1. Auto-renewal scams

Continue Reading...

Back in 1964, filmmaker Paul Almond set out to test that theory by documenting the lives of a group of seven-year-old British children. Some were born to the manor; others grew up in charity homes. There were tykes from both the countryside and the city. Almond wanted to know if the destiny of the children had already been scripted by the circumstances of their birth -- particularly those of class. His film Seven Up! has grown into a series spanning over five decades. Every seven years, like the cycle in some mythological saga, Michael Apted, the assistant on the original project, has returned to these children as they have morphed before our eyes into awkward adolescents, tentative adults, and now, the paunchy survivors of late middle-age.

Continue Reading...

That was in the United Arab Emirates. But what about the United States of America? You’d think a more enlightened view of women and marriage might prevail.

Think again. The Huffington Post ran a front-page piece just this week with a headline that would make any old-school patriarch proud: “Women: Five Reasons Your Divorce Is Your Fault.” The author, self-appointed intimacy expert Laura Doyle, spent several paragraphs hectoring women for sins including “Taking the same approach at home as you do at work” and “Rejecting his efforts to make you happy.” She reserves special scorn for present-day Lysistratas who are cruelly “withholding sex” from their partners, as if they were using sex as a punishment rather than simply too tired or not aroused enough to want it. Doyle’s “remedy” for this transgression? “Consider making yourself available for sex at least once a week in support of your mutual goal of connecting.” Problem solved!

Continue Reading...

This year, self-gifting has hit an all-time high. Shoppers are rushing to sales racks and frantically loading up on everything from tablets to trendy sneakers for that very special someone known as Me.

According to the Wall Street Journal, market research company NPD has discovered that the trend is a prime driver of holiday shopping growth this year. Before the recession, the firm found that around 12 percent of shoppers said they’d purchased items for themselves during the holidays. Last year the figure was up to 19 percent for surveys that went out before Christmas. And the post-Christmas surveys showed that 26 percent of respondents had made holiday purchases for Numero Uno. This year, the figure is already up to a whopping 32 percent.

Continue Reading...

That’s right, HSBC is officially above the law. Too-big-to-fail has become too-big-to-prosecute.

Continue Reading...

Before the financial crash sounded a high-decibel wakeup call, Americans had gone decades without serious public discussion about the intersection of markets and morals. Sold on Reagan-era market worship and frenzied deregulation, we looked more and more to markets to solve our problems and enhance our lives. But that’s slowly starting to change. We're beginning to ask the question: When everything is for sale, how much does it really cost us?

Continue Reading...

Wealthy CEOs have joined together in the much-maligned "Campaign to Fix the Debt" to argue for lower taxes on the rich and cuts to the social safety net, but they are being met by a counterforce of ordinary women trying to work and raise their families. MomsRising, a grassroots organization that advocates for family-friendly policies including paid family leave and an end to wage discrimination, is taking action to tell America about how the fiscal cliff will impact them. They are gathering in Washington, DC to deliver to congressional offices stories about the financial burdens facing families across the United States, as well as thousands of signatures calling on Congress to end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Members will also be making over 190 deliveries of a short book of fiscal cliff stories to the in-district offices of their local representatives in 40 states.

Continue Reading...

The Campaign to Fix the Debt is a huge, and growing, coalition of powerful CEOs, politicians and policy makers on a mission to lower taxes for the rich and cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid under the cover of concern about the national debt. The group was spawned in July 2012 by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, architects of a misguided deficit reduction scheme in Washington back in 2010. By now, the "fixers" have collected a war chest of $43 million. Private equity billionaire Peter G. Peterson, longtime enemy of the social safety net, is a major supporter.

Continue Reading...

The Jeffrey MacDonald murder case is one of the most disturbing in living memory. There are only two possible pictures, both nightmares.

Picture No. 1. Jeffrey MacDonald, a Princeton-educated Green Beret doctor with no history of violence and a sterling record, butchered his pregnant wife and two young daughters using a knife, ice pick and club. Then he injured himself and set up the scene to make the crimes appear to be the work of intruders. He claimed they chanted, “Kill the pigs! ... Acid is groovy!” and scrawled the word “PIG” on the wall in his wife’s blood.

Continue Reading...

Using the excuse of a phony, manufactured crisis known as the “fiscal cliff” – which isn’t a crisis at all, as economist James K. Galbraith has succinctly explained -- they are gearing up to pull the wool over the public's eyes by cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The CEOs are part of the Fix the Debt campaign run by the Peter Peterson-backed Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, which plans to unleash tens of millions pushing for a deficit reduction deal that favors the rich in the lame-duck session and beyond.

Continue Reading...

