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The Taylor Swift Exploitation Machine
She doesn’t love you, she doesn’t care for you, and she doesn’t know you. But does her team pretend to, confecting an image of faux empathy and interest, sorting out the wheat from the chaff. The predatory, fan sucking phenomenon of the Taylor Swift marketing machine is something to behold. Leaving aside the sort of […]
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Labor Movement Means More Than Unions
Since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, headlines have focused on union organizing victories at Starbucks and Amazon. But a recent New York Times story declaring “New York Delivery Workers Are Getting a Bump in Pay” reminds us that workers outside the union movement are part of the labor movement too. However important, unions are […]
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Ticketing Woes
What is it about government contracts that produces the worst results and poorest returns? Those clods behind such deals, notably in the poison chaliced field of public transport, seem so utterly incapable at even modest competence. In public transport, muddles, bungling and oh so much fumbling are common; the whole show comes into view when […]
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Another Look at the Financial Transactions Tax
Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash A small financial transactions tax could correct a number of maladies in our economic system, from the federal debt crisis to the widening wealth divide to the rampant financialization of the economy, while eliminating taxes on income and sales. The debt ceiling crisis has again brought into focus the […]
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Peace Dollars: Putting Our Economic House In Order
The total federal deficit at $31+ trillion? Maybe it’s time for some creative thinking — a totally unique strategy that benefits all Americans, not just capitalist predators. Special use currency is not unprecedented. Abraham Lincoln used “greenbacks” — the paper currency shown above, backed by nothing more than confidence in the government — to finance the Civil War. He […]
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Inverted Corporate Capitalism: Blocking Their Owner-Shareholders
It is the season of annual shareholder meetings for giant corporations when CEOs go through the motions of elections for their Board of Directors and approval of other resolutions. People who own stock in General Motors (GM) receive the “GM Meeting Information” in an envelope emblazoned with this disingenuous message: “Your Voice/Your Vote/Be Heard. Every […]
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Rogue Consultants: PwC, Tax Evasion, and Getting Clients
Things are not looking up at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a global professional services firm piratically free in sharing confidential tax information gathered from government clients. Then again, the firm’s expertise is not so much to look up to a principled heaven as down to a tax-proof Hades, buried in the scrambling minutiae of accounting and deception. […]
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Squeezed by the Shorts: Time to Ban Short Selling?
Short sellers have made a killing in the recent banking crisis, scalping $14.3 billion from bank stock owners just in March of this year. Short sellers “borrow” stock they don’t own and immediately sell it, driving the price down. Then they buy it back at the lower price, return the stock, and pocket the difference. […]
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Toxic Contagion: Funds, Food and Pharma
In 2014, the organisation GRAIN revealed that small farms produce most of the world’s food in its report “Hungry for land: small farmers feed the world with less than a quarter of all farmland.” The report “Small-scale Farmers and Peasants Still Feed the World” (ETC Group, 2022) confirmed this. Small farmers produce up to 80% […]
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