Search Results for: BID

A Political Cash Cow: How Big Business uses inflation to increase profits and derail democracy

“[T]he monopoly which our manufacturers have obtained against us … like an overgrown standing army, has become formidable to the government, and upon many occasions intimidate the legislature.” — Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776 There has lots of speculation about what may be causing today’s terrible inflation to continue to rise. Is it rebound demand from COVID? Too much “quantitative easing” stimulus from the Fed? Chinese botched-Covid supply chain issues? Saudi Arabia withholding oil from world markets? Russia’s terrorist campaign against Ukraine? Obviously, all are contributing factors. But the price of oil is now below $95 and...

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Corporate Socialism: How Federal policy went from regulating big business to heavily subsidizing it

The Clean Air Act of 1970 authorized the government to regulate air pollution. The Inflation Reduction Act, which Joe Biden signed into law this past week, allocates more than $300bn to energy and climate reform, including $30bn in subsidies for manufacturers of solar panels and wind turbines. Notice the difference? The Inflation Reduction Act is an important step toward slowing or reversing climate the crisis. It also illustrates the nation’s shift away from regulating businesses to subsidizing businesses. From 1932 through the late 1970s, the government mainly regulated businesses. This was the era of the alphabet soup of regulatory...

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A rising death toll: Why crossing the U.S. border from Mexico has become more tragic for migrants

By Joseph Nevins, Professor of Geography, Vassar College The June 2022 deaths of 53 people, victims of heat stroke, in the back of a tractor-trailer in San Antonio, Texas, show the dangers of crossing the U.S. southern border without authorization. All of the dead came from Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras – the three most common origin countries of migrants encountered by the Border Patrol in 2021 and so far in 2022. Such fatalities result from two intersecting phenomena. One is the massive growth in the federal government’s policing system in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands since the mid-1990s. The other is...

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State-sponsored Antisemitism: Kremlin’s threat to close Jewish emigration service echoes Soviet era

By Shaul Kelner, Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies, Vanderbilt University Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sparked a surge of refugees fleeing the war zone, but political repression and economic uncertainty have also prompted emigration from Russia itself. Among the emigrants are Russian Jews, 16,000 of whom have left for Israel in the nearly six months since the war’s start. Now, Russia’s Justice Ministry is threatening the organization that helps the emigrants leave. A Moscow court held a preliminary hearing on July 28, 2022, about the ministry’s application to dissolve the Russian branch of the Jewish...

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Frontier Mythology: American gun culture ignores how common gun restrictions were in the Old West

By Pierre M. Atlas, Senior Lecturer, Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University Even after the Buffalo and Uvalde mass shootings, 70% of Republicans said it is more important to protect gun rights than to control gun violence, while 92% of Democrats and 54% of independents expressed the opposite view. Just weeks after those mass shootings, Republicans and gun rights advocates hailed the Supreme Court ruling that invalidated New York state’s gun permit law and declared that the Second Amendment guarantees a right to carry a handgun outside the home for self-defense. Mayor Eric Adams,...

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Reinventing Treason: When four illegitimate Republican presidents each abandon democracy

Dwight Eisenhower was arguably the last Republican president who believed in democracy, the rule of law, and that government should do what the people want. From 1960 to today a series of leaders within the Republican Party have abandoned the democracy that American soldiers fought the Revolutionary War to secure, the Civil War to defend here at home, and World War II in Europe and the Pacific to defend around the world. This has brought us a series of criminal Republican presidents and corrupt Republican Supreme Court justices, who’ve legalized political bribery while devastating voting and civil rights. None...

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