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Are Economic Indicators Signaling a Recession?
Investment banks are sounding the alarm on a looming recession while consumers worry about soaring inflation diminishing their purchasing power, a plummeting stock and bond market, slow GDP growth, rising interest rates, and an equity market decline. But what do actual economic indicators of recessions currently say about the likelihood of…
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How Too Much Loss Aversion Leads to Utility Losses
Humans aren’t perfectly rational agents that make choices that maximize utility, when faced with risky choices that could lead to big gains, people are risk-averse, preferring to settle for choices that result in lower utility but higher certainty. While loss-aversion is beneficial in many situations, heuristics and personal biases cause…
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What’s Driving Inflation
Soaring inflation rapidly climbed 7% in the United States through December, the fastest since 1982. The rising price index isn’t a unique phenomenon, it’s been seen globally. However, it’s been more pronounced in the U.S. than in any other country. Policy makers argue over the causes among partisan lines, but what has…
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The Great Labor Awakening
A great reckoning has come for the American business model of labor exploitation — will corporations choose growing labor shortages and boycotts, or employee rights and fair pay? Although the top 10 percent in the U.S. own 70 percent of the U.S. wealth, the working class holds tremendous untapped power capable…
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Is Biden Responsible for the 7-Year High Gas Prices?
Since the U.S. economic reopening began, gas prices rapidly hit a 7-year national average high of $3.24 a gallon. Consumers are feeling pain at the pump and wondering if this is the fruit of President Joe Biden’s energy policies. This oil and gas sticker shock threatens to strengthen the country’s…
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Starvation Wages Caused The Labor Shortage, Not Unemployment Insurance
“No one wants to work anymore,” reads one sign taped to a McDonald’s drive-thru. Many fast-food and service industry companies are reporting that they’re facing a labor shortage created by unemployment insurance. This myth has been refuted by workers and analysts’ data. The real problem is the stagnant, starvation minimum wage which…
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How Taxpayers Subsidize Corporations’ Starvation Wages
A recent study proved that large corporations use taxpayer money to subsidize starvation wages which leave employees relying on public assistance programs to just survive, while executives reap billions in profit. The Government Accountability Office undertook the study at the request of Sen. Bernie Sanders to answer questions about the relationship between employers and…
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Soaring Wealth Inequality and Pandemic Profiteers: A Call for Tax Reform
Mass hunger, unemployment, sickness, and an eviction crisis are things Americans are experiencing at a level not seen since the Great Depression through no fault of their own and with no relief. The other America, the billionaire class’ wealth has seen their wealth surpass a $1.9 trillion gain since mid-March,…
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How Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders Will Wield His Power
Incoming Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will exert great influence over domestic economic issues that will finally help the American working class like never before through a special budget mechanism. Vowing to move quickly to push through an economic stimulus package and fight economic inequality to “boldly…
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How Trump’s Rhetoric Incited a Violent Insurrection at the Capitol
In 1861, 11 senators and 3 representatives were expelled from Congress for supporting the insurrection and refusing to recognize Lincoln’s electoral win. Today, congressmen and republican governors are calling for the impeachment and/or removal of treasonous President Trump under the 25th Amendment for inciting a domestic terrorist coup attempt to stop…
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Democracy Under Attack: 106 Reps. and 17 States Back Texas’ Seditious Election Lawsuit
The Texas GOP suggested secession from the United States this morning after, on Friday, the Supreme Court rejected a seditious, undemocratic lawsuit by Texas, supported by 106 House Republicans, asking to overthrow the election results from four states Trump lost in November — GA, MI, PA, and WI. The suit…
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Progressives Are Not Responsible for House Losses
Democrats wrongly blame progressives for a net five centrist candidate House losses despite Americans’ overwhelming support for progressive policies. All 112 co-sponsors of Medicare for All on the ballot won, and 97 out of 98 co-sponsors of the Green New Deal on the ballot won. A recent Fox News exit poll further…
