Wall Street’s Democrats
 In Washington’s coming budget battles, sacred cows like the tax deductions for home mortgage interest and charitable donations are likely to be on the table along with potential cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
But no one on Capitol Hill believes Wall Street’s beloved carried-interest tax loophole will be touched.
Don’t blame the newly elected Republican Congress.
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 Franklin Foer, editor of The New Republic, has weighed in on the Amazon controversy with a piece titled “Amazon Must Be Stopped.” The subtitle reads “It’s too big. It’s cannibalizing the economy. It’s time for a radical plan.”
I, for one, am feeling a little less alone as a result. We proposed our own “radical&
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 Gallons of ink have been devoted to Wall Street executives’ lack of accountability for a global financial meltdown that was built on top of a mountain of fraud.
Nobody at the top has faced criminal prosecution. Executive compensation and bonuses have rebounded nicely. And while taxpayers committed trillions to keeping those “too-big-to-fail” institutions afloat, the foreclosure crisis persists six years after the crash.
And while the Troubled Asset
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 The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 established some of the New Deal’s most important protections for workers. It gave us the 40-hour work week and mandated that working people be paid overtime — at least time and a half — for putting in more than 40 hours a week. Today, FLSA covers about 75 million Americans.
The rationale behind the legislation was that most hourly wage-earners don’t have a lot of bargaining power with their bosses. But it was also assumed that management and skilled professionals did have the clout necessary to
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JP Morgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon, left, and Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein leave the White House in Washington in 2009 following a meeting with President Barack Obama. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) In America today, the views of the voting public are nearly meaningless; wealthy individuals and business-backed special interest groups are almost entirely responsible for the stances that politicians take on the issues. That’s the takeaway from a new study by Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University. While the findings of the study may not seem particularly novel to those who have been paying attention to our p
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 Before Zaida Ramos joined Cooperative Home Care Associates, she was raising her daughter on public assistance, shuttling between dead-end office jobs, and not making ends meet. "I earned in a week what my family spent in a day,” she recalled. Zaida Ramos, employed at Cooperative Home Care Associates, with her son in their East Harlem, NY, neighborhood. (Photo: Stephanie Keith/YES!) After 17 years as a home health aide at Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA), the largest worker-owned co-op in the United States, Ramos recently celebrated her daughter’s college graduation. She’s paying half of her son’s tuition at a Catholic
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 Most progressives are, by now, familiar with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the proposed trade deal that would link the United States with Pacific Rim powerhouses like Australia and Japan. Wonkier corners of the left are equally conversant in the intrigue of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a pact that would couple the United States and the European Union. Like-minded critics would do well by memorizing yet another trade acronym: TISA, or the Trade in Services Agreement. Judging by the stakes and the ultra-secrecy of the negotiations, it could easily be the worst of the bunch. Here’s wh
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 It’s called "inversion” — US corporations reincorporating in countries like Britain, Ireland or the Netherlands to duck US taxes, often by merging with a European entity. The latest corporation to try to please investors with this tax dodge was Illinois-based Walgreen, the US’s largest pharmacy chain. But last week, under accusations from customers and lawmakers that the maneuver was unpatriotic, unfair to corporations remaining in the US and hypocritical because
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Main 
The events in Ferguson last month laid bare 
Yesterday, Representative Paul Ryan’s unveiling of his new proposal to address poverty offered the opportunity to gather responses from some of the people who might lead such a movement.
