Sam Pizzigati: Philadelphia’s Forgotten Spirit of 1776

Later this summer, just a few weeks after this year’s Fourth of July celebrations, Democrats will be gathering in Philadelphia to make some presidential nomination history.

Democrats — small-d variety — gathered in Philadelphia soon after the original Fourth of July, too. Those democrats, all Pennsylvanians, also had some history to make. In September 1776, they would go on to adopt their new nation’s most egalitarian state constitution.

Before the Revolution, only men of property in Pennsylvania could vote and hold office. The new state constitution, notes historian Clement Fatovic in his recently published “America’s Founding and the Struggle over Economic Inequality,” totally removed property qualifications for voting and office-holding.

Economic Theorists: The High Priests of Capitalism

By Richard D. Wolff, Truthout | Op-Ed

People have always chosen among different co-existing economic theories to understand the world and to act within it. Who chooses which theory, consciously or not, shapes world history. Disagreements over Brexit emerged partly from different ways of understanding the British economy and its relation to Europe. Donald Trump's support grows partly out of economic theories different from those used by supporters of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. The last century's global politics swirled around quite different theories of the difference between capitalism and socialism. Political struggles often reflect clashing economic theories and political strategies often include making one theory dominant and marginalizing or silencing others.

To appreciate the economic theory choices confronting the capitalist world and global politics today, it helps to see how parallel choices shaped pre-capitalist economies. For example, wherever the chattel-slave economic system has existed (alone or together with other systems), people constructed theories about why the slave system existed, how it worked, etc. The same is true for all other economic systems (feudal, capitalist, etc.). Every system always included those who loved and evaluated it highly and those who hated and opposed it, as well people positioned in between. Individuals' evaluations were typically consistent with their explanations. People chose among theories that either extolled the system's virtues or criticized its flaws and faults, or positioned itself somewhere in between. In short, the line between evaluation and theory has always been -- and is today -- fuzzy and porous. Those who insist that their evaluations and theories do not shape one another usually blur that line the most.

Dean Baker: Neil Irwin Is Far Too Generous to Economists: They Only Care About Efficiency When the Policy Redistributes Income Upward

Neil Irwin raises the question of whether economists have been too single-minded in pushing efficiency, while ignoring issues of distribution. This is way way too generous to economists. In fact, economists have been totally happy to ignore efficiency considerations when the inefficiencies redistribute income upward. This situation pops up all the time.

As I frequently point out in comments here and elsewhere, we protect doctors, dentists and other highly paid professionals from competition with their lower paid counterparts in the developing world or even other wealthy countries. We have maintained these protections even while our trade negotiators did everything they could to make steel workers and textile workers compete against their low-paid counterparts in Mexico, China, and other developing countries.

The History of Privatization

How an Ideological and Political Attack on Government Became a Corporate Grab for Gold

Donald Cohen

The post-WWII era was a tough time for conservative economists, academics, intellectuals, and business leaders. Social Security, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Securities and Exchange Act, and other New Deal programs represented a dangerous expansion of government’s role in the economy and society – nothing short of a frontal assault on freedom and the beginnings of socialism in the U.S.

Today, after 50 years of attack on government, privatization is a standard conservative response to tight public budgets, a key pillar of attacks on government, and a lucrative market opportunity for domestic and global corporations. Large corporations operate virtually every type of public service including prisons, welfare systems, infrastructure, water and sewer, trash, and schools.

Mixed Bag Platform Draft Sets Stage for Fight at DNC Convention

Final Democratic Party platform draft contains wins on minimum wage and death penalty, losses on TPP and fracking

by Deirdre Fulton, staff writer

The final draft of the Democratic Party's 2016 platform, released Friday, calls for an end to the death penalty, a $15 minimum wage, the establishment of a postal banking system, broad marijuana law reform, and elimination of tax breaks for Big Oil—all victories for Bernie Sanders and his supporters—but fails to include key concessions on trade, Israel-Palestine, or fracking.

Indeed, not only does the document (pdf) fail to endorse a national fracking ban, as climate activists and Sanders are demanding, but "the platform puts the party on record in favor of the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Power Plan and the goal of '100 percent clean electricity,'" writes David Weigel for the Washington Post. "That plan and that goal assume that fracking will continue."

Matt Taibbi: In Response to Trump, Another Dangerous Movement Appears

Fears of demagoguery are provoking a frightening swing in the other direction

The "too much democracy" train rolls on.

Last week's Brexit vote prompted pundits and social media mavens to wonder aloud if allowing dumb people to vote is a good thing.

Now, the cover story in The Atlantic magazine features the most aggressive offering yet in an alarming series of intellectual-class jeremiads against the dangers of democracy.

