election victories in Alabama and Virginia, Democrats are now dreaming of a wave election in 2018 and regaining a majority in the House of Representatives. But even in their victories, there’s a warning that Democrats could be stymied by an old nemesis – the firewall of Republican gerrymandering. Typically, […]
Washington – Riding a tide of tax cuts and rising profits over four decades, the captains of Corporate America have shifted $1 trillion each year from the paychecks of middle class Americans into massive payoffs to Wall Street investors and CEO pay packages. And now they want you to believe, once again, that cutting corporate […]
Washington – Okay, let’s keep score. He’s thrown down the gauntlet. After taking the oath of office, President Trump used his Inaugural address to tar his presidential predecessors and most of Congress, whose members sat around him, as failures – “politicians who are all talk and no action.” So that’s Trump’s standard – action, not […]
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 – Economists call it “the Virtuous Circle of Growth.” It’s the dead opposite of “trickle down economics.” The core idea is that a well-paid middle class is the engine of America’s economic growth. In other words, America’s job creators are the 99%, not the 1%. That was the economic concept that powered America’s remarkable […]
Washington – If you wonder what price we all pay for corporate money flooding political campaigns ($1.7 billion in 2014), see Exhibit A — the attempt by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to exploit legal loopholes and renounce its U.S. citizenship to become an Irish company and to duck U.S. corporate income taxes. Pfizer made no secret […]
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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