Lee Camp: New Data Shows US Government Has Been Bought For $14 Billion

No wonder the latest polls show both corporate parties are thoroughly disliked. It’s time to acknowledge that our system has been 100% purchased by the One Percent, and that even the best candidate on their best day is still no better than a Zungenwurst. 

Lee Camp
By Lee Camp
Citizens United

Princeton, New Jersey (Scheerpost) — This past weekend I was sitting in my hot tub that’s really just a bathtub that’s really just my neighbor’s bathtub that he lets me use when he’s out of town and doesn’t know I found his apartment key — and it occurred to me: I don’t think most Americans are happy with our political system. I don’t know why

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UN Human Rights Panel to Discuss U.S. Income Inequality

Extreme income inequality poses a threat to the well-being of American democracy.

Mark Gruenberg
By Mark Gruenberg
Homeless tents are dwarfed by skyscrapers in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

NEW YORK—The United Nations Commission on Human Rights will open debate June 21 on a special report by its lead investigator, who said the U.S. not only “is the most unequal society in the developed world,” but that Trump administration policies – notably the $1.5 trillion tax cut for the rich – have made a bad situation worse. UN Special

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Congressional Budget Office Report Reveals The Rich Are Once Again Outpacing Everyone Else

The Congressional Budget Office has just released the latest iteration of its U.S. household income distribution series, and this new research rates as the nonpartisan agency’s most comprehensive yet.

Sam Pizzigati
By Sam Pizzigati
A homeless man sits outside a high-rise building converted into apartments, Dec. 4, 2017, in downtown Los Angeles. The U.S. Department on Housing and Urban Development release of the 2017 homeless numbers are expected to show a dramatic increase in the number of people lacking shelter along the West Coast. (AP/Jae C. Hong)

Back in the 1980s, the decade that saw researchers start detailing America’s increasing concentration of income and wealth, flacks for the emerging Reagan economic order disdainfully dismissed the significance of the alarming new data. The United States isn’t getting more unequal, the Reaganites pronounced, and the middle class isn’t shrinking.

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Study Finds Link Between Income Inequality, Consumerism and Size of Carbon Footprint

Countries with lower rates of wealth disparity tend to have happier citizens and offer a better quality of life. A more nearly equal distribution of wealth also has substantial environmental benefits, as less meat is consumed, less waste is produced, and citizens consume what they need rather than acquiring excess products.

Kate Harveston
By Kate Harveston
Shoppers scramble to get deals at Walmart on the day before Black Friday, Nov. 23, 2017 in Bentonville, Ark. Gunnar Rathbun | AP

As the rich get ever richer -- courtesy, in countries like the United States, of corporate-friendly deregulation and tax “reform” -- does the planet get ever warmer and dirtier? New research suggests economic balance is linked to environmentally-friendly practices. Countries with lower rates of economic disparity have citizens who enjoy a better

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Trump’s Twenty-First-Century American Populism

Rajan Menon takes a clear-eyed look at the populism of the Trumpian moment, the growing inequality that is increasingly the heart and soul of this society, and what is(n’t) being done about it.

Rajan Menon
By Rajan Menon
President Donald Trump gives a thumbs-up after speaking to Navy and shipyard personnel aboard the nuclear aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford at Newport News Shipbuilding in Newport News, Va. (AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Among the stranger features of the 2016 election campaign was the success of Donald Trump, a creature of globalization, as an America First savior of the white working class. A candidate who amassed billions of dollars by playing globalization for all it was worth -- he manufactured clothes and accessories bearing his name in low-wage economies and

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Late-Stage Capitalism: Denying the Imperium of Death

The tens of thousands of American deaths from drug overdoses are a measure of the hopeless desperation left behind by the soul-starving socio-economic system of late-stage capitalism.

Phil Rockstroh
By Phil Rockstroh
capitalism racism

Opinion -- According to a nationwide study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a greater number of U.S. Americans died (approximately 65,000) from drug overdoses last year than were killed during the course of the Vietnam War. At the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the

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