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Economic Populism Can Combat Democrats’ Declining Minority Support
Trump won the highest share of non-white electorate vote of any Republican in 60 years, while moderate Democrats lost support and seats. Despite Joe Biden’s expected narrow win, Democrats face a disconcerting problem from declining minority and Latino support that can only be regained through the proven-effective economic populism of the…
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Losing Trump Campaign’s Ballot-Count Protests and Lawsuits Emerge
After vowing to go to Supreme Court over ‘fraud’ and refusing to commit to conceding to election results for months, the rapidly sinking Titanic of a Trump campaign announced legal action in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania after today’s counted ballots are securing a Joe Biden win. Belligerent Trump supporters barged…
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Voter Suppression Is Killing Our Democracy
A staggering 233 election cases are pending in federal courts facing off over voting rights during an election in a pandemic. Voter suppression rulings are already underway. Recently, a 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated Texas’ process for tossing absentee ballots over mismatched signatures, determining that the right to…
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Tax Law: How the Wealthy Get Away With Evasion
While billionaires brag about tax evasion, the highest tax burden as a percentage of income falls on the poorest Americans. The lowest 20 percent of taxpayers pay a tax rate more than 50 percent higher than the top 1 percent of households. This should come as no surprise after the Panama Papers bombshell…
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Will ICE Face Accountability for Their Human Rights Abuses?
There is an ongoing DHS investigation into the forced hysterectomies performed on ICE detainees; an act of genocide with deep roots in US history. It was confirmed that the Georgia doctor performed two hysterectomies on detainees at the Irwin County Detention Center who allege they did not consent to such an abhorrent procedure. ICE — an extrajudicial organization created…
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What Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee Means for Americans
Donald Trump’s nomination of conservative jurist Amy Coney Barret to the increasingly partisan Supreme Court has spared a deep confirmation battle. Many are contesting whether Americans’ having a stake in the decision requires waiting until the presidential election. Nonetheless, the Senate Judiciary Committee will begin hearings on October 12th. What…
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Senate’s Performative Legislation Protects the Bloated Military Industrial Complex
“And when we talk about real change it is incredible to me the degree to which Congress continues to ignore our bloated $740 billion defense budget—which has gone up by over $100 billion since Trump has been in office.” The Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act allocating $740.5 billion…
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The Reconstruction Era’s Failures
“We’ve won the war. Now you have to lead us out of it,” General Ulysses S. Grant in Lincoln (2012) encapsulates the Reconstruction Era’s limitations and failure to truly unite and rebuild post-Civil War America even a decade after. The Reconstruction Era was characterized by a fragmented country with a gridlocked Congress, violent,…
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The Causes of the Civil War: A Document Review
“These slaves constituted a peculiar rand powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of war,” Abraham Lincoln stated in his second inaugural address according to Major Problems (2). That single speech succinctly explained the cause of the Civil War fought from 1861 through 1865 – slavery. Slavery and…
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A Rational Choice Model Analysis of The Iraq War
The Iraq war is often cited as one of the worst intelligence failures in modern foreign policy history. The conflict claimed the lives of over 250,000 people under the false pretense that Iraq had obtained weapons of mass destruction (Matthews). Historians and foreign policy experts contest whether the framing of…
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Industrial capitalism has relied on cost minimization through cheap labor since the Gilded Age — it’s now moved overseas where it’s had unsafe, exploitative ramifications in developing nations. The decline in US manufacturing since the 1970s has without a doubt transformed the economic landscape to the detriment of non-college educated…
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The Failure is a Corrupt Two-Party System, Not Electoralism