Federal Judge Blocks All of Mississippi’s Vicious Anti-LGBTQ Law From Taking Effect

By Mark Joseph Stern

Anti-LGBTQ activists just suffered their worst defeat since the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision—a rout so stinging and decisive that it calls into question the viability of their entire strategy post-Obergefell.

That drubbing came in the form of an astonishing 60-page opinion by U.S. District Judge Carlton W. Reeves blocking every single part of Mississippi’s sweeping, vicious anti-LGBTQ segregation law from taking effect. The law, HB 1523, granted special protections to three religious beliefs: Those who oppose same-sex marriage; those who oppose sex outside of marriage; and those who dislike trans and gender-nonconforming people. Starting July 1, HB 1523 would have allowed religious landlords to evict gay and trans renters; permitted religious employers to fire workers for being LGBTQ; granted state and private adoption agencies the right to turn away same-sex couples; allowed private businesses to refuse service to LGBTQ people; given doctors a right to refuse to treat LGBTQ people in most circumstances; and permitted clerks to refuse to marry same-sex couples.

Report: A host of common chemicals endanger child brain development

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- In a new report, dozens of scientists, health practitioners and children's health advocates are calling for renewed attention to the growing evidence that many common and widely available chemicals endanger neurodevelopment in fetuses and children of all ages.

The chemicals that are of most concern include lead and mercury; organophosphate pesticides used in agriculture and home gardens; phthalates, found in pharmaceuticals, plastics and personal care products; flame retardants known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers; and air pollutants produced by the combustion of wood and fossil fuels, said University of Illinois comparative biosciences professor Susan Schantz, one of dozens of individual signatories to the consensus statement.

Thomas Frank: The Influence of Influence: On Worshipping Money in Washington, D.C.

A closer look at the influential, the influencers, and those looking—for the right price—to be influenced in the nation's capital

Although it’s difficult to remember those days eight years ago when Democrats seemed to represent something idealistic and hopeful and brave, let’s take a moment and try to recall the stand Barack Obama once took against lobbyists. Those were the days when the nation was learning that George W. Bush’s Washington was, essentially, just a big playground for those lobbyists and that every government operation had been opened to the power of money. Righteous disgust filled the air. “Special interests” were much denounced. And a certain inspiring senator from Illinois promised that, should he be elected president, his administration would contain no lobbyists at all. The revolving door between government and K Street, he assured us, would turn no more.

Instead, the nation got a lesson in all the other ways that “special interests” can get what they want -- like simple class solidarity between the Ivy Leaguers who advise the president and the Ivy Leaguers who sell derivative securities to unsuspecting foreigners. As that inspiring young president filled his administration with Wall Street personnel, we learned that the revolving door still works, even if the people passing through it aren’t registered lobbyists.

The GOP’s War on Voting Is Working

 Wisconsin and Minnesota are case studies in the difference between Republican and Democratic rule.

By Ari Berman

On April 5, the day of Wisconsin’s presidential primary, Anita Johnson picked up Dennis Hatten at his new apartment in West Milwaukee and took him to the polls. “We’re going to complete your journey and make sure you vote today,” Johnson told him.

 Simply being able to vote in Wisconsin was no small feat for Hatten, a 53-year-old former Marine. He’d met Johnson, a 70-year-old Wisconsin coordinator for VoteRiders, in August 2015, as the country celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. Hatten was living in temporary housing for homeless veterans across the street from Milwaukee’s VA hospital. Wisconsin’s strict new voter-ID law would be going into effect in 2016, and Johnson was part of the effort to help 300,000 registered voters without an acceptable government-issued ID obtain one—9 percent of the electorate.

Bernie-backed progressive Zephyr Teachout wins New York Democratic primary

Sarah K. Burris

Progressive Zephyr Teachout scored a major victory for the progressive wing of the Democratic primary in New York’s 19th Congressional District, Tuesday night. This pits her against John Faso, a Republican former state assemblyman, on the November ballot.

“I am running for Congress to break down those doors in Washington, D.C. The doors that are keeping the people of America — the real people, the citizens of America — locked out,” Teachout said in an email to supporters after the win had been announced. “I’ve been fighting well-paid lobbyists on behalf of working families my entire life. I will fight until we win — for the people of NY 19. For the American people.”

Bernie Sanders: Democrats Need to Wake Up

Surprise, surprise. Workers in Britain, many of whom have seen a decline in their standard of living while the very rich in their country have become much richer, have turned their backs on the European Union and a globalized economy that is failing them and their children.

And it’s not just the British who are suffering. That increasingly globalized economy, established and maintained by the world’s economic elite, is failing people everywhere. Incredibly, the wealthiest 62 people on this planet own as much wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population — around 3.6 billion people. The top 1 percent now owns more wealth than the whole of the bottom 99 percent. The very, very rich enjoy unimaginable luxury while billions of people endure abject poverty, unemployment, and inadequate health care, education, housing and drinking water.

