This article was first published by TruthDig (truthdig.com) Michele Bachmann has become known as the Queen of the anti-government Tea Baggers, protesting health care reform and slamming every other government handout as “socialism.” But what her followers don’t know is…

The problem with the water debate, to the extent there is one, is the way it’s spun. Long dominated by eco-warrior do-gooders, the fight for water has been framed as boringly and abstractly as possible. How is the “environment” supposed…

Article originally published by Vice magazine Prospects have never been good for ex-cons. Even during good economic times they hover between 50 and 75 percent unemployment, and generally take home about nine grand a year. No wonder 70 percent of…

This article was first published in The eXile on June 23, 2003. As Russians openly strive to become elitny, America’s dominant oligarchs and feeble intellectuals live in a state of grotesque denial about their elitism. Billionaires act like hicks and…

This article was first published on AlterNet What are we getting in return for the bailout? So far, predatory credit card rates, exorbitant bank fees and obscene Wall Street bonuses. But we’re being robbed in other, sneakier ways, too. It…

This article was first published by TruthDig (truthdig.com). In recent days, students have been rallying and barricading themselves inside buildings on University of California campuses to protest a 32 percent hike in tuition fees. Last Wednesday and Thursday, scuffles broke…

This article was first published on Alternet.org A group of water oligarchs in California have engineered a disastrous deregulation and privatization scheme. And they’ve pulled in hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars without any real public outrage. The amount of…

How about this for a plan for sprucing up our nation’s crumbling housing projects: ship lazy black folks out to the subprime suburbs, privatize their apartment buildings and hand them over to real estate developers. That’s what T.A. Frank, a…

This article was first published in Alternet. Editor’s Note: The shocking transfer of public wealth to Wall Street’s pockets is illustrated vividly in Mark Ames’ article below, which covers some very disturbing recent events in Alabama, where billionaires and banks…

Just when you thought you’d seen all the health-insurance evil possible, now comes another shocker: a UnitedHealth subsidiary in Colorado denied coverage to Peggy Robertson, mother of two, because she wasn’t sterilized after her caesarian-section delivery procedure, according to a…

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy It’s not often you get to see a sleazy tool like US Chamber of Commerce head Tom Donohue get smacked around on live TV. In part that’s because…

Every day and every week we hear another shocking story about how our billionaires have cooked up an even sicker scheme to shake down Americans and plunder the national wealth, as if the last scheme was too easy and boring….

Can someone get me my beta blockers? You have to have a bottle of something close by if you dare to read the financial news on any given day. Like, oh, say, Monday, the Day of Atonement: Businessweek reports that…

There was a leak yesterday to Bloomberg that the Fed is making plans to “drain” $1 trillion from the US economy. Because supposedly our economy is overheating with too much money—not that anyone you or I know has seen a…

After a brief lull, workplace shootings are back with today’s murder rampage near Fresno, California. Apparently the killer, identified as James Bascadi Badasci was recently laid off after 10 years from the company he attacked this morning—Fresno Equipment Company, a…

Memphis—or Memfrica, as we call it—is a city where all that is fucked up about America is taken to the extreme. I recently fled this festering dung heap of a ghetto for Russia, where I’ll be getting educated and properly…

This article first appeared in Alternet Now we know why America’s oligarchs are fighting to keep the rest of us stuck in the world’s worst health care system: the more we die, the more billions Wall Street will earn. A recent…

This article was first published on Vice’s blog. California’s State Assembly dipshits should congratulate themselves for a job well done. They finally managed to pass a bill that will reduce the state’s prison population by 17,000. All it took was a…

This is infuriating: According to today’s New York Times, most low-wage workers in America are victims of routine theft. The thieves: wealthy employers, who steal on average 15% of their low-wage employees’ pay by routinely underpaying them for their work,…

The best way to understand Larry Summers, the man who’s shaping America’s economy from his director’s chair at the National Economic Council, is to meet the people he hangs out with. Once you get to know Larry Summers’ crowd, nothing…

This article first appeared in Alternet. The right-wing anti-Obama-care movement is OK with killing off tens of thousands of Americans each year. That’s what this is all about: The right-wingers and their corporate sponsors are protecting a medieval and violent…

St. Gladney de St. Louis clutches a “Don’t Tread On Me” flag and suffers quietly… Those Tea Party thugs are a lot like Colonel Klink’s Nazis: they’d be funny in a cheap sitcom way if they weren’t causing the rest…

There’s a reason why the Chinese are ascendant while America is in decline. Because the Chinese walk upright and aren’t afraid to apply justice to the pigs who are ruining their country; while at the same time, Americans bow and…

This is one of the clearest and most painful “going postal” rampage massacres I’ve studied, and I’ve looked at a lot of them. The reason is that the murderer, George Sodini, left behind a diary that makes everything as clear…

America’s collapse into a Third World banana republic is accelerating: Alabama’s most populous county, Jefferson County, is so broke it’s closing down courthouses and laying off so many cops that it’s now planning to call in the National Guard to…