Can electoralism ever produce a transfer of power to the working-class in a two-party system, or are corrupt political parties that will never allow change into power, elections dominated by corporate interests, and voter suppression the problems? According to the theory of democratization, the wealthy autocrat class only willingly surrenders power in times of extreme economic recessions…
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Eco-fascism: Humanity is Not The Problem, Neoliberalism Is
The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has not only revealed the inherent, exploitative economic failures of an unfettered free market, but also, the environmental failures of capitalism as decreased fossil-fuel activity has cleared the air pollution in Asia, and canals in Italy. Yet there has been a rising online sentiment…
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Coronavirus Exposes the Failings of American Capitalism
“We are only as safe as the least insured person in America,” Bernie Sanders, in one tweet, succinctly captured the individualist United States’ failed safety net amidst a coronavirus pandemic with now 10,502 cases occurring while 27 million are uninsured and the working-class grocers, delivery drivers and caretakers are on the front-lines as emergency…
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The Productivity-Inflation-Wage Gap and the Effects of a $15.00 Wage Floor
If the federal minimum wage had kept up with the 657% increase in inflation and 176% rise in worker productivity over the past 50 years, it would be $21.72. It peaked in 1968 at $11.18 when the cost of a four-year public university was $329.00, according to National Center for Education Statistics, a…
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Climate Change Mitigation and The Future of Energy by 2040
Complete climate change mitigation is an alternative forecast that overlooks carbon-reduction solutions such as sequestration and nanotechnology that will be necessary to meet a 27% increase in global energy demand, provide electricity access in developing nations where 1 billion lack electricity and face barriers to renewable energy attainment. On our current…
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Bernie Beats Trump: How The Most Electable Candidate Fights For You
Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ surging lead in the polls, leading donations with a record 4 million small donors, and majority-support for his policies across demographics make it clear he’s not only the true populist in the race, but the most electable once-in-a-lifetime candidate. Faux-populism won in 2016, and centrism’s failure made it…
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The U.S.-Created Central American Asylum Human Rights Crisis
Despite previously accepting the most refugees globally, the U.S. has a dark history of denying asylum to those fleeing human rights abuses — from the Jewish refugees in the 1930s, to the Haitians during the Duvalier dictatorship, and Salvadorans fleeing political violence in the 1980s. Many times these crises have been caused by U.S.-led…
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How to Feed 9.8 Billion Sustainably
By the year 2050, the UN estimates the global population will reach a staggering 9.8 billion. One of the biggest existential challenges facing this population projection will be the 70% rise of food demand. With most growth generating from developing nations, high-yield agricultural solutions based on food technology, sustainability, precision…
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Why Bernie Sanders Would Win in 2020
With an imminent climate catastrophe only 12 years away, healthcare being the number one cause of bankruptcy in the wealthiest country on earth (with 78% already insured), the oligarchy’s stranglehold on the working-class now stronger than ever, stagnating wages that haven’t kept up with inflation, a human rights crisis in the middle-east, and a student debt crisis that stagnates economic growth,…
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Mexico’s Gilded Economic Inequality
From the Spanish crown to the corrupt camarilla elite, Mexico’s leaders have long kept a strangle hold on middle-class growth in Mexico. It’s the stimulus in the Mexican negative feedback loop of political turmoil – widespread poverty in the 12th world’s largest economy is the issue to end all other issues. Poverty fuels organized crime,…
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Legalization: The End to Mexico’s Drug Violence
Over a decade after former President Felipe Calderon launched a militarized crusade against drug cartels, Mexico has recorded its highest homicide rate of 19.4 since the interior ministry began keeping records, with a staggering 29,168 murders in 2017. Despite lethal military deployment and a winning ‘kingpin-strategy’ (Nieto has neutralized 89% of drug-cartel leaders on his list), it has…
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The Rise of U.S. Domestic Terror
The Third Reich didn’t begin with supporters of a nationalist demagogue bombing places of worship, killing worshiping Jewish people, vandalizing Jewish property, targeting political opponents, running opponents over with a car, violently attacking ethnic minorities on trains and shooting them in grocery stores, it rose in prominence through hateful rhetoric.…
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The Paradox of Tolerance for Intolerance
The extremist side of child-drugging internment camps, Obama effigies, Roy Moore, sexual assault, and mocking the disabled doesn’t care about civility; what they want is compulsory compliance, and dissent silenced in their administration’s persistent crimes against humanity. There is something seriously wrong with a nation showing more concern for wealthy operatives of administration rampant with human rights violations being…
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Abolish ICE: The Loss of 1,475 Children and Human Rights Violations
Declaring that children inhumanely separated from their asylum-seeking parents “are not innocent” is alarmingly on nazi, authoritarian levels, not on par with U.S. democratic values or the presidency. We are living through the second coming of Hitler with the Trump administration sanctioning state-violence against immigrants by planning military concentration camps for children, (unlawfully)…
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Discrimination Against Bilingualism Goes Back to WWII
A Trump-supporting New York attorney with a documented history of launching unhinged, racist tirades against strangers was recently caught on camera again verbally assaulting two bilingual people for speaking Spanish in public. Aaron Schlossberg berated an employee and a customer for conducting an order in Spanish saying, “Your staff is speaking Spanish to customers when they should…
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America’s Gestapo: Redefining the Rule of Law
A 7-year-old asylee girl being locked up by ICE for four months at a Chicago jail has become America’s heralded “rule of law.” With the new Supreme Court ruling stating that immigrants, even permanent residents, and asylees, can be held indefinitely, internment camps have become the law of the land. As if the violation of…
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Gun Control Has Always Worked
Since 2012 there have been 1,624 mass shootings in the U.S. We’re responsible for 31% of global mass shootings despite being 5% of the population, but guns are the only aspect of society we can’t seem to regulate. Since 1996, 167 of mass shooters’ weapons were obtained legally (49 were obtained illegally.) Somehow keeping guns…
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No Equality without Economic Justice
Why are people with the same economic interests so divided? It’s not “economic anxiety”; a vote in Iowa is the equivalent of 5 California votes. The answer is grounded in American history spanning back 300 years when racial animosity was harnessed by elite landowners to destroy class solidarity and prevent…
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Trump’s History of Racism, Before Decrying Immigration from “Shithole Countries”
“Being president doesn’t change who you are. It reveals who you are.” As if it was possible to hit a new low, Donald Trump has managed it with a series of brazenly racist comments bypassing previous dog-whistles. In a meeting this past Thursday, as confirmed by Sen. Durbin and Sen. Graham, he…
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DACA Myths Debunked
The Trump administration has expressed a desire to kick out 800,000 young, tax-paying professionals, army members, and college students with a 91% employment rate and no felonies or misdemeanors by rescinding DACA, to fulfill a racist utopia. To kick out young adults who had no jurisdiction over coming here. While ignoring…
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Bernie Sanders Myths Debunked
Nearing 2018, Clinton loyalists have taken it upon themselves to slander the most liked politician in America (who stands for the most statistically favorable issues.) Choosing to rehash the June 2016 primaries with slanderous narratives about Sanders while “Queen Hillary” drinks chardonnay in the woods, goes on a book blame…
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Trickle-Down Economics Never Worked
Time and time again, history has proven our economy to be better under democratic presidents and, thus Keynesian economic policy. It’s no mystery as to why republican Congresses have been responsible for the last four major economic crisis in the: 1930s, 1970s, 2001, and 2008. Supply-side economics simply doesn’t work in non-Stagflation…
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How Conservatives Have Bastardized the Meaning of Patriotism
“When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” The Declaration of Independence, Statue of Liberty, Constitution, and general rule of law, are the new Communist flags to Russian flag-wielding, conservative, self-proclaimed “patriots.” In the past year, we’ve seen the political right launch…
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Trump Didn’t Just Embolden White Supremacists, He Sided with Them
Trump offers a defense of white supremacists which injured nineteen and killed Heather Hayes at Charlottesville: “What about the alt-left that came charging at us?” The events in Charlottesville undeniably solidified what some knew and many denied – racism, moreover, nazi ideology is alive and well in America and President Trump was…
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The Supreme Constitutionality of Affirmative Action
The politics of fear and hate has manipulated many Americans into feeling like the discriminated class because of perceived systemic ” reverse racism” — an ideology which has coincidentally proliferated since the civil-rights movement. White-Americans began feeling oppressed when African-Americans gained equal rights with the Brown v. Board ruling, Kennedy’s 1961 Executive…
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Why Moving Left is the Only Democratic Winning Strategy
The democratic party has been completely decimated. Democrats have moved too far right and suffered tremendous losses because of it. Sixty-nine, House seats gone, 13 Senate seats gone, and a White House gone. Nine-hundred-and-ten seats total gone under 8 years of a Democrat-controlled White House, handing over complete legislative power to the…
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The Bipartisan Case for Single-Payer
It’s time to stop putting political ideology over the welfare of the country. In the world-power that is the United States, medical expenses have long been the number one cause of bankruptcy, with 78% of filers already having health-insurance. It should be considered a serious issue when inhabitants of the wealthiest country…
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A number of 670 worldwide protests is not normal the day after a United States President takes office. It’s not normal for over 3 million people – many women – to feel an impending threat looming over their civil rights, looming over their democracy, that they’re compelled to go organize in crowds…
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Highlights from Obama’s Farewelll Address
It was the perfect end to a surreal, phenomenal 8 years. Maybe one of the greatest speeches delivered in the last few thirty years. Embodying the values he carried so fervently behind every decision, Obama delivered the very message which he never strayed from; genuine, passionate, moving and most importantly…
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Against all Odds: Barack Obama’s Legacy
The unknown senator from Illinois, a young black political outsider with a Muslim middle name, a passionate community leader that no one estimated would come to carry the weight of the collapsing global economy, largest amount of threats to American soil, and pivotal geopolitical challenges on his shoulders, managed to…
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Should the Electoral College Be Abolished?
“The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” – Donald J. Trump. Truer words have never been spoken by Trump. If you thought the 2000 Al Gore loss was unfair, well wait ‘till you hear how much our losing 2016 candidate won the popular by – 2.9 million votes.…
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Why Hamilton Electors Must Rise Up
America you’ve been conned. Not just by any con-man, a con-man-in-chief. Not only won’t he deliver on his promises but the blueprint he’s laid out, shows that he’ll actively work against you. Did a cheeto-toned face come to mind? Sadly, your working class hero is an unhinged fraud, but you…
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Donald Trump is Not My President
After last night’s devastating results, half of America was left shaken to it’s core – media and politicians included, while the other half celebrated the nomination of Donald Trump as our 45th president. The electoral college created to protect us from a demagogue failed us. Hillary didn’t just lose, civil…
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Never Trump: A Full Comprehensive Guide to Why This Election Is About More Than Party Lines
A textbook narcissist, a blatant racist, a hate mongrel, a conman, and a misogynist with fascist tendencies – words I would’ve never in my life used to describe a republican nominee or past republican president. They’re words millions of people have readily adopted into their conversation as soon as there’s…
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Illegal Immigration Myths Debunked
The MAGA cult has built up the false threat of immigrants as a scapegoat to distract people while Republicans gut Medicaid, expand domestic surveillance, sell $1 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia, have the 2008 financial crash cronies deregulate the swamp, destroy our democratic institutions, and get away with the biggest criminal conspiracy in U.S. history. Let me preface this by stating the…
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Ban Stock Buybacks Again
Stock buybacks used to be illegal, once considered a form of stock manipulation until 1982 when the SEC passed rule 10b-18 legalizing the practice under Reagan’s failed trickle-down agenda. Over the past 10 years, companies on the S&P 500 have put $5.4 trillion into purchasing their own shares instead of…