Crash Survival Zone

By Dean Baker

As every backcountry hiker recognizes, you must first know where you are before you can figure out how to get to where you want to be. While it is important to know where we want to go, progressives often badly misunderstand where we are now.

Specifically, much of the anger of progressives is wrongly [...]

Can Obama’s supporters save him from his economic advisers?
By Robert Kuttner
…The past weeks have seen efforts to seize on every shred of good (or not as bad as expected) economic news. The commercial paper market is loosening up! Some new homeowners are getting bargains! The economy only lost 539,000 jobs in April instead of the [...]

By Martin Wolf

“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Thus wrote the Sicilian writer Giuseppe di Lampedusa, in The Leopard. This seems to me the guiding principle of the Obama presidency. To many Americans, he seems a flaming radical. To me, he is a pragmatic conservative, albeit one [...]

Forget sticks, and stick with carrots instead. So says Brent Schulkin, founder of a fledgling movement of activist consumers employing a kind of reverse boycott that he calls a Carrotmob. The concept is simple: instead of steering clear of environmentally backward stores, why not reward businesses with mass purchases if they promise to use some [...]

The “ruthless pragmatist” is actually passionate about a central moral issue of modern American life — the lopsided distribution of political and economic power.

By Robert Reich

The President seems to me especially thoughtful and passionate about one of the great moral questions of domestic policy today: widening inequality of income and wealth, and therefore of opportunity [...]

It’s the curse of the modern presidency. Our chief executives need to make an active, aggressive effort to reach beyond their immediate circle of advisers, to demand fresh thinking and avoid the sycophancy that comes with the Oval Office. Otherwise, they’ll only hear what they want to hear—or what their aides tell them. To judge [...]

How the boss absconded with your benefits.

By David Cay Johnston
John Snow won’t have to worry about his retirement. When he left the csx railroad to become George W. Bush’s second treasury secretary, he took with him a $2.5 million annual pension. The figure was based on 44 years of employment at csx, never mind that [...]

On April 14, President Obama gave a speech at Georgetown University, trying to explain why he was taking on so many economic issues so early in his administration. He argued that the country needed to break its bubble-and-bust cycle and cited the New Testament in calling for a new economic foundation for the nation. This [...]

Revelations that Ken Lewis had his arm twisted at the highest levels of government to buy Merrill should make for some interesting litigation.
The ramifications of the startling revelations about Bank of America’s controversial acquisition of a failing Merrill Lynch are explosive, and they will have a major impact on the tragic drama’s main actors, from [...]

By David Sirota

Feeling sorry for yourself? Struggling to get by? Wondering how you can get a bailout? Well, stop moping, because it’s not too late!

I may not have Suze Orman’s verve or Billy Mays’ voice. But I’ve discovered a revolutionary risk-free investment plan straight from those who brought us the economic meltdown. So in this [...]