The Age of Disintegration

Neoliberalism, Interventionism, the Resource Curse, and a Fragmenting World

By Patrick Cockburn

We live in an age of disintegration. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Greater Middle East and Africa. Across the vast swath of territory between Pakistan and Nigeria, there are at least seven ongoing wars -- in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and South Sudan. These conflicts are extraordinarily destructive. They are tearing apart the countries in which they are taking place in ways that make it doubtful they will ever recover. Cities like Aleppo in Syria, Ramadi in Iraq, Taiz in Yemen, and Benghazi in Libya have been partly or entirely reduced to ruins. There are also at least three other serious insurgencies: in southeast Turkey, where Kurdish guerrillas are fighting the Turkish army, in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula where a little-reported but ferocious guerrilla conflict is underway, and in northeast Nigeria and neighboring countries where Boko Haram continues to launch murderous attacks.

All of these have a number of things in common: they are endless and seem never to produce definitive winners or losers. (Afghanistan has effectively been at war since 1979, Somalia since 1991.) They involve the destruction or dismemberment of unified nations, their de facto partition amid mass population movements and upheavals -- well publicized in the case of Syria and Iraq, less so in places like South Sudan where more than 2.4 million people have been displaced in recent years.

10 Things You Should Know About What It's Really Like to Be Homeless

Separating truth from fiction.

By Evelyn Nieves

On Monday afternoon, as Patty L., a 33-year-old native San Franciscan currently living in a tent, began describing the casual hate tossed her way every day, a 30-ish, chubby white man in an Izod polo and khaki shorts walked by.

“Um,” he said scornfully. “Can I get through?”

Patty was leaning against a building, visiting two friends who live in a tent on a corner across the street from a trendy rock climbing gym. At least five feet of pavement separated Patty and the tent, which sits in the Mission District, a Latino/working-class/artists’ enclave transforming into the fastest-gentrifying neighborhood in the country.

Trading Places: Neocons and Cockroaches

Exclusive: Neocons want a new Cold War – all the better to pick the U.S. taxpayers’ pockets – but this reckless talk and war profiteering could spark a nuclear war and leave the world to the cockroaches, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

If the human species extinguishes itself in a flash of thermonuclear craziness and the surviving cockroaches later develop the intellect to assess why humans committed this mass suicide, the cockroach historians may conclude that it was our failure to hold the neoconservatives accountable in the first two decades of the Twenty-first Century that led to our demise.

After the disastrous U.S.-led invasion of Iraq – an aggressive war justified under false premises – there rightly should have been a mass purging of the people responsible for the death, destruction and lies. Instead the culprits were largely left in place, indeed they were allowed to consolidate their control of the major Western news media and the foreign-policy establishments of the United States and its key allies.

Inside Charles Koch's Plot to Hijack Universities Across America and Spread His Radical 'Free-Market' Propaganda

With his grants, Koch is installing libertarian-minded economics professors at hundreds of universities.

By Alex Kotch

The public is starting to catch up with the reality that Charles Koch is not only a major spender on building his own ideological institutions. Over the past decade, Koch has funded colleges and universities to bend them in his direction, often funding “free-market” academic centers. Mostly through his personal foundation, Koch gave $108 million to 366 colleges and universities from 2005 to 2014 and still more since then: for example, $10 million for George Mason University’s School of Law, which will be renamed after late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia; $2 million to Western Carolina University to establish a free-market center; and over $4.1 million approved for future payment to several schools according to the foundation’s 2014 990 tax form.

Some of these grants come with strings attached. At Florida State University, the initial memorandum of understanding between the Charles Koch Foundation (CKF) and the school’s economics department gave the foundation control over hiring decisions and the curriculum.

An Increase in the Minimum Wage Strengthens the Economy for All

The following is a Truthout interview with David Rolf, union organizer and author of The Fight for $15.

By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview

Mark Karlin: How does the nationwide Fight for $15 as a minimum wage represent the importance of grassroots activity and tenacity in achieving social and economic justice goals, particularly in terms of advocates taking the lead in compelling politicians to take action?

David Rolf: November 2012 marked the beginning of a new movement of underpaid workers in a particularly infamous industry -- fast food. New York Communities for Change and SEIU, along with a host of other community, civil rights, labor, and religious organizations, supported some two hundred workers in walking off the job. Two hundred is a tiny number in a city of 8 million people, but still newsworthy because it was the first labor protest by fast-food workers within living memory. Then, in the summer of 2013, with support from SEIU and union workers in other industries, the first coordinated national fast-food strikes ignited in cities all around the country: Seattle, New York, St. Louis, Detroit, Harrisburg, Milwaukee, Chicago, Flint, Kansas City -- 60 cities in all. Over the next two years after the 2013 strikes, a broader call for $15 emerged, as fast food and other low-wage workers protested in hundreds of cities around the globe.