Lincoln himself stands several cuts above the vast majority of U.S. presidents. After some equivocating, he freed the slaves, a monumental undertaking that was a service to the country and to humanity in general. He was also friendlier to workers than most presidents, an affinity noted by Karl Marx, who exchanged letters with Lincoln leading up to and during the Civil War. (You won’t see the GOP acknowledging that!)

Continue Reading...

The most popular red herring Social Security hustlers have unleashed into the waters of public discourse has grown into such a massive whale of a lie that liberals frequently subscribe to it. The idea goes like this: We need to somehow “fix” Social Security because people are living longer – “fix” in this context being code for “cut.” Two groups stand to benefit in the short-term from such a scheme: the greedy rich, who do not want to pay their share in taxes, and financiers, who want to move towards privatizing retirement accounts so they can collect fees. As for the masses of hard-working people who have rightfully earned their retirement, the only “fix” is the fix they will be in if already modest benefits are further reduced.

Continue Reading...

I grew up with white Southern men. Some of them hard-core Republicans. They have been my classmates. My neighbors. I’m related to lots of them. Having been raised in North Carolina and attended the University of Georgia, it’s impossible for me to see them as strangers.  And while they can irritate me no end when they say and do dumb things, I cringe when San Franciscans like Mark Morford wax elitist and paint them as a monolithic band of aliens whose intolerance is only matched by their ignorance.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

In the last weeks before the election, Romney has shown himself ready to get down on bended knee to woo the female vote. Which would be cute, if he didn’t have a record of denying women their basic human rights. Unbeknownst to Mitt, women, in addition to making handy office workers, are also fully capable of seeing through all the manipulations, mansplaining and malarkey that have been spread around this campaign season. So let’s pause a moment to take a look at Mitt’s continual war on women’s credibility.

1. Global Rights for Women

In the final presidential face-off Monday night, Romney seemed to glow with the fire of the global struggle for women’s rights. Right off the bat, he hailed the Arab Spring and the “hope that there would be a change towards more moderation, and opportunity for greater participation on the part of women in public life….”

Continue Reading...

Most recently, we’ve learned that Arthur Allen, CEO of ASG Software Solutions, sent an email to workers with the following subject line: “Will the US Presidential election directly impact your future jobs at ASG? Please read below.”

David Siegel, the billionaire founder of Westgate Resorts, has been playing the worker intimidation game. So have the Koch brothers, sending anti-Obama voter materials to 45,000 employees of their Georgia Pacific subsidiary (thanks to AlterNet's Adele Stan for bringing us that story). In Michigan, the president of Lacks Enterprises warned his company's 2,300 employees that their paychecks will shrink if Obama is re-elected.

Continue Reading...

1. David Siegel, the Bitching Billionaire

Thanks to folks over at Gawker, we’ve gotten a look at the noxious activities of David Siegel, founder and CEO of national timeshare giant Westgate Resorts. Siegel is filthy rich and wants you to know it, building himself the largest (and possibly the tackiest) house in America. The documentary The Queen of Versailles follows Siegel and his wife Jackie in pursuit of obscene excess in the form of a 90,000-square-foot homage to bad taste, complete with a 20-car garage, a two-story wine cellar, and a 30-foot stained glass dome.

Continue Reading...

Romney’s penchant for bragging about his business activities at fundraisers helps underscore just how vile his brand of capitalism really is. While CEO of Bain, Romney invested in a Chinese sweatshop which he appears to be describing in detail at the very same Boca Raton fundraising event where he made his infamous case that nearly half of all Americans are freeloaders.

Continue Reading...

But you might not want to make snow cones out of it. Because this year at Snowbowl, that twinkling white powder will be made from human sewage.

Three cheers for America’s innovative capitalists, who are leading the world in turning shit into snow. This year, the Arizona ski resort, located near Flagstaff, will become the first ever to charge humans to glide about in their own waste: 100% pure sewage effluent. How’d you like to face-plant in that?

If that’s not horrible enough, the mountain is sacred to Native Americans, who are outraged over its desecration. Navajo Klee Benally has spent years fighting the resort’s expansion. But in February, a federal appeals court ruled in favor the plans, which had been opposed by 13 Native American tribes and environmental groups.

Continue Reading...

Even after a terrible financial crisis exposed their folly, the High Priests of Old Time Economics still speak the cold, barren language of self-interest. Acting solely in your own interest, they preach, is the key to efficiency and human well-being.

Not Joseph Stiglitz. Wednesday night, the Nobel Prize-winner spoke to a packed chapel at New York City’s Union Theological Seminary, which, along with the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), a New York-based think tank, hosted the first conversation in a brand-new series meant to change the way we understand economic issues.  Union Theological Seminary president Dr. Serene Jones, INET Executive Director Robert Johnson, Professor Gary Dorrien of Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University, and Betty Sue Flowers, Director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, joined Stiglitz to talk about the topic at hand: “Economics & Theology.”

Continue Reading...