Tag Archives: Taxes

October 24, 2011, 10:32 am

Personal Accountability

A hundred Occupy activists from New York and New Haven clustered Saturday on the lawn of GE Jeffrey Immelt’s house in New Canaan, calling him out because GE pays no taxes.

Now, obviously, it’s an article of American faith that God helps those who help themselves; that we are soaring eagles and not heaps of ants; that capitalism is irreversibly red in tooth and claw, and was meant to be. Rugged Ayn Randians are always passing out gold stars to plutocrats for “working hard”—as if janitors, nurses, coal miners, teachers, farm workers, freight handlers, cafeteria workers, electricians, welders, et al. were slackers. Elizabeth Warren has a video going around (deservedly viral) pointing out that no one makes it alone. The You’re-on-Your-Own meme that’s the common thread in post-compassionate conservatism is the most popular form of Darwinism across the land.

This is no small element…

August 5, 2011, 9:25 am

Neoliberal Economic Policies Are Still Eating Our Brains

By Laurie Essig

I was scarred by George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead as a child. I somehow was allowed to tag along with an older sister and a date to a drive-in and I cringed in the back seat as zombies tried to eat the brains of Americans.

As an adult watching this film, I was less scared by the cheesy visuals and amused that the “victims” were already mindless as they moved around a shopping mall buying stuff they didn’t need. But I still have nightmares about zombies. Now, however, those nightmares are real.

The neoliberal economic policies of our government, like Romero’s zombies, continue to eat our brains when they should have been dead long ago. And the fact that no matter how clear it is that neoliberal economic policies should have been killed because they didn’t work and they brought the U.S. and the world to financial ruin, they just keep popping up, alive, ready to eat